When I was a kid, I was too busy reading grown-up books (mostly junk) to pay much attention to children’s literature. I assumed that kids lit was what people wanted me to like rather than what I really did like. So by the time I reached my 20s, I had all sorts of treasures waiting for me. Among them were the books of Frances Hodgson Burnett.
Even if I had read children’s literature as a child, Burnett’s most famous novel, “The Secret Garden,” was considered a girl’s book and not something little boys read. When I finally got around to it in the late ’80s, I loved it so much that when I finished, I immediately picked up a copy of Burnett’s “A Little Princess.” I was reading that on the bus one morning when I noticed a businessman in his 40s sitting beside me and eyeing the book. Finally, I nervously allowed my eyes to meet his only to hear him say, “It’s a great book, isn’t it?” He went on to praise Frances Hodgson Burnett’s writing and told me how much he had enjoyed reading her books to his own daughter.
The reasons so many adults are reading books written for children seem pretty simple. A good book is a good book is a good book. What holds true about movies made for children is also true of books written for them: There is no truly good one that adults can’t enjoy as well. It may also be that for adult readers, kids books offer the strong, straightforward storytelling that reminds them of why they first started to read fiction.
The adult readership for children’s books stands to become even larger this fall as some writers with certifiable literary standing and large adult followings publish kids books. Neil Gaiman’s (truly scary) “Coraline” is already in the stores and on the charts. And in the next few weeks will follow books from Michael Chabon, Carl Hiaasen, Isabel Allende and Clive Barker. It’s a fair bet that readers who loved “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” or who count “The House of the Spirits” among their favorite novels, or who wait greedily for their yearly dose of Carl Hiaasen (I stand accused), will pick up these writers’ new works, regardless of whom they were written for. And established writers aren’t the only ones getting into the act. The veteran rappers L.L. Cool J and Doug E. Fresh also have children’s books coming out soon.
Obviously, the success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has made it easier for authors to work in children’s literature without risking a smaller audience or worrying about being taken seriously. Chabon says that Rowling’s success allowed him to go to his agent with his idea for a children’s book, and “instead of saying, as she might have done a few years ago, ‘Please just take a year of your writing life and flush it down the toilet,” she said, ‘Hmm. Interesting idea! Go for it!’”
Daniel Handler, who, under the nom de plume Lemony Snicket, has achieved wide success with his riotously dour “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” isn’t certain that Rowling’s success translates into newfound respect for children’s literature. But, he says, “It does make it an exciting time to be writing such things. Another children’s author I know compared it to playing rock ‘n’ roll in the ’60s — it’s a time when children’s literature is part of the zeitgeist, which results in a lot of experimentation and innovation.”
The main thing Rowling’s success seems to have done for writers venturing into children’s literature is to allow them the means of satisfying a desire that already existed. Michael Chabon, whose new “Summerland” is his first novel for children, cautions about separating “a publishing phenomenon” from a literary one. “Adult writers,” says Chabon, “especially in Britain, have always written, or considered writing, for children.”
He cites C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Roald Dahl, E.B. White, Dodie Smith, Mordecai Richler, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and Salman Rushdie. You could also tack on Ian Fleming (“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”) and the great Peter O’ Donnell, who wrote the Modesty Blaise novels and kids books like “Moonlit Journey” and “Pinkie Goes South.” Paula Fox, an author currently enjoying a revival (her memoir “Borrowed Finery” was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award and selected as one of the year’s best books by the New York Times Book Review), has written for children for years — of her 21 kids books “How Many Miles to Babylon?” impressed me, when I read it as a child, as the grimmest book I’d ever encountered.
It’s partly the memory of the potency of their childhood reading that prompts many adult authors to try their hand at the form. Handler says, “You never love a book the way you love a book when you’re 10. No matter how much I admire the work of Nabokov or Murakami, I’m not going to reread ‘Lolita’ or ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ nearly as many times as I reread ‘Harriet the Spy’ in third grade.” (It might be interesting to see what part “Harriet the Spy,” a book about the pleasures of voyeurism if ever there was one, played in the development of future film critics. I know of at least three who worshipped it as kids.)
Chabon feels similarly: “You never forget the delight that the books you loved as a child brought you; it’s all still there, you remember it. It’s fairly inevitable, I’d say, to want to try and get some of that for your own kids; but in the past, in this country at least, it was not necessarily feasible and perhaps not quite taken seriously enough.”
As Chabon notes, the appearance of these books does seem, for some of the writers at least, tied to the children in their lives. Isabel Allende says that her new “City of the Beasts” was inspired by reading to her grandchildren. The household of Clive Barker, whose “Abarat” is the first in a new fantasy series, includes the teenage daughter of his partner. Michael Chabon is only partly joking when he says that he always thought he was going to write kids books because he was a kid when he first wanted to become a writer.
