More Goodness From Gaiman

Once again, I was delighted to read all about how Neil Gaiman does revisisions of his work. Here's an excerpt:

"Most short stories go through a couple of drafts and a polish -- I'll write a first draft, then (if it wasn't typed) I'll type it up, and then I'll email it to friends and find out what didn't work, or puzzled them. (I miss Mike Ford. He was the sharpest of all of them -- saved me from making a fool of myself half a dozen times.) And then, if I can, I'll put it away for a week or two. Not look at it. Try to forget about it. Then take it out and read it as if I've never seen it before and had nothing to do with its creation. Things that are broken become very obvious suddenly. I'll go in and polish it up, and possibly keep playing with it a little -- it's on the computer: everything's malleable until it's printed. I'll try and read it aloud the next time I do a reading, in order to find out what I can about it, including places where what I wrote was not what I meant, and I'll fix what I find. And then I'll go on to the next thing.

Personally, I think you learn more from finishing things, from seeing them in print, wincing, and then figuring out what you did wrong, than you could ever do from eternally rewriting the same thing. But that's me, and I came from comics where I simply didn't have the liberty of rewriting a story until I was happy with it, because it needed to be out that month, so I needed to get it more or less right first time. Once I disliked a Sandman story on proofreading it so much that I asked if it could be pulled and buried and was told no, it couldn't, which is why the world got to read the Emperor Norton story, "Three Septembers and a January", although I no longer have any idea why I thought it was a bad story, and I'm pleased that Tom Peyer ignored my yelps."

Anyone who's read "Three Septembers and a January" is probably also pleased his editor stood firm on that one! It's certainly one of my favourite Sandman tales, and one I often describe to people when they ask why I love the series so much.