Author Neil Gaiman is in Melbourne this week for a writer's talk. Photo: Justin McManus
BEFORE Neil Gaiman was a published novelist, he was a reviewer, and one of the many things he took from the experience, he says, was the importance of story.
He would often read ''beautifully written books in which very little was going on, with no imperative to turn the page''. And he promised himself ''when I became a writer I would regard that as a sin''.
The importance of that vow was recently brought home to him in, he says, ''a strange and wonderful experience over Thanksgiving'', when he was away on a trip with his 17-year-old daughter, Maddy. She had taken with her a copy of his 2001 novel American Gods, which she was reading for her school book club.
''And suddenly,'' he recalls, ''she turned to me and said, 'You did what!' '' A reader doesn't often get the chance, he says, to speak directly to the writer like that. By the same token, a writer doesn't always get to see the response of a reader blindsided by a plot twist. ''And as an author,'' he says happily, ''it was a wonderful moment of triumph.''
Gaiman is in Melbourne tomorrow, giving a sold-out talk at the Athenaeum Theatre, and he will be back on New Year's Eve for a gig that is an ''intersectional mash-up event'' featuring his wife, singer Amanda Palmer, and assorted cabaret performers and writers.