All language subtitles for MasterClass Neil Gaiman Teaches The Art of Storytelling - 02Truth in Fiction

Fiction stories

are one of the most interesting

phenomena that human beings have. Human

beings

are storytelling creatures. We tell

stories. Stories are vital. Stories are

important. We can go back later to why

they're vital. We can go back later to

how they're important. We can go back

later to how long they have been around.

Um, but the important thing to

understand is that stories are part of

us and we convey truth with stories

which is fundamentally the most

gloriously giant contradiction that you

can ever imagine. What we're saying is

we are using lies.

We're using memorable lies. We are

taking people who do not exist and

things that did not happen to those

people in places that aren't

and we are using those things to

communicate true things to kids. Now

whether you're looking at um and and to

each other I mean with with not just

kids but it begins with kids you tell a

child the story of Little Red Riding

Hood

and there are lots of takeaways from

that story but one of the takeaways that

is always taken is you know there are

people out there who may not mean you

well.

And there are people out there who when

they say, "Where are you going? What are

you doing?" You may not want to tell

them. It might get your grandmother

eaten. Might get you eaten. There are

people it is best to avoid.

Some some people some wolves are hairy

on the inside and some wolves are hairy

on the outside and perhaps you are best

keeping yourself safe. And it's a it's a

it's a true thing. It's a good thing to

learn.

It may be not something that we we are

automatically told. So a story like that

gives us that as information. You're

telling a reader something that you hope

will stay with them, something honest,

something important, something vital,

but you're using lies.

Little Red Riding Hood never existed.

Wolves don't eat grandmothers and then

climb into beds disguised as

grandmothers. And if they did, Little

Red Riding Hood would walk in and go,

"That is a wolf." She would not be

sitting there going, "Grandmother, what

big eyes you have. All the better to see

you with my" and wolves can't talk.

But we understand that we as human

beings are really good at taking that

information.

That is the magic of stories. That's the

magic of fiction because it's giving you

something big and true and important

that you might not otherwise get and you

can carry it in your heart and you can

tell it to your children and your

children's children.

I began Coraline with a quote that

wasn't from GK Chesterton, although I

said it was.

Um, I said, "Fairy tales aren't true.

Fairy tales are more than true. Not

because they tell us that dragons exist,

but because they tell us that dragons

can be defeated." That

for me was the important thing about

Coraline.

the idea

that dragons can be defeated.

I wanted to tell my kids something that

it had taken me 30 years of living to

figure out.

So when I was writing Caroline

um I wrote the first third of the book

um and then we moved to America and I

had been writing Caroline up to that

point in my own time. When I had free

time I would write it. Now we've moved

to America.

Um, everything has got a lot busier and

there was no free time and

nobody was waiting for it. I'd been told

by a publisher that it was absolutely

and utterly unpublishable what I was

doing. So, the desire to keep going, I

wanted to keep going. I knew that I had

to finish it,

but I was happy that I had a third and I

knew that one day I would get to go back

to it. And then

I was walking with my children in the

woods

and I trod on a yellow jacket nest. The

yellow jacket nest was under the ground

and uh within a couple of seconds I was

surrounded by a cloud of yellow jackets.

They're like small wasps and they're

mean

and

I shouted at my children to get away

and stayed exactly where I was because I

knew that if I ran after them, the cloud

of yellow jackets around me would follow

me and it would get to them. So, I

waited till they were at the top of the

hill

and getting stung the whole time and

then ran after them.

And uh I remember climbing into the

bath. I put all of the three of us into

the bath. They were very small. And uh

counted the stings. I had about 39

stings.

Um and

each of them had been stung once or

twice. And the problem was in shaking my

head like that to try and dislodge some

yellow jackets, my glasses had gone

flying. which meant that the next day I

needed to go down, go back to where that

had happened and get my glasses back.

And that was terrifying. Going back to

get my glasses

was scary.

Standing there getting stung while my

kids ran away was not scary. There was

absolutely nothing brave about it. Going

back the next day

to find my glasses.

That was brave.

And that moment just sat there and it

sat there for me informing everything

that I felt like I wanted to write

Coraline for. And I suddenly knew a

third of the way in

what the book was about.

I'd been writing a scary book. I knew

that it was about the idea that dragons

could be defeated. I knew that I was

trying to tell kids that yes, you can

face up to the things that scare you.

Yes, you can deal with it. Yes, you can

triumph. But it was at that moment that

I understood that actually what I was

just trying to say to them. The entire

message of this book was

being brave doesn't mean you're not

scared. It means you're scared and you

do the right thing and you do it anyway.

And that gave me a handle

into the rest of the book. That gave me

a place to walk into the rest of the

book. And it meant that

when I took Caroline back into the other

world, now her parents had been

kidnapped. Um, she knew they were there.

That the action of going back was now

scary and it should be scary. What is

wonderful

is now here we are almost 20 years after

Coraline the book was published. And I

will do signings and I will do events.

At every event I do, every signing I do,

there is a woman in her late teens, in

her 20s, now even in their 30s

who have a battered

school printing edition of Coraline with

them.

And they're the ones who just stop and

they tell me very very quietly that the

book

and Coraline saved their lives

in their teens

when they were going through a very bad

place when they were being abused when

parents' marriage falling apart, bad

things happening at school. And they

would tell themselves that if Coraline

could get through what Coraline got

through in the book, they could get

through that. But the best thing is

about it is I I told them a giant lie.

Told them a story about a little girl

who went through a door that didn't

exist.

Took about a girl that doesn't exist, a

place that doesn't exist.