But having his own kids returned Chabon to that desire. “I started back through the beloved books of my childhood with my oldest daughter. We began with the ‘Wizard of Oz’ when she was about 2 and a half, and on through Lewis and Tolkien and Ingalls Wilder and Dahl and Alexander and O’Dell and Fitzhugh and White. And it was all still so wonderful, and just as reading Alan Furst, say, makes me think about writing spy fiction … I started thinking, Hey, I want to do this. I still want to do this.”
You can’t help but wonder, though, whether there’s another reason, one these writers haven’t acknowledged to themselves — namely the sheer challenge of writing for kids. The old excuse among writers who write long is that they did it because they didn’t have time to write short. While some of the batch of new books are long (“Summerland” comes in at just over 500 pages), kids books, no matter how long they are, require writers who know how to write essentially.
That’s a very different matter from writing simply, which, in the context of children’s literature, has the connotation of dumbing things down. Even when the back story or mythology of a children’s book becomes complicated, the story has to be expressed in the clearest possible terms. That means finding what might be called a suggestive concreteness, a way of conveying action, character and setting in a few sharply defined strokes.
It’s an egalitarian approach, allowing the readers to shade things in for themselves. Here, from the opening of “Coraline,” is a description of a forbidding well on the grounds of the house that the young heroine’s family moves into:
“She found it on the third day, in an overgrown meadow beside the tennis court, behind a clump of trees — a low black circle almost hidden in the high grass. The well had been covered up by wooden boards, to stop anyone from falling in. There was a small knothole in one of the boards, and Coraline spent an afternoon dropping pebbles and acorns through the hole and waiting, and counting, until she heard the plop as they hit the water far below.”
Gaiman melds the secret and the hidden with a sense of danger, drawing a picture of the well as a lurking presence in the high grass; he describes the boards, which raises the possibility of someone falling to his death. And then there’s the way he uses the evocative clause “and counting,” which allows us to imagine the depth of the well.
As it turns out, there’s a more dangerous portal lurking in “Coraline.” Exploring her family’s new apartment, Coraline comes upon a door in the living room that opens onto a skewed replica of her family’s new digs. Waiting for her on the other side are her other “parents,” funhouse mirror replicas of the real ones with black buttons sewn on for eyes (told you it was creepy). Coraline finds everything she’s wished for in this alternate reality: parents who pay attention to her and delicious food. Then it turns out this “other mother” has no intention of letting Coraline get back to her real life. Gaiman’s book is a potent parable about a little girl getting her first inklings of the compromises of the adult world. It’s also a good, frightening read. (The book says it’s for readers 8 and up. I’d just make sure I knew the fright threshold of any 8-year-old I gave it to.)
One of the reasons Isabel Allende’s insufferable “City of the Beasts” doesn’t work is that she trusts neither her material nor her readers. She falls prey to one of the classic traps of bad writing: She puts her story at the service of her message.
Kids can scent the kind of didacticism Allende engages in, and she doesn’t even use the proverbial spoonful of sugar to help her medicine go down. She shows no faith in her audience’s ability to suss things out without being preached to. You never get the feeling she believes in the material on any level but the “instructive” one; it’s merely a sanctimonious little lesson in how man is despoiling the environment. This is exactly the kind of reductionism that William Bennett exalts in literature, only in Allende’s case, it’s coming from the left instead of the right.
And it shrivels up next to Carl Hiaasen’s charming “Hoot,” another environmental tale, but one in which, as in his Floridian mysteries, Hiaasen’s first concern is to be an entertainer. He uses a reliable old formula, that of the new kid in town finding his place, and joins it to one of his multistrand plots, this one about a scheme to save a group of miniature owls who’ve made their home in a vacant lot scheduled to have a pancake house built on top of it.
It won’t take Hiaasen’s adult readers long to realize they’re in Hiaasen country — not when the corporate dolt is named Chuck E. Muckle and when the characters include a kid who can fart the first line of the Pledge of Allegiance. Hiaasen is the environmentalist as vaudevillian. When a kid slips baby gators down the porta-san at the construction site, you know you’re dealing with the same man who once fantasized about putting bull gators in the tourist pond at Disney World.
That Hiaasen is such a natural at writing for children gives weight to Daniel Handler’s insistence that there is no difference between writing for kids and writing for adults.”I always suspect that people who regard them as different things are the sort of people who talk to children in that annoying high-pitched voice.” And Chabon echoes that sentiment when he says, “I tried to keep my sentences shorter, my diction plainer and my vocabulary simpler” — but, he adds, he didn’t feel he had to try very hard.
Still, if writing for kids requires more discipline, it may also be liberating. Chabon, who calls writing “Summerland” “the most pleasurable experience, page for page and paragraph for paragraph, that I’ve ever had as a writer,” says that the book allowed him to write about all sorts of fantastical things “without apologies or explanations or rationales.”
