#all respect to rl stine

[nobodyfamousposts]

This ask might be late since today is October 29, but who do you think would win? Your dolls vs. Slappy from goosebumps

Perfect timing for Halloween though!

It was rather odd for a commission, but Marinette was nothing if not dedicated and honest. If she accepted a job, she would make every effort to see it through to its completion.

She admittedly wasn't expecting the requestee to send her the puppet he wanted her to make clothes for, though.

"It does make sense." She reasoned, pulling the puppet out of the box he was shipped in. "This way I can make sure the clothes fit him."

She looked him over, curious.

"Slappy, huh?" Strange name for a puppet. But she supposed it was probably part of his routine, right? Slapstick humor or whatnot?

She laid the puppet out on her desk and looked him over. Taking a few measurements. Noting what color and fabric would suit him best.

It wasn't until the call for dinner that Marinette realized how much time had passed.

"All right, I'm going down for dinner. Littlebug, Chaton, play nice with Slappy while I'm gone."

With that, Marinette left the room, knowing that everything would be in good hands.

==================================

Slappy couldn't have planned this any better.

Mailing himself to the designer girl was a stroke of genius! He would get new duds AND a new slave to torment.

France was a bit far from his previous "new home", but at least this would be far enough from anyone who would be aware of him or could pass along word about him. Seriously, the advent of super heroes would really be the death of him.

Slappy pushed himself off the desk and began looking around the room in distaste.

Still, he'd known she was a girl but did her room really need this much pink? And what were those names? Littlebug and Chaton?

Sure enough, there were two dolls seated side by side on the trunk. Curious, he approached them.

They looked almost like super heroes, too. One doll had black hair in pigtails while wearing red with black spots. The other had yellow thread for hair and an all black suit with cat ears. Both with pasted smiles and blank stares as they sat in place just like any old dolls.

If he was a sap, he would say they were cute. But then he might as well be called "Sappy" instead of Slappy. And that would certainly be less fun.

Speaking of, he raised one hand and slapped the red doll off the trunk. Might as well get to work. Had to start on the torment sooner or later to let the kid know who was boss.

"Sorry kiddos," he jeered, "but there's not gonna be enough room for all of us."

Maybe he'd stuff one of them in the trunk? Or use scissors, since designer-girl had to have some in her desk somewhere...

He gave the red doll a grin and reached for the cat doll to see what to do to it next.

He wasn't expecting the hand that grabbed him instead.

"What?" He jumped, startled and looked back.

The cat doll was still there.

But he was standing now.

And he wasn't smiling anymore.

"Uh...hello?"

Before he could do anything else, he heard a whip sound before something wrapped around him, tying his legs together. The cat doll took advantage and pushed him, causing him to lose his balance and fall flat on his back on the floor.

Looking up, he saw the black doll staring down at him from the trunk.

And sure enough, the red doll was standing as well. Specifically standing over him and looking down on him, holding...was that a yo-yo?

She pulled, and his bonds tightened. So clearly she had control over what was holding him, and prevented him from moving.

And for what was supposed to be a cute plush toy, she looked...rather angry.

The cat doll hopped down to stand over him as well, not looking happy either.

He simpered.

"Hey, let's talk about this?"

The two glared at him.

==================================

"Littlebug! Chaton! I brought you dessert!" Marinette called as she entered her room.

She had expected the dolls to have been active.

...she had not expected the activity.

She looked around the room in confusion.

"Why is Slappy tied up? And missing his arms?"

Chaton held up one of the puppet's arms and waved to Marinette with it.

"Well that's one. Where's the other?"

Littlebug looked away, refusing to answer.

Ooooooh, Marinette saw what was happening here.

"Did you two get jealous?"

They didn't deny it. Chaton continued to play with the arm while Littlebug just gave the puppet a nasty glare.

Slappy was sorely regretting his life choices.

Note to self: the dolls don't like to share.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

i Am obsessed with this opening “goosebumps” track and Do enjoy it all the more upon every additional listen, it’s everything i could want for a halloween song and a great alternate theme for the whole goosebumps series

[darklingichor]

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton *Major Spoilers*

I did not plan to revisit this one because I still have it mostly memorized from when I read it over and over as a teenager.

