Neil Gaiman and story
October 19th 2010 19:43
Here's a quote from Neil Gaiman, an author I both like immensely and dislike occasionally (!) - some of his fantasy stories are wonderful, and some are plain grim and gross ('gross' in the sense of 'yuck.') Anyway, I pinched this quote off Alan Jacobs' 'more than 95 theses' site:
“Things with stories became incredibly unfashionable for kids. There was a point in the eighties and nineties when young-adult literature was being driven by the opinions of some teachers and some librarians, who were of the opinion that young-adult literature should be wholesome and informative and nutritious, like stone-ground wheat or whatever. I was in England back then and you’d get these books for review, and they’re all about this 15-year-old boy who lived in this tower block in London, and his older brother was using drugs, probably heroin. But there was a teacher who believed in him, and even though things weren’t going very well, it was kind of bleak and miserable, but because the teacher believed in him, maybe by the end he was going to be okay, we sort of hoped … And if I read that book once, I must have read it 30 times, and I didn’t like it any better any of those times. But that was the book, and it wasn’t a story. It didn’t keep you turning the pages. You didn’t want to know what happened. Adult literature rarely goes through exactly the same kind of doldrums, in that there are always genres, and those genres, of whatever kind, including the contemporary realist novel, that are there for the kind of reader who likes them. So if that’s the kind of thing you like, you can go and find it.”
— Neil Gaiman
The quote comes from an interview with Gaiman.
“Things with stories became incredibly unfashionable for kids. There was a point in the eighties and nineties when young-adult literature was being driven by the opinions of some teachers and some librarians, who were of the opinion that young-adult literature should be wholesome and informative and nutritious, like stone-ground wheat or whatever. I was in England back then and you’d get these books for review, and they’re all about this 15-year-old boy who lived in this tower block in London, and his older brother was using drugs, probably heroin. But there was a teacher who believed in him, and even though things weren’t going very well, it was kind of bleak and miserable, but because the teacher believed in him, maybe by the end he was going to be okay, we sort of hoped … And if I read that book once, I must have read it 30 times, and I didn’t like it any better any of those times. But that was the book, and it wasn’t a story. It didn’t keep you turning the pages. You didn’t want to know what happened. Adult literature rarely goes through exactly the same kind of doldrums, in that there are always genres, and those genres, of whatever kind, including the contemporary realist novel, that are there for the kind of reader who likes them. So if that’s the kind of thing you like, you can go and find it.”
— Neil Gaiman
The quote comes from an interview with Gaiman.
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