What’s striking about the best of these books, and what’s always true about great fantasies, is that they’re rooted in recognizable emotions. One of the reasons Harry Potter has been such a success is the casualness of J.K. Rowling’s style, the fact that she’s writing about wizards and witches and demons and dragons at the same time that she’s describing school bullies and tests and grumpy teachers and first crushes and feeling left out. There’s no hoity-toity ethereality in her brand of magic, no Stevie Nicks-style preciousness. The books are written in the same good, durable, plain language that you find in Hiaasen and Gaiman and Chabon — and even in the mock-Gothic grotesqueries of Lemony Snicket.
There are plenty of reasons for writing a kids book right now, some of them obvious, like the financial rewards and the current critical attention paid to children’s literature. Other reasons — the satisfaction the writers get from giving back the kind of pleasure they experienced as children, for instance — are more personal and intangible. But there’s one other reason that not even writers themselves may be aware of: Writing for kids allows them to fulfill the great primal satisfactions novels can give us, while it demands that they work at the absolute peak of the craft. It’s a win-win situation: Readers are reminded of why they read in the first place, and writers of why they ever wanted to write.
The news last week that HBO had optioned the works of William Faulkner for adaptation by “Deadwood” creator David Milch was treated in some press reports as incongruous. It shouldn’t have been. The mindless take on “Deadwood” is that it had a lot of swearing in it (which it did, but so what? — get over it, for cryin’ out loud!), yet viewers not mesmerized by the four-letter words noticed the Shakespearean and King Jamesian cadences of Milch’s dialogue from the start. Those influences are evident in Faulkner’s fiction, as well. (Also, let’s not forget we’re talking about a man who wrote a novel in which a woman is raped with a corncob — this isn’t Merchant-Ivory territory.) Milch and Faulkner is, in fact, an inspired pairing.
The Faulkner acquisition is only the latest prize in a literary shopping spree for HBO and other television companies. The premium cable network is currently at work on adaptations of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad, and Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods,” in addition to its ongoing series based on the novels of George R.R. Martin (“Game of Thrones”) and Charlaine Harris (“True Blood”). Fox will be turning Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” into an hour-long dramatic series, as well, and Salman Rushdie is at work on an original show, “Next People,” for Showtime. The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it’s about time.
Television and the novel, while not exactly soul mates, have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film. Yet any novelist can testify that the second most common question he or she hears from readers (after “Where do you get your ideas?”) is “Who would you like to see playing [main character] in the movie?” Fantasizing about the film version of a favorite book seems to be very common, but you have to wonder why. Rarely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film, although when they are — as with the Harry Potter, “Twilight” and “The Lord of the Rings” franchises — popular enthusiasm can certainly be enormous.
Far more often, however, the results are disappointing — let the recent adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” stand as a case in point. Much of a novel has to be cut to fit a 90- to 120-minute dramatization, and this can mean more than just the loss of supporting characters or scenes. Most movies conform to a three-act structure (some screenwriters will insist that it’s actually a four-act structure), a form with a proven ability to hold audiences’ interest through a single viewing. Novels, meant to be read over multiple sittings, have more freedom. Trimming a novel like “Bleak House” to fit the three-act format alters the fundamental shape of the work, often subtracting from the novel the very roominess and complication that made you love it in the first place.
A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world. Furthermore, while theatrical film is a medium in which the director reigns, in television, as Rushdie told the Observer, “the writer is the primary creative artist. You have control in a way that you never have in the cinema. ‘The Sopranos’ was David Chase, ‘The West Wing’ was Aaron Sorkin.” Although television is, like film, a photographic medium, it need not rely as heavily on visual storytelling or gifted but capricious actors to fill in its nuances. Buffy Summers is a memorable character, replete with layers and contradictions, largely because she was written that way — as the undistinguished post-”Buffy” career of actress Sarah Michelle Gellar illustrates.
Nevertheless, apart from a brief miniseries boom in the 1970s and ’80s (“Rich Man, Poor Man,” “Shogun”), the mass-market imperatives of broadcast television kept it and the novel apart until the advent of cable. Literary people wrote off TV as a “vast wasteland” — a fair cop, it must be said — with occasional oases like “Twin Peaks,” the groundbreaking serial drama created by the eccentric film auteur David Lynch. After one thrilling season, Lynch’s relationship with ABC went south, and so did the show, cementing the notion that the medium itself (rather than the broadcast network system) militated against quality and originality.
A network like HBO, however, doesn’t need to attract large audiences; rather, it aims to persuade a much smaller population of subscribers that it’s worth paying a little extra every month to see better programming. With “The Sopranos,” HBO ushered in the idea that serialized drama can aspire to an excellence (particularly in writing and performance) comparable to that of film, and with “The Wire,” critics got in the habit of comparing such series to novels. The fact that established crime novelists like Richard Price and George Pelecanos wrote for “The Wire” surely fostered that notion. Other cable networks expanded the possibilities of the genre with such serial dramas as “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men.”
