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Neil Gaiman and Shaun Tan seem to be developing something of a double act these days, appearing on stage at literary events around the world. The two met last year at the Edinburgh book festival, and Gaiman recently wrote up their conversation for The Guardian newspaper. |
Neil Gaiman: Your stuff is always laconic. One of the things I love about it is that a picture is worth a thousand words and you make your pictures work very hard.
Shaun Tan: Part of it is that I don't trust myself as a writer. I still lack confidence, probably because the first 20 or so stories I wrote were roundly rejected. I actually started out as a writer and then converted to illustration because I realised that there was a dearth of good illustrators in genre fiction, at least in Australia at that time. I diverted all of my resources to visual imagery, and as a result I noticed that my writing did become more and more pared down, until it started to approximate my normal speaking patterns. When I write a story I imagine I'm telling it to someone like my brother. And we don't talk that much [laughs] - it condenses everything down and that's a very Australian thing, too.
