the view from the cheap seats by neil gaiman

The largest element in the collection consists of introductions Gaiman has written for other writer’s books. They are divided into ten sections, but the fences bordering each are easily and frequently scaled. The result is The View From the Cheap Seats, a compendium of mostly small bits from Gaiman’s large body of small non-fiction writings. Somehow the keeper and on–the-fence piles seem to magically move closer to each other until they are indistinguishable. Thus, newly energized, he begins to pore through the materials a second time, and in this pass, he makes three piles, keeper, on the fence, and toss, ties up the toss pile, and off to the bin it goes.

But in gathering all the material together, and now admiring the still dusty but paper free sections of floor that have become newly visible, and considering tying up all the paper for inclusion in the recycling bin, it occurs that they might be worthy of another form of recycling. Not half bad, he might think, and he would be right. He gathers a stack from here, a sheaf from there, and as I imagine anyone who writes might do, he reads some of the things he has written, some of them decades old. So he bites the bullet one Saturday morning when the creative urge is at low ebb. Maybe his wife gives him the stink-eye about the piles, urging him to take some time and deal with the mess. Another black shirt here, another black shirt here.While it is likely that his words are all nicely tucked away on hard drives, in clouds, on servers and disks of various ages and sorts, I envision stacks of paper hither and yon festooned with buzzing colonies of paper mites. Black shirt here, black pants there, black jacket over there. He may be the neatest person alive, a place for everything and everything in its place. I know nothing of Neil Gaiman’s living situation, of course. The writer was suitably terrified, and vowed to get right on it, concerned about the possibility that he was losing his shit. One day a doll with button eyes that he kept on his desk stood up and told him that he really should do something about the growing menace if he wanted to be able to leave the room ever again.

He began to wonder if the words had started shifting their locations while his back was turned, if they intended to keep him in his writing place, making more and more words and stories to keep them all company. Sometimes the lanes they had formed led him not to a door, but into a wall and he had to find his way back to the desk where he made the words, and start over. To get from his magic writing place to the world outside he had to push his way past words on stacks of paper that had grown so high that he was no longer able to see over the top to the door. The words and papers that he had dreamed into existence had begun to clog the space. Once upon a time a writer sat in a large room and looked around.

The view from the cheap seats by neil gaiman