I loved this book so much, even though my life was worlds away from Ponyboy's, I related to him.

This is probably the most influential book I've ever read. I found out it was written when S.E. Hinton was a teen and I thought "Maybe I can do it too."

I soon found that I was far too sensitive to let people read what I wrote, I couldn't get around the idea of pouring part of myself into something and having someone tell me it sucks.

Now, I realize that's pretty rich considering this blog, but I couldn't do it as a kid and even now it feels a little like saying "please judge my spleen for your liking. If it is found lacking, by all means throw it in the shredder. Fear not, I will feel every cut."

This is why very few people have ever read my fiction.

That's also why, with a couple of exceptions I try to be very respectful of every book I read.

Anyway, what made me return to The Outsiders was that I discovered that there was a 50th anniversary edition. This hardcover has extras, my finger was hitting buy before I even registered it.

So, reread it for the first time in a long time.

I sank into the sweet nostalgia of the story. Reading this book is like sliding on a well worn pair of jeans. This book introduced me to Robert Frost.

I taught myself to type using the poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" because I had it memorized and would never get tired of it.

I still love the friendships and family bonds presented in the story. I still got a knot in my throat when Johnny died and Dally lost everything. I cried when Ponyboy found Johnny's letter. By God, but I still love this book.

I did notice that some things hit differently now than they did even when I read it once in my 20's.

The first thing I noticed is akin to when you watch The Little Mermaid as an adult and Arial says that she's sixteen and not a kid

and you laugh out loud because, girl, you are a zygote, shush!

When Cherry says to Ponyboy, she could fall in love with Dallas Winston so she hopes she never sees him m again. When I was a kid reading this,familar with The Breakfast Club, Grease, etc, this seemed like a natural statement.

Now? My first thought was "Oh honey, you're more screwed up than I remembered." Because from their first interaction, Cherry would fall in love with a catcalling construction worker.

Ponyboy says that Dallas said something "Really filthy".  In the movie, he asks Cherry howhe was suppose to know if her hair was really red, like her eyebrows were. A roundabout way of asking if the carpet matches the drapes. Bad enough and in the context of the 1960's that might have been dirty enough to be censored from the orginal manuscript, but I always imagined it was worse than that.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, after all, Dally wasn't so much a step up or down from Bob, as a step to the side.

Honestly when I was fourteen and reading this for the first time, I didn't think much of Cherry, I thought she was fake, and very stupid. She was older than me, but I knew it was massively fucked up not to admit she dated a bad guy.

  I see her as sad now, and she's a much darker character She's painted as someone with integrity, someone with principles.

She wouldn't take a Coke from Dally.

She tells Bob that it's her or the booze.

Won't take a pop from a hood, threatens to break it off with her boyfriend if he continues to drink. Okay, understandable.

Realize he beat the tar out of, and pschologically scarred a kid for kicks?

He was sweet sometimes.

What?

He was something special.

She says to the kid he and his friends attempted to murder. 

"He wasn't just any boy."

Right you are, Cherry. Incidentally, did you have any pets disappear while you dated him?

She's a mixed up girl.

I had many a head cannon for the characters in this book when I first read it.

I thought Ponyboy would grow up to be a writer, Darryl would open his own roofing business, Soda and Steve would work for him while fixing cars on the side. Two-Bit would work with them when he felt like it, or he would end up hitching to California to be a stand-up comic.

I thought Cherry would end up married to someone who worked for her father, who I imagined was a lawyer.

After this read through? I adjusted that future.

We met Randy again in That was Then, This Is Now. He's a hippie, which makes perfect sense. I see Cherry running off to Haight Ashbury. I don't get farther than losing sight of her red hair on a crowded, sunny sidewalk, but I get the same spooky vibe I always got after reading Rumble Fish.

Something else that hit differently, the relationships between the boys.

It hit differently for me because I know now why I love it so much.

I remember being  in a major reading slump before I picked up this book. See, I couldn't get into the books that were marketed to me. I wasn't in to RL Stine, except for the history of Fear Street books. I couldn't get into Christopher Pike at all.

I was reading mysteries and westerns, but I really wanted something that had people my age in it that wasn't a romance or sick lit. I'd read enough of those, and I thought that if I read one more book where boy meets girl then one of them croaks I would scream.

