Upcoming 92nd Street Y guest Neil Gaiman first came to prominence as the creator and writer of the cult-favorite comic book The Sandman, and is the author of New York Times bestseller American Gods and the just-released Anansi Boys. Along the way, he’s also written bestselling children’s books, television scripts, graphic novels and film scripts and has had nearly all of his novels—both prose and graphic—optioned for the big screen. Gaiman also maintains a very active internet presence.

Now one of the world’s most prominent fantasy/science fiction writers, Gaiman will be appearing at the Y on Monday, January 9 to kick off our WIRED at the Y lecture series in collaboration with WIRED magazine.

After the jump, Gaiman speaks on growing up with American pop culture in England, how the punk-rock ethic informs his work and what it’s like to have fans with Sandman tattoos.

Your appearance at the 92nd Street Y will be one of your first in several months. What is it like doing speaking engagements when, as a writer, you work primarily in the written word?

Actually, they’re enormously fun. The biggest problem I have at all with doing anything in the written word is it’s just me and the computer. There are cool things out there like royalties where you can see you’ve sold half a million of this or a million of that, but it’s just a number. One of the things about speaking engagements is getting to meet the people who read your books and have them stop being a number. That’s enormously fun.

Do you have a favorite medium that you prefer to work in?

More than anything, I’ve been incredibly fortunate in being one of those people who is somehow culturally permitted to work in different mediums. I’ve worked in all sorts of different genres, and normally you’re not. You’re normally constrained to doing one thing over and over. I’m allowed to do children’s books, picture books, graphic novels, comic books, adult novels, funny books—and in addition to all of that I’m allowed to write movies, film scripts, that sort of thing. I just see myself as incredibly fortunate.

My favorite medium of all is probably the radio play. I absolutely love radio plays and radio drama partly because I think you’re engaging the imagination of the listener [in] much the same way you are [when] dealing with a novel. But I also think it feels like you’re getting to make your film—only in two days, rather than in the several months it takes in real life. I’ve managed to do a grand total of four of them since 1996 so I don’t really feel like I’m doing particularly well on the score of that.

I suppose the big problem with radio plays is that every time I write a radio play for the BBC, it always seems to cost me several thousand dollars to do it!

Your books are steeped in American pop culture. Growing up in England, did you see a line between British pop culture and American pop culture?

I think the best thing about growing up in Britain was [that] we had about 85% of American pop culture… maybe 60 or 70%. We didn’t have your sports. But we had American pop music and English pop music. We had all the important things from American television. We thought that American television was much better than it actually was because they didn’t send over any of the rubbish!

[...] Overall, I suppose, growing up in England felt like some sort of weird satellite state of America. You know, America has a culture which the English, you know [...] England wants those things. But we grew up reading the comics, watching Star Trek. Lou Reed for me was much more iconic than the Beatles.

On your blog, you mentioned meeting Ian Dury. Besides him and Lou Reed, what other musicians did you listen to growing up?

Who did I listen to? Who did I love? I was very fortunate in being 16 when punk happened. I am going to say that if you’re going to be any age when English punk happened, 16 was the right age and it was exactly the right time for it. Before that, I was a David Bowie kid. I discovered Bowie when I was about 12 and Lou Reed very shortly after. It all really came to life with me with punk though. That was the Adverts, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Jam, the Stranglers. It was a wonderful period to have music when everything was stripped back to its three-chord basis for a little while.

I met TV Smith from the Adverts a few months ago.

He may be one of the best songwriters living. I think it’s so bizarre that this morning I had to go to the website of Amazon.de—Amazon in Germany—to buy the new TV Smith CD. I think, you know, he’s absolutely, unquestionably one of the best songwriters living and it’s such a shame no one knows who he is.

But then the Adverts were sort of strange, even if you go back and listen to them they were essentially a one-single band who, the minute they did interesting things, their label dropped them. Their second album was amazing and I got it when it first came out.

Let me throw something in here. I think, looking back on it, the thing about punk that really helped me was the aesthetic of punk. The punk aesthetic and the punk work ethic helped me in being one of these weird writers that does everything. The idea was that if you’re going to be a musician, learn three chords, play a guitar and get up there. You learn in public and you just do it. That as an ethic, for me, has always been incredibly strong and incredibly powerful. That is why I will go off and do something where I have no idea how to do it. I’m figuring that when you learn by doing it, you learn as you go.

Before comic books, you worked as a journalist. How did the transition to comics happen?

Oh, I was a very bad journalist. The transition happened in a weird stage of things winding down from 1985 or 1986 in journalism and then realizing [that] what I really wanted to do was comics, and being fortunate enough to be hired by DC Comics to do Black Orchid. The advance from that gave me the financial basis from which I was able to quit journalism to the point where it became supportable. I wasn’t a great journalist but I learned from journalism. I learned about interviewing people and the economy of dialogue.

Along the way, you gained a massive fan base. Are you ever surprised by how much your fans are into your work?

I don’t know. It’s not something that I think about. There are things that tend to surprise you the first time they happen and never again after that. The first time I saw somebody with a Sandman tattoo, I went “Oh my God, how strange is that?” Now the idea of people with tattoos of my work doesn’t make me stop or blink. When people ask me to sign [their tattoos] and the next time they’re tattooed [..] well, they [have] the signature tattooed…

Like I said, these things tend to surprise you once but they don’t tend to be what’s important. The readers are very nice but at the end of the day when you’re a writer, it comes back to you and a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen. That’s all it is: coming up with stuff and writing it down.

You wrote the English-language dialogue for Princess Mononoke. Was it different writing from foreign-language source material?

It was very strange and fun. I had this astonishing movie and a literal translation; my job was to try to create dialogue that would be brilliant, informative and sayable by actors [and] would still keep the original spirit of what Miyazaki was trying to do. The problem I kept having was that I kept being limited by mouth movements in the original cartoon. I would come up with a line that would be poetic, beautiful and brilliant and encapsulate everything that needed to be encapsulated—and if the character [had] moved their mouth just one more time, I would have been able to use it.

On your blog, you write a lot about your writing. Does it affect the writing process when, for lack of a better way to put it, you write about writing?

I don’t know. I think mostly the writing about writing is one of the reasons why I started doing the blog. It felt like there were two streams coming up. I would attend signings and events and would be incredibly puzzled that people obviously weren’t expecting me. They were expecting someone much taller, paler, serious and less funny. Some kind of very strange thing out of their imagination—nine parts Sandman and one part mysterious writer; a little bit Byron and a little bit Morpheus.

And part of it was for the same reason why Harlan Ellison used to write short stories in shop windows, which is that you want to remind people that writing isn’t glamorous. It isn’t something you do when the wind is only blowing in the right direction and the goat bones rolled the correct way that morning. It’s a craft; it’s something you do day in and day out. If you’re a professional writer, it’s something you do on the days you don’t feel like it. For me, it felt like a good place to answer people’s questions about writing, what writing was, how you do it and why you do it. I tried to explain that there’s no such thing as writer’s block. There’s getting stuck on something and laziness, but [writer’s block] doesn’t exist any more than gardener’s block or cellist’s block. If you can do it, you do it.

You live in Minneapolis. What are some of your favorite aspects of the city?

What I like best about the city, I think, is that it is odd [laughs]. It’s a strange and anomalous place. There are a lot of writers out here, a lot of nice people and [this] feeling that there’s a cultural community. Not to mention that it’s only a short plane ride away from either Los Angeles or New York, which are the two places I go most often.

Tickets are currently available for Neil Gaiman‘s conversation with WIRED Senior Editor Adam Rogers.

[Neil Gaiman: 01/09/06]