Kinetic Writer

In a July 2001 interview given shortly after the release of his book American Gods, Neil Gaiman was asked about his worst fantasy.  When he was about ten years old, he fantasized about locking all of his favorite authors — living and dead — in an enormous castle, where he would make them collaborate on a 12-volume epic with the plots devised by Neil himself.

As a fan of his work, this was cool to learn. But as a fantasy writer, in that I fantasize about being a writer, I connected with Neil’s introspection about his fantasy:

“As daydreams go, it says an awful lot about me as a young man: I wasn’t confident enough about my ability to come up with stories. I was coming up with this huge, intricate story in order to justify in my daydreams of creating stories.”

It all comes down to confidence, doesn’t it?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 1:08 pm and is filed under books & reading, philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.