So I went to my mom's bookshelf, and found her copy.

I really loved that the real connections that are focused on, are between friends and family. These connections were not treated as being less than a romantic relationship. In fact, just the opposite, the gang see each other as their cement relationships. Soda and his girlfriend Sandy break up, he's hurt and it adds to an already rough time, but it is not a focus.

I suppose it could be argued that the reason for the lack of focus on romance has to do with the fact that Pony states that he's not thinking of it yet. But seeing how all of the gang look out for each other from Darryl keeping the Curtis's door unlocked in case one of the boys needed a place to crash, to everyone looking out for Johnny, to Johnny staying with Pony when he was upset after his fight with Darry, and looking out for him when they were in hiding, to Dallas helping them find a place to go after Bob was killed, to Pony sticking by Johnny after the killing, to Two-Bit sticking up for Johnny when his mother came to the hospital  and how broken up he was when Ponyboy got sick, and finally how one of Johnny's last acts was to write Ponyboy a letter that he hoped would help both Pony and Dallas.

These are not friendships that end when everyone starts dating.

This seems like a "duh" statement, but you have to think, so many things show friendships as training wheels. Something you use until you reach the next level and find a romantic partner. And, maybe this was just my small town, but that was very much the way things went around me, it was expected.

It was great to read a book about kids around my age who didn't see friendships as inferior to romantic relationships.

Now, knowing that I'm Aro Ace, I think I liked it because it spoke to what I thought was important without making it seem like something I needed to grow out of.

The extras were cool, letters between the author and the editors when the book was in the works, letters from the actors who played Pony, Johnny, Soda, Dallas, and Randy.

It was interesting to read the actors' feelings about characters they played so early in their careers. I was half hoping Matt Dillon would apologize for choking on, and embodying that gigantic piece of ham during the death scene, but one can't get everything in life.

I could read the other SE Hinton books, and talk about the connections between them, but I will likely skip That was Then, This is Now and Rumble Fish.

See, I didn't like That Was Then This Is Now very much when I first read it. A big reason? I didn't like Bryon. There was just something about the character that rubbed me the wrong way.

He's... I don't know... he's like Two-Bit without the charm. Plus, Ponyboy is featured, but Bryon hates him. It seems out of jelousy because of all the stuff that had happened in The Outsiders. And he hates him even more *because* he's quiet about it. I get distancing the last book from the next and that was an effective way of doing it, but when I was younger it just made me not like the character all the more.

I've read it a few times since I was younger, wondering if it would improve as I aged. It didn't.

Bryon is still mostly unlikeable. Plus, I grew up in the Frying an Egg, Diving into an Empty Swimming Pool, DARE, era of drug awareness. The whole book felt like a PG-13 version of The Buttercream Gang. Now that I have sufficiently aged myself...

Rumble Fish, I loved, but like I said, it's an unsettling story and one that left me oddly unsatisfied.

I really enjoyed the next two, Tex and Taming the Star Runner so I may revisit those.

[captainkirkk]

I attended a talk RL Stine was on/headlining a few years back at a con and I always thought that it was really funny, because he said he started from a title and then came up with a concept to fit that title. So it sort of makes sense that some of his books would be kind of cliche or wild, because he is very much like Stephen king with the whole “salami writer” thing and he just kind of... goes for it. Very fun talk if not at all how my creative process works lol.

That’s insane but I respect his work ethnic. I’m also tempted to try this out myself....

[kenshi-vakarian7]

Writer Interview

I was tagged by @rpgwarrior4824 :) Thank you.

I think everyone I know was tagged, so anyone who hasn’t yet, feel free to do this.

Q: What is your coffee order?

If I home, I make iced coffee with whatever flavored creamer I have on hand.  When I’m out, I sometimes get a frappucino, though I’ve been recently trying to cut down on that.

Q: What is the coolest thing you’ve ever done?

Hmmm... I’d say, in recent memory, raising my ginger cat since age 2 weeks.  I didn’t know what the heck I was doing with all the bottle-feeding and everything that came with caring for a newborn kitten.  I definitely did something right because he’ll be 5 years old next month.

Q: Who has been your biggest mentor?