The influence moves both ways; Egan has said that “The Sopranos” was one inspiration for “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” The novelist Mark Danielewski (“House of Leaves”) recently signed a $1 million contract with Pantheon Books for a serial novel, “The Familiar,” to be published in 27 volumes, with a new book appearing at four-month intervals. Although this naturally reminded quite a few observers of Charles Dickens, who published his novels in serialized installments, when interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Danielewski said that he’s thinking in terms of five-book “seasons,” citing the television model.
A peculiar twist to these developments is that a novel that must be cut to accommodate a movie-length running time may still be too short to fill a 13-hour season and beyond. Some novelists are now writing additional material based on their supposedly finished works. Gaiman, who recently published an “author’s cut” (with 12,000 more words) of “American Gods” on the 10th anniversary of that novel’s publication, told an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that he’s writing a sequel and two spinoff stories, as well as at least two episodes of the series itself.
“American Gods” — which recounts the adventures of assorted deposed pagan deities reduced to working regular jobs in the New World — lends itself well to such add-ons. (Gaiman’s 2005 novel, “Anansi Boys,” is an “American Gods” satellite.) The boundaries of a novel like “The Corrections,” by contrast, seem less porous, yet Franzen recently told New York magazine that he was plumping up “The Corrections” for the HBO adaptation: “Minor characters in the book are becoming very substantial characters in the show, too. It’s fun. I’m coming back to the book as a stranger, essentially 12 years after I wrote it, and I’m filling in blanks that were deliberately blanks, but I’m having the pleasure of filling them in.”
No doubt the print edition of “The Corrections” will remain the canonical version of the novel, but if the additional material is written by Franzen himself, albeit for television, it will have a status that someone else’s adaptation will not. Are the previously undescribed histories of the fictional characters in “The Corrections” actually part of “The Corrections,” even if they don’t appear in the text version of the novel? Will the series end where the book does, or will the narrative continue? If so, for how long, and who will write it?
A definitive ending is one thing that serialized dramas don’t promise. (The agonies of “Deadwood” fans denied such an ending are legendary.) When it comes to literary adaptations, this may be a miscalculation. America’s top-drawer television producers ought to take note of their British counterparts and apply their newly elevated standards to reviving the fine art of the miniseries. After all, even Dickens knew when to call it a day.
Further reading
The New York Times on David Milch’s planned adaptations of William Faulkner works for HBO
Jonathan Franzen discusses the forthcoming adaptation of “The Corrections” with New York magazine
The Los Angeles Times on Mark Z. Danielewski’s projected serial novel, “The Familiar”
Neil Gaiman describes his work on the HBO series “American Gods” at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as reported by the Guardian newspaper
Jennifer Egan tells the New York Times about the forthcoming HBO adaptation of “A Visit From the Goon Squad”
Neil Gaiman’s enthusiasm for audiobooks is no secret. The best-selling author has narrated many of his own titles, including “The Graveyard Book,” which won the Audiobook of the Year award (from the Audio Publishers Association) in 2009. He’s even narrated books by other authors on occasion.
Recently, Gaiman kicked his advocacy up a notch by agreeing to hand-select and produce a line of audiobooks in partnership with the audio download retailer Audible.com. Neil Gaiman Presents released its first five titles last month; they include the novel “Land of Laughs” by Jonathan Carroll and “You Must Go and Win” by musician-turned-essayist Aline Simone. Future releases will include books by the early 20th-century American author James Branch Cabell (the target of a once-notorious censorship suit for writing an “offensive, lewd, lascivious and indecent book”) and “Dimension of Miracles” by Robert Sheckley, a work Gaiman likens to “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and which will be narrated by television personality John Hodgman.
Most omnivorous audiobook consumers have been frustrated by the relatively limited selection of available books (especially if you’re looking for something besides best sellers). Neil Gaiman Presents is part of a larger enterprise by Audible.com, called ACX (for Audiobook Creation Exchange). It aims to bring new titles to the public by hosting a service through which authors (and other rights holders) can connect with professional narrators.
“The short-term reason I got involved with ACX,” Gaiman told me, “is that there are books I love that I want to bring to the world. The long-term reason I signed up is because I want to live in a world where every book that exists has a great audiobook.” I telephoned him to find out more about Neil Gaiman Presents and why it’s been so difficult to get a wider variety of audiobooks to the ears of America’s readers.
Have long have you been an audiobook fan?
I remember at age 9 or 10 staying up to catch the BBC classic serial of “Mansfield Park” on Radio 4. They’d do 15 minutes a night. I just thought it was a great story. I had no idea who Jane Austen was.
I got my second wind when CDs started coming out. Before that, the packaging had made things so unwieldy. You’d have these huge things with cassettes in. The first giant CD thing I bought was Stephen King’s “Bag of Bones,” read by Stephen King, which was a 20-CD set. The problem with that was that they were $60 and you’d only play them once.
In 2003, I was told by an audiobook publisher I’d met that they probably had at most a year until the audiobook division of this publisher would be closed down for good. The economics didn’t work. The tragedy was that the packaging was what was killing them. Then I saw my first iPod and thought: You know, I don’t think it’s as dead as they think.
