All language subtitles for MasterClass Neil Gaiman Teaches The Art of Storytelling - 06Story Case Study- The Graveyard Book

So what characters want and what

characters need always drive every story

and they always drive how the character

behaves, what's going to happen, how

they interact with other characters. Um,

here's the graveyard book. Haven't

talked about it before, so I just

grabbed it.

And we begin

with uh there was a hand in the darkness

and it held a knife. The knife had a

handle of polished black bone and a

blade finer and sharper than any razor.

If it sliced you, you might not even

know you'd been cut. Not immediately.

The knife had done almost everything it

was brought to that house to do and both

the blade and the handle were wet.

And we know very very quickly we are

dealing with a man called the man Jack

who is walking around this house

with a knife.

The hunt was almost over. He'd left the

woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom

floor, the older child in her brightly

colored bedroom surrounded by toys and

half-finish models, but only left the

little one, a baby barely a toddler, to

take care of. One more and his task

would be done.

And

now we know exactly what the man Jack

has done. He's killed a family and what

he wants, which is to kill the baby.

The problem is the baby isn't going to

be there.

Because when we meet the baby, what the

baby wants is to get out of his crib.

Ever since the child had learned to

walk, he'd been his mother and father's

despair and delight. For there never was

such a boy for wandering, for climbing

up things, for getting into and out of

things. That night he'd been woken by

the sound of something on the floor

beneath him falling with a crash. Awake

he soon became bored and had begun

looking for a way out of his crib. It

had high sides like the walls of his

play pen downstairs, but he was

convinced that he could scale it. All he

needed was a step. And the baby gets out

of the crib. The baby wants to get out.

The baby is not trying to escape.

The baby's just

heads off, bumping down the stairs on

his bottom,

heads out of the open door that the man

Jack had left open when he crept into

the house. The baby heads up the hill,

and then we meet some other characters

in the graveyard.

Owens called the pale woman in a voice

that might have been the rustle of the

wind through the long grass. Owens, come

and look at this.

She crouched down and peered at

something on the ground as a patch of

shadow moved into the moonlight,

revealing itself to be a grizzled man in

his mid-40s. He looked down at his wife

and then looked at what she was looking

at and he scratched his head. Mistress

Owens, he said, for he came from a more

formal age than our own. Is that what I

think it is?

And at that moment the thing he was

inspecting seemed to catch sight of Mrs.

Owens, for it opened its mouth, letting

the rubber nipple it was sucking fall to

the ground, and it reached out a small

chubby fist as if it were trying for all

the world to hold on to Mrs. Owen's pale

finger. "Strike me silly," said Mr.

Owens. "If that isn't a baby." "Of

course it's a baby," said his wife. "And

the question is, what is to be done with

it?" "I dare say that is a question, Mr.

Owen, said her husband. And yet it is

not our question, for this here baby is

unquestionably alive and as such is

nothing to do with us and is no part of

our world. Look at him smile, said Mrs.

Owens. And now we have two ghosts

in a graveyard and a baby. And we know

that one of them wants to get involved

and one of them doesn't.

And then

the man Jack turns up

and the Owens family hesitate.

Uh they're about to leave the baby

when they see a ghost, which is pretty

unusual. I mean, it's not that unusual

given that they are in fact ghosts and

live in a graveyard amongst ghosts. Um,

but there was a difference between the

folk at the graveyard and this. A raw,

flickering, startling shape, the gray

color of television static, all panic

and naked emotion, which flooded the

Owenses as if it were their own. Three

figures, two large, one smaller, but

only one of them was in focus, was more

than an outline or a shimmer. And the

figure said, "My baby, he is trying to

harm my baby."

A clattering. The man outside was

hauling a heavy metal garbage can across

the alley to the high brick wall that

ran around that part of the graveyard.

"Protect my son," said the ghost. And

Mrs. Owens thought it was a woman, of

course, the bab's mother.

So now

again, what do people want? Well, his

dead mother wants her son to be

protected. Mrs. Owens wants to protect

the man Jack wants to kill.

The baby is perfectly happy right now.

We also know that the baby needs to be

looked after even if it doesn't know

that it wants to be looked after.

And now we get to follow what happens.

We get to follow as a mysterious

stranger named Silas appears and

deals with the stranger, seems to wipe

his mind of what's happened in the

graveyard and sends him off again.

And we follow Mistress Owens and the

baby as

there is a convocation of the dead. All

of the dead in the graveyard get

together

and debate what should be done with the

baby. We know what Mistress Owens wants.

She wants the baby. We know what the

people in the graveyard want. They want

not to have to deal with a live baby.

You're a You're in a graveyard. Why

would you want that?

And then two things happen. One of which

is death herself appears. The lady on

the gray riding her pale horse arrives

and she just says to them, "The dead

should have charity."

And the other is that Silas, the

mysterious stranger who

appears to be neither living nor dead,

says that he will be the child's

guardian. He will bring it food from the

world of the living and he will help

look after it. And at this we end the

first chapter

of the graveyard book. And it's all

being driven by wants and it's all being

driven by needs.

A child has been adopted by the

inhabitants of a graveyard.

And now what we want to know is, okay,

what's going to happen? Who is this

child? What's he going to be when he

grows up? And now we have our beginning.

But everything is driven by want and

everything is driven by need. And

everything is driven by characters

wanting different things and those

different things colliding.

And every moment that one character

wants something and another character

wants something mutually exclusive and

they collide. Every time that happens,

you have a story.