A fellow fanfic writer I knew when I was starting out.  He was a crazy good writer who was highly respected by the time I started writing my own fics.  I never approached him about my fics at any time, he was the one who found me.  He saw my potential and was the first person to give me constructive critiques and pointers to improve.  We’ve long since lost touch since he decided to move on from fic writing, but I’ll always appreciated the fact that someone like him made the time to help me out and encourage me to keep writing.

Q: What has been your most memorable writing project?

That would be Part One of my Ketsueki Quadrilogy.  I pretty went out of town with this one; 4-way crossover with four video games (no, not Mass Effect), expanded on wishes and dream fights, references, character development (and romance all around!), and just... there’s too much to mention.  The bonus was the feedback and the readers talking about what they liked and getting excited for the next chapter.

That was a good two years.  To this day, it’s still my favorite fic I’ve ever written.

Q: What does your writing path look like, from the earliest days until now?

Growing up, I read a lot of books.  One summer, I was indulging in some book series such as Ann M. Martin’s The Babysitters’ Club and RL Stine’s Fear Street (I liked Goosebumps, but found that I liked Fear Street more).  By the end of that summer, I decided that I wanted to be a writer.  I did some original work up until my senior year of high school when I discovered fanfiction.net.  I’ve been writing fanfics ever since.  I do have a few ideas for original works, but they’re all currently in the planning stage.

Q: What is your favorite part about writing?

Writing out and FINALLY publishing that one scene that’s been in my head for ages.  Bonus if people react positively to said scene.

Q: What does a typical day look like for you?

I wake up... usually by my three cats because one shoved his whole body in my far, one is knocking things off the shelves, and the other is yelling in my face.  So I get up and feed them, then go back to sleep.  If I work that morning, I get up at 7:30am, hit the snooze a bunch of times, then get up and get ready.  If I work later or if I have the day off, I usually stay in bed until 10am the latest.  At that point, I catch up with tasks and important stuff before I indulge in my hobbies or go to work.  I cook my own dinner, which I usually start at 5pm if I off from work around that time.  When that’s done, I do whatever is needed/indulge in my hobbies again before bed.  Depending if I go to work in the morning, bedtime is usually between 11pm-2am.

Q: What does your writing process look like?

I either have a notebook full of short scene summaries, random scenes written out, or I have the next few chapters written but not completed.

Q: What’s the best advice you’ve gotten?

It’s actually something I only realized recently and wished I took to heart sooner... Write whatever the hell you want.  There’s much more to it than that, but I’ll just leave it at that.

Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned?

It’s never happened to me personally, but I’ve witnessed it over the years in multiple forms.... no matter what you do, there’s ALWAYS going to be at least one person who will either not be happy with what you wrote or go out of their way to put you down for whatever weird reason they have.  Like I said before, write whatever the hell you want.

Also, never give into the pressure of random requests unless you’re personally asking for requests.  There’s a 99% chance that the person/people who pushed you to write the story/add the thing they wanted you to add/etc. will actually NOT read the story at all.

Q: What advice would you give someone who wants to start writing?

Write whatever the hell you want. =P

[moviesteve]

Fear Street: Part One – 1994 https://bit.ly/3iZZK2I A homage to slasher films of yore, of the Friday 13th/Halloween/I Know What You Did Last Summer (70s, 80s and 90s respectively) sort, Fear Street: Part One – 1994 is the first of a trilogy based on the books by RL Stine, directed by Leigh Janiak and retaining some cast members across all three. Divulging which … Read more

[blschaos3000-blog]

Its 7:00 pm hot/humid

Welcome to “8 Questions with…….”

I was recently sent a new film called “To The New Girl” of which I loved and I think its one of the best films of the year.  After watching it for the fourth time,I knew I wanted to interview EVERYONE involved in the film but also knew that wouldn’t be practical. So I went with the top two of my wish list and was lucky enough to land this interview with the playwright who wrote the play and later on the film,Sam Macher.  Yes,I know my title says “Samantha” but the lady likes to go by Sam. Sam is one of the most multitasking artists I have met yet….writer,playwright,teacher and producer. She does this while also working in the professional world (as long as there isn’t a pandemic going on). I really wanted to know how her play has become such a powerful film and so I went slightly wild with my questions. Sam is the type of artist that you find yourself saying “8 Questions?? To hell with that….I got waaaaay more then 8 Questions to ask”. I hope you all enjoy this interview and getting to know the voice behind one of the best films of the year in “To The New Girl” as I ask playwright Sam Macher her 8 Questions…..