Did you always read your own work?
As long as they would let me. The ones I didn’t read, I didn’t read for a reason. I didn’t do “American Gods” because — as was demonstrated on “The Simpsons” last night — you don’t want to ask me to do even a bad American accent. You do not want a story that is meant to feel absolutely accurate in terms of place to have an English person doing his idea of an American accent.
Then there’s “Anansi Boys,” my favorite audiobook of all of my stuff, partly because I imagined [actor] Lenny Henry reading it while I was writing it. And partly because there is no way on God’s green earth that I’m going to do an audiobook that has four little old Jamaican ladies in it. I still tell people that if they like “Anansi Boys,” the real version of it is Lenny reading it. That’s the author’s preferred text.
How did Neil Gaiman Presents come about?
Basically, what Don Katz [CEO and founder of Audible.com] said to me was, “How would you like your own record label? We need a Judas goat” — actually, he didn’t say Judas goat; I did, because it’s a fun word — to lead these other authors and show them it’s not scary. And not just authors. Agents and publishers also have these rights and could be doing this.
Why is there so much hesitation?
For me, the tragedy of audiobooks is that the physical limitations and impossibilities of putting out complete novels as audiobooks in the days of LPs and then pretty much in the days of cassettes, meant that the costs and the odds were always against you. Most books aren’t out as audiobooks. If you like a book, it’s probably not been done as an audiobook.
Publishers would take audio rights but then never do anything with them. Don wants to circumvent the process. That process is that you persuade your publisher to do an audiobook and then you have no control over who gets cast, or who reads it. You have no quality control over pronunciation or goofs or anything like that. And then your publisher brings it out and then your publisher remainders it.
That is the problem that ACX was created to solve — and for me it’s also the problem that it’s highlighting. I’m hitting it more and more. All I know is that there could be lots and lots of audiobooks out there that aren’t. For years it didn’t matter that the rights were held by people because nobody could do anything anyway. But we’re not in that world anymore.
Did you start out with a list of titles you’d always wanted to see adapted? I know I have quite a few.
I had authors and titles. There’s an amazing number of them where we’re still looking for the rights. With some, I contacted the author and the author said, “Sure,” but we’re still down the rights rabbit hole with agents and publishers trying to figure it out. The first five books that have come out on Neil Gaiman Presents have simply been the first five books that were ready. I went out to a huge bunch of authors of books I liked to see what we could see.
And you found all the narrators through the ACX exchange?
In one case, I cheated and leaned on a friend. That was for “Dimension of Miracles.” It’s such a great book. There is no one who likes “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” or who cares about what Douglas Adams did who wouldn’t enjoy it, but I needed a voice for it that is as iconic as Peter Jones’ or Stephen Fry’s — a voice that would have that kind of quality, but also be American.
The book begins on Madison Avenue in the early ’60s. I thought: Who could give me that iconic voice, with the urbane, American quality it has to have, and who can deadpan a joke as well as Stephen Fry or Peter Jones? So, naturally, I thought: Hodgman. And I leaned on him, which consisted of saying, “Will you do this?” He had never read the book, so was astonished by it, loved it and immediately understood why I’d asked.
Did you have a concept for the collection as a whole?
It’s very much being defined by “books I like.” The plus side of Neil Gaiman Presents is that it’s all stuff I like. The downside of Neil Gaiman Presents is that you do not have to like it too. I can’t imagine that anybody completely shares my tastes in anything. I’d love it if people tried new things.
I love the fact that I’m bringing Jonathan Carroll to wider audience who might not otherwise know his work. I’ve loved Jonathan Carroll’s work for 20-something years. But I don’t expect that everyone who likes Jonathan Carroll’s “Land of Laughs” is also going to like M. John Harrison’s “Light,” a challenging, weird work that in many ways defines what’s most interesting about early 21st-century science fiction. It’s a challenging novel and it’s not about falling in love with characters.
I imagine there are some books that will never be adapted for audiobook — like Tom Phillips’ “Humument.” But apart from that, I’d like to think there will come a day when pretty much anything that was published in prose or in poetry you can listen to.
There are those who would say that that’s not “really” reading.
I remember reading a piece by Harold Bloom where he explained that audiobooks were not books because the proper experience goes in through the eyes. The reading experience is only an ocular experience, not an auditory one. That had me sitting there thinking about old John Milton, who obviously was not a proper writer at all because he couldn’t even see what he was writing. He was dictating it to his daughters who wrote it down. What kind of a faux poet was he?
What I realize when I’m doing an audiobook is that I actually have a much closer relationship to the text than I do when I’m reading. There’s no temptation to skim. You often notice things that the author in all probability thought he or she had buried brilliantly in the text, sitting there in plain sight. I first noticed this phenomenon when I was reading Diana Wynne Jones’ books to my daughter. I normally get to the end of a Diana Wynne Jones book and think, “What just happened?” and have to flip back to figure it all out. We weren’t getting that because I was reading it aloud and everything was there for you.
