One of the first books I read this year was Stardust by Neil Gaiman. I had just started skimming through some of his essays in The View from the Cheap Seats, and I was reminded how his tone of writing can feel like a warm blanket, like the pressure of your parent’s weight at the end of the bed, reading a bedtime story.
The audio book is a bite-sized little 6 or so hours, and I had just gotten the idea to write a fairy tale of sorts for my nephew’s 7th birthday this year. I find myself needing to justify things I simply want to do with some kind of output, and my initial justification for reading Stardust was to get in the mindset of a fairy tale narrator. For my money, nobody alive does that better than Gaiman.
The story is fun, a delicate twisting of new and familiar into something wholly its own, but I found myself mesmerized once again with Gaiman’s ability to be uniquely himself. I think that’s part of what makes him such a talented voice actor for his own work, because he’s the narrator of everything he writes. Whether it’s graphic novels, short stories, children’s books, or epic fantasy, they’re all his stories. I mean reading them gives me a sense that only he could tell it exactly the way it’s told.
The lesson I rediscover everytime I read one of his books is to always air on the side of revealing too much of myself, to write the things I feel myself drawn to, and not to worry about anything other than writing the story that is bouncing around my head. Easier said than done, and even easier for someone that already has such an established body of work like Neil. (I call him Neil, because if reading books is akin to spending time with the author, he and I are very close friends).
I’m currently reading David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, only a full decade late. One of the through-lines I’m struck by is how people’s attitudes about themselves are influenced by their immediate surroundings. He talks a lot about drop out rates and research paper publishing of Ivy League students compared to students who go to state schools, which I’m not going to get into a hack job of paraphrasing here.
The takeaway for me is that my opinion of my life, be it my writing or my job or who my friend group includes, can be heavily influenced by who is around me. The problem is that none of those people, even friends or family, are me. I’m the one living my life. I’m the one that has to be satisfied with my decisions.
Reading Neil Gaiman again, and especially reading Stardust, was a gentle reminder to be the one living my life. That can take as many forms as there are people on Earth. For me, it was encouragement to write a chapter book for my nephew, license to buy a couple fountain pens and write things that felt honest in a place where nobody has to see if I so choose.
An excerpt from The View from the Cheap Seats perfectly summarizes my takeaway from Stardust in a beautifully dissonant, Gaiman-esk way. He was talking to a journalist, who was trying to understand the purpose behind the book, the type of social commentary woven into Neverwhere:
“What’s it for?" he had asked, which is not a question you expect to be asked when you write fiction for a living.
"It’s a fairy tale," I told him. "It’s like an ice cream. It’s to make you feel happy when you finish it."