On the other side of it is her other

mother

with buttons for eyes who definitely

doesn't exist.

And everything that happens in there

was made up by me. It's not true.

But it helps them. It carries them

through. It is true. And they took the

true things from it. And that human

beings are able to do that is so

important, so gratifying and so cool.

All fiction

has to be as honest as you can make it.

This I believe this may not be true for

every other writer out there. It may not

be true for any other writer there, but

it's true for this writer. You have to

make it as honest as you can because

that's what people respond to. As far as

I'm concerned, any success

I have achieved as a writer of fiction I

have achieved because I'm an honest

writer of fiction. Because my people are

real people. Because you care about

them. The hardest time for me was

starting out

as a very, very young writer.

I wrote short stories

and I sent them out to places that could

conceivably publish them and they all

came back.

And I looked at the stories which went

out and came back and went out and came

back

and I thought, okay, well, one of two

things is true here.

Either I'm not good enough

or

I don't understand

the world. I don't there's stuff I don't

get. There's stuff I need to know.

And I thought, okay, so as of today,

I am now

a freelance journalist

specializing in the world of publishing

and fantasy and science fiction. And I

decided I was a journalist because I

thought that gives me license

to ask questions.

It gives me license to go out into that

world

and meet everybody,

find out who everybody is,

find out what they do, find out how they

read to learn. And then I got invited to

my first writer's workshop. It was the

Milford writer workshop. And I was

sitting there with a bunch of fantastic

writers like Gwyneith Jones and Diana

Win Jones and Mary Gentle. And I

realized very very quickly that my

reactions to stories were things like I

like this or I don't like this or this

is good.

That wasn't their reaction.

They were responding to stories on a

much deeper level. They were reading

different stories to what I was reading.

And I realized I was reading the stories

as an audience

and they were reading stories as crafts

people

as people who built these things as

people who did this. And I also realized

I was wrong. I was wrong if I wanted to

be a writer. And they were right.

And that experience more than anything

else I think changed me. And it changed

me mostly because I realized that in

order to write fiction,

I needed to be honest.

Up until that point, I had a I had a

facility with voices.

I could do essentially impressions of

other writers. I could write things that

felt

kind of like things that other writers

would have written and written well, but

I didn't have anything to say. And that

wasn't because I hadn't lived. That was

because I wasn't really prepared to say

anything true about who I was.

I didn't want to be judged.

I didn't want people reading any of my

stories to know who I was or what I

thought or to get in too close.

And I realized that if you're going to

write, if you're going to be a

successful writer, at least if you're

going to be the kind of writer who did

the kind of stuff that I was going to

do,

you had to be willing to do the

equivalent of walking down a street

naked. You had to be able to show too

much of yourself. You had to be just a

little bit more honest than you were

comfortable with. And if people judged

you, if they felt they knew who you

were,

that was just something that you were

going to have to live with.

And what was strange is once I started

doing that

and I was expecting to be judged or

shunned or or people's opinions or to

have to deal with things and what I

discovered was actually their opinions

were we really like this. We love this

story. It's a good story.

It felt huge. It felt personal. And I

realized that's because I was being

honest about me.

And some things when you get really

specific

apply to so many of us.

So that was how I took my darkest period

and eventually

turned it around.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is my

most personal novel. It's the one that

really is about a seven-year-old me.

And it was a very uncomfortable book to

write because it had to be too honest

about who I was, about what I felt when

I was that age. The great thing about

being an adult writer

writing from the perspective of a

seven-year-old boy is I was a

seven-year-old boy.

I have that in my armory. I didn't need

to go out and interview seven-year-old

boys, meet seven-year-old boys, talk to

seven-year-old boys, because somewhere

inside me is the seven-year-old boy that

I was. So, I started writing a short

story and the protagonist was very much

me. Me, age seven. The family wasn't

really my family,

but the house and the environment and

the place was my house. My environment,

my place.

What then started happening

was the more that I wrote remembering

what it was like to be seven,

the more being seven came back to me.

um things that I hadn't thought about

for 40 years, for 50 years

came flooding back in the same kind of

emotional I guess space that you're in

when you go back to a town that you

lived in 30 or 40 years ago and the

first time you're there everything seems

very strange and then you go but hang on

if you go down here that's that road and

all of the spaces suddenly start to make

sense again. You haven't been there for

a long time. You didn't even think you

knew it, but it's in there waiting for

you. So, writing yourself

and going back to your own past and

visiting your own past,

um, as a writer,

you're not writing autobiography. What

you're doing

is lying.

But you're using the truth in order to

make your lies convincing and true.

You're using them as seasoning. You're

using the truth as a condiment

to make an otherwise unconvincing

narrative absolutely credible.

It is it is vitally important

that whatever engines you might have

used to convince your teacher

that your homework really was eaten by

the dog now come out to convince the

reader that your father really was

having an affair with an

extraterrestrial

uh monster from another dimension who is

about to destroy the earth. Um, and all

of that becomes very very important.

You're deploying truth and you're

deploying emotional truth in a way that

is convincing. And the strange thing

about it is that once it was published

over and over again, I had people coming

up to me, people writing to me saying,

"You wrote my childhood."

None of those things happened to me.

My childhood wasn't like that. But you

wrote about my childhood. You wrote

about me.

And I did because I was writing about

me. Because I was being honest. Because

I was being specific.

And if you're specific, then what you

say that's true applies to other people,

too.

But you have to be willing to just open

your chest a little bit too much and

show rather more than is comfortable of

your heart

and of your mind.