Audiobooks have certainly become a lot more popular of late.
People are really busy. One of the joys for me of audiobooks is that you can do them while doing something else. I no longer have commuting time anymore. The evil nature of email is such that simple downtime tends to fill up with people needing things from me. Writing time is at a premium. I’m no longer doing many long drives.
So my reading time becomes my exercising time. I lost 30 pounds on “Bleak House” earlier this year. That was awesome.
Can you talk a bit about the importance of the right narrator, and how much that person can add to or subtract from the audiobook experience?
I remember once talking to a best selling author about audiobooks. He’d written a book that was narrated by a 20-something black male and the audiobook was read by a 50-something white female. He had no say in this and after listening to it for five minutes he stopped, feeling physically sick.
In some cases, when the author is alive and available, I cede that choice to the author. I become the production entity and I’ll cast a deciding vote if the author says it’s between three narrators he or she likes equally. If the author’s alive, I want the author happy. That’s the most important bit.
Narrators have a huge part to play. With one of the authors we’re doing for Neil Gaiman Presents, James Branch Cabell, the first round of auditions were all from actors who clearly thought, “This is a work of fantasy and there’s magic in it, therefore I have to do this in English accents and everything has to be portentous.” I listened to seven people in a row kill every joke on the page by not noticing it was there.
It was the only case in which I had to write a little essay, saying “Look, this is a cultured Southern gentleman making jokes, occasionally quite filthy ones, with a completely straight face and with gentle irony.” I listened to another four or five auditions after that and the one that made me say, “You!” was the first time it was funny. I was laughing at the jokes. Finally I could hear them.
It’s very weird. You’re listening to five people read, and one of them will make you want to hear what happens next, will make you want to keep going.
Even though it’s the exact same words. It’s remarkable how much the reader contributes.
I had something like this deciding between 17 different versions of “Bleak House.”
Which one did you end up picking?
I went with Hugh Dickson. It was the BBC version. Huge thumbs up for Hugh Dickson!
Minnesota does this very nice thing where 3/8 of one percent of the state’s sales tax goes to what is known as the Legacy Fund, which is primarily dedicated to clean air and land and water and parks and nature, but which also spends a bit of money preserving the state’s “arts and cultural heritage,” because Minnesotans enjoy the arts, and culture, and there is, in that state, a long bipartisan history of supporting those nice things, as a sort of public good. This very nice thing is in the Minnesota constitution, because the people voted for it.
The newly elected Republicans who recently took control of both of Minnesota’s legislative houses, though, are residents of Tea Party America, and in Tea Party America the government has no business spending money on anything besides arming militias, to shoot abortion providers. Take it away, House Majority Leader Matt Dean:
Dean also singled out a $45,000 payment of Legacy money that was made last year to science fiction writer Neil Gaiman for a four-hour speaking appearance. Dean said that Gaiman, “who I hate,” was a “pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota.”
Why would Dean have anything against internationally beloved author Neil Gaiman? Does he hate enchantment?
As Gaiman explained at length, at the time the library story “broke,” he was offered that much money — his regular speaking fee — by a Stillwater, Minnesota, library that had to use the Legacy money (which is meant to do things like bring famous authors to suburban libraries) by the end of the month, or else lose it. Gaiman gave the money to charity.
Gaiman responded to Dean on his blog today, and it is well worth reading:
I think that Minnesota has things it can be proud of – quality of life things, that make it really good to live in this part of the world. The things that have kept me out here for twenty years. One of the biggest things is it has really good Public Radio and a thriving, active, involved arts scene. It makes me sad to see people trying to crush or even diminish these as part of their political agenda.
And also I think that if you’re a Republican in Minnesota, and you read my books or my blog, you could do worse than tell Matt Dean what you think of this kind of bullying schoolyard nonsense from someone who’s meant to be representing you. Honestly, it makes you all look bad.
Oh, right, public radio. This bizarre attack on a writer who is probably far too successful and popular to still warrant the “cult” label was part of a push to defund public radio.
But it is a sort of half-assed attempt at defunding, honestly. Minnesota Public Radio (distributor of “A Prairie Home Companion,” producer of “Marketplace” and “The Splendid Table”) receives a bit of money from the Legacy Fund. After the panel in charge of giving out the Legacy Funds approved legislation giving public radio and television millions of dollars, Leader Dean was forced to remind Rep. Dean Urdhal, the Republican chairing the House Legacy Funding Division panel, that Republicans hate public radio. So Urdahl introduced a new amendment that would make everyone compete for grants, instead of just being given the money by the legislature. MPR will very likely still get money. Socialism… averted?
Attacking “A Prairie Home Companion” and the author of “Coraline” is deeply stupid Republican overreach — about as tone-deaf as a heartland Democrat threatening to take your guns away — because those things are very popular, among many groups of voters, across Minnesota and the country as a whole. Dean may hate Gaiman, for reasons unknown, but there are a lot of teenaged goth girls (and women who were once teenaged goth girls) in the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs, and Rep. Dean will surely regret crossing them.
Last week, BBC Audiobooks America announced that it would sponsor the creation of a story via Twitter feed, using a first sentence written by author Neil Gaiman as the seed and inviting the public to collaborate in completing it, one 140-character passage at a time. The experiment was widely pronounced “cool,” as such things usually are, then promptly forgotten by everyone but the participants — again, as such things usually are.
The several dozen people who contributed to the story seemed to have fun, and perhaps that’s all that really matters. A Web 2.0 version of the old surrealist parlor game known as “exquisite corpse,” the twittered story was intended as a publicity stunt for BBC Audiobooks America’s line of “distinctive single-voiced and full-cast dramatized audiobooks,” and surely succeeded at that. Yet BBCAA intends to publish an audio-only version of the story, read by Gaiman himself, which makes this as apt an occasion as any to raise some questions about the creative potential of social networking. How is a good story invented? Is it yet another of those decision-based endeavors that can, according to the technotopian, freakonomical wisdom of our time, be performed better en masse than by the hopelessly antiquated individual? Can fiction be crowdsourced?
Although this is far from the first Twitter-generated story, Gaiman may be the ideal writer to preside over such an undertaking. No popular author better demonstrates how openly borrowed material can be transfigured by the force of a powerful imagination. His work combines elements of fairy tale, folklore, classic British children’s fiction, comics, horror and hard-boiled mystery. “Coraline” taps into the tradition of countless stories about bored children who find portals to other worlds, partakes of the evil-stepmother motif from the Brothers Grimm, structures it all into a save-your-parents quest reminiscent of “A Wrinkle in Time,” and so on, but Gaiman’s limpid style and heady imagery (those button eyes!) also make it indisputably original. The Newbery-medal-winning “The Graveyard Book” performs a similar alchemy by combining Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” with (improbably enough) the modern-day serial-killer thriller. This method makes Gaiman easy to imitate but — and here’s the rub — impossible to equal.
Gaiman’s kickoff sentence for the the BBCAA story is, “Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, ‘We don’t love you anymore.’” What follows, coaxed out of the Twitterverse, is a patchwork of extremely familiar motifs: malicious animated puppets, cuddly talking animal pals, an ominous castle, a sinister music box and spookily chanted rhymes — all tied to the obligatory chase after objects of obscure magical importance (otherwise known as plot coupons).
The twittered story (which as of this writing has no title) is Gaimanesque, yes, but only really in tone. Much of it is simply lifted — from “Coraline,” from “Alice in Wonderland,” from “The Wizard of Oz” and, above all, from the storehouse of shopworn Hollywood clichés — to form a patchwork that never resolves into anything more that just that, a hodgepodge of random stuff you’ve seen a zillion times before. The considerably muddled narrative describes the adventures of a girl who is either 1) kidnapped by her mirror reflection and trying to get home or 2) bravely attempting to rescue her little brother from an evil queen, or both (it keeps changing), but Sam’s exploits turned out to be far less compelling than the spectacle of their composition. Witnessing this story come together was an object lesson in the trials of collaboration and the limits of the wisdom of crowds.
Here’s how it worked: Although anyone could tweet a suggested next sentence, an editor at BBCAA selected which ones would be incorporated into the canonical version of the story. (Gaiman’s involvement in the creative phase of the operation seems minimal, which didn’t keep one participant from grandiosely claiming to be “writing an audiobook with Neil Gaiman” elsewhere on the Web.) Oddly enough, no one was bothered by this “gatekeeping” role, even when the BBCAA editor repeatedly rebuffed a campaign to give a minor character a bigger role in the plot. (He/she later gave in, though.) Anyone who took a good look at the chaotic selection of potential paths forward could see that somebody had to steer. Yet, even with a skipper, much of the time the tale didn’t seem to be sailing anywhere but in circles.
It’s tempting to attribute this meandering quality to the lack of a master plan. However, contrary to what people often think, improvisation is a vital part of the fiction-writing process. Remarkably few single-person authors outline their plots in advance of writing. Many, like the science-fiction novelist Samuel Delany, report that they start out with a few images and then see where their intuition leads them. “Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction,” Delaney once wrote, “it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader.”
Nor is the problem always a matter of too many people pulling the story in too many directions. True, if you’re only going to get one or two of your own sentences into the end product, you’re going to want them to be boffo. Consequently, most of the proposed passages represent bids to initiate a pivotal plot development (“Suddenly” has to be the most popular adverb deployed), attempts at high drama (“‘No!’ The Queen shrieked, ‘this will not be allowed! He is mine!’”) or articulations of some grand insight or theme (“You have to face her. She’s part of you”). Without much in the way of simple scene-setting or nuance, the story lacks texture, atmosphere and the variety in pacing and intensity that makes fiction dramatically effective. Instead, with the emotional volume knob stuck on high, the result is just one damn thing after another.
Still, most of the participants have a pretty firm sense of what the parameters of “a Neil Gaiman story” ought to be, and even the rejected tweets had more in common than you’d expect. There was the occasional marginally literate non sequitur — “‘Sir, do you know what is this egg?’ Asked Sam to the badger. ‘Of course, lady. This is an Catoblepas eggs.’” (Huh?) Yet even these fell within the same essential thematic register. There were few contributions that came entirely out of left field — no Mach-5 race cars, say, or sessions of Parliament.
Instead of being bombarded with too many ideas, what the twittered story really suffered from was too few. The handful of contributors who could come up with interesting motifs or turns of phrase had no idea how to constructively inject these into the whole, while the ones who were good at moving the plot forward tended to write exclusively in clichés. The dialogue is particularly lamentable, imported exclusively from the most formulaic of action movies: “‘Events are already in motion,’ the Prince said. ‘We must act’”; “Sam screamed ‘Nooooo’” “‘Sam! Listen to me!’ the Prince shouted, ‘You must go, we will hold them off, now RUN!’” I was thinking they’d managed to hit every overplayed note of the blockbuster pulp factory except for the venerable “Don’t die on me, damn it!” — when, sure enough, Sam sobs to the stricken Prince, “No, you can’t die!”
The same tired devices turned up over and over again. Any shift in the action always seemed to be accompanied by a mysterious glowing light, and the heroine was forever being “enveloped” or “engulfed” in this glow, if not in darkness or some other featureless miasma, as a way of getting her from one indistinct setting to another. At one point she even finds herself transported to a featureless, solid blue vacancy — much like the green-screen backdrops used to film connect-the-dots CGI blockbusters.
Despite an endless series of chase scenes, by the fourth day of tweeting with the projected 1,000th-tweet end point approaching, the plot wasn’t especially close to a resolution, and key elements remained unexplained. Who was the evil queen (besides a lift from “Coraline,” “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “Snow White”), and what did she want? What promise had Sam broken? Who didn’t love her anymore? What exactly had happened to her brother? Why had she been sucked into the mirror? What was her reflection doing back in the real world? She’d collected two sidekicks (a badger and a wisecracking puppet, motivations unclear), as well as a green marble egg that intermittently pulsed (pulsing being almost as commonplace as glowing in this story), a gold key, a blue crystal rose, a music box with an evil talking doll inside and a confusing back story involving royal twins, a puppet maker, a magpie with a magic mirror and several doppelgängers, none of which added up to a coherent explanation of what was going on. A lot was happening, and it was all pretty boring.
Consensus began to break down, despite efforts among the contributors to sort out the loose ends while the BBCAA editor was off getting lunch or a little shut-eye. Occasionally a sentence made an obvious plea for answers (“It was that voice again. That voice that had haunted her the first time she reach the castle. And then she realized …”), but no one took up the challenge, leaving those ellipses sadly unfulfilled. It’s so much easier to just introduce another new development! As @Toujours_Diva, the group’s self-appointed heckler, wrote sarcastically, “You know what this story needs? A few more extraneous characters.” (Some of the collaborators interpreted that as a sincere suggestion.)
Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: “When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room.” Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you’ve got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason. Well past the purported 1,000-tweet limit, Sam was still reviewing the pieces of the puzzle confronting her and wailing, “I don’t know how to put it together!” She was not alone. At one point, BBCAA put up a poll asking participants where Sam should end up after yet another engulfment, and the response was evenly divided among several major alternatives. Then they tried literally smooshing all the characters and plot coupons together (because they’re all part of Sam!) in a climax that involved yet more glowing and pulsing. And it still wasn’t over. People were confused and, it seems, still dissatisfied. Time for another poll! Even the ol’ “It was all a dream/the ravings of a lunatic” finish was seriously contemplated.
At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, “Where do you get your ideas?” but the real question is “How do you make sense of your ideas?” Delany believed that good writers read so much that they “internalize” certain “literary models” and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story’s proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.
But gather together a hundred people who don’t really know how to do this and they’re still not going to be able to do it. Even if a handful among them actually do have some aptitude, their efforts will be sabotaged by the well-meaning but misguided inclinations of the rest of the group. Like any art, good fiction requires a combination of talents — eloquence, inventiveness, pragmatism, decisiveness and taste — rarely found in a single person, and a prevailing feeling for form that can only be located in a single person.
Most of us do recognize the real thing when we see it in action, but that’s another matter. As Delany put it, “While many — or even most — people can internalize a range of literary models strongly enough to recognize and enjoy them when they see them in … new works that they read, very few people internalize them to the extent that they can apply them to new material and use them to create. Lots of people want to. But not many people can.” Not many people, and certainly no crowds.
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(Credit: AP) 
"American Gods" coming soon to HBO 
Rep. Matt Dean of Minnesota and Neil Gaiman 