Please introduce yourself and tell us about your current project

I’m Sam Macher, the writer/producer of “To the New Girl”, an independent feature film from New Girl Pictures and Dragon Hunter Productions. I’m a playwright by training, producer by necessity, and storyteller by birth.

 How have you been doing during this pandemic? Have you found it challenging to remain creative or has it been easy?

The pandemic has presented as many challenges as it has opportunities in a lot of ways. On the one hand, I was laid off from my stable day job, but on the other, I had more time and energy to dedicate to helping get this film project (and others) off the ground. All in all, I feel lucky to be safe and healthy, and though this hasn’t been the most creative time for me, I’m still able to work on projects I love with people I love.

 What was it like growing up in your house as a child? Were your parents artistic and how did they encourage you to be creative?

I would say both of my parents are incredibly creative and imaginative in their own ways, so the nice thing about being their child is that there were no limits to what they thought I could do. My dad is a first generation American and built his own transportation/logistics business in our garage (it’s now been around for 30 years this fall!). My mom has worked her way from office manager to VP at a national non-profit and now works at a architecture firm, in part because she has an incredible passion for design. I think they both come from a “follow your passion- you’ll either figure it out or you’ll change direction” mindset.    A lot of folks I’ve met during my career had well-meaning relatives that told them to pursue more traditionally lucrative fields of study and warned them away from unstable careers in the arts, but thankfully I never worried too much about that. For me, as the first one in my immediate family to go to college, their perspective was that so long as I got my education, everything else would work out. They turned out to be right. I learned the skills I needed to run my creative career like a business by producing my own work and this eventually translated into working at small non-profits then small businesses, and eventually even Fortune 500 companies. Once they got past my weird job history and somewhat irrelevant degrees, hiring managers saw my creativity as an asset and not a liability. I will say though that I got (and still get) a lot of benefit of the doubt along the way. Attending the right schools and having the right connections has undoubtedly helped me succeed. I don’t say this to undermine my talent or work ethic, but to highlight that lots of talented folks work hard and unfairly don’t even get in the door in creative or corporate spaces.

 When did you start writing and what type of writing did you do? How important was reading to you growing up and who were your favorite writers growing up?

  I started writing at a pretty young age. I think the first story I wrote was when I was six or seven. Thankfully, my mom kept all of my “early work”, and it’s funny to me that even then, it was surprisingly dialogue heavy. I also used to write TV shows for my friends and I to perform on the playground and spent countless hours making movies on the family camera.   I read a lot as a kid and some of my favorite books were the Anne of Green Gables series. I think I read them/watched the Canadian miniseries dozens of times. I also loved RL Stine and all the Goosebumps and Fear Street books. I adored Steven King. I still can’t get enough ghost stories. One of these days I’ll finally get around to writing something spooky!

You attended and graduated from the University of Virginia,what was your college experience like? How much  did your creative writing blossom while you were in school?

   College was… weird. I wasn’t a great student, but I loved my spiritual writing and playwriting classes and probably took 6 of them during those 4 years. Even though my academics were a little subpar, I learned a ton. I learned how to write in a workshop, give and accept feedback, and self-produce my plays, which was completely invaluable. The training I got in the UVA playwriting program (headed by Doug Grissom) was a huge part of how ready I was for my MFA at Hollins (led by Todd Ristau). While I was at Hollins, I already had the toolkit to be a good collaborator, but they helped mold me into a good writer. So many of the opportunities I’ve had over the years have come from the reputation I established at Hollins and the classmates and instructors that believed in me enough to produce my work.    To this day, I still have a strong relationship with both programs. UVA brings me back as a guest artist about once a year, and I’ve even gotten to be a guest lecturer as well. The Hollins New Works Initiative still functions as a production office for my films, allowing me to fundraise through their 501c3 infrastructure. Not all schools take this kind of risk on their alums. I’m grateful that my schools do.

 What drew you to live theater and how did you get your start as a playwright?  How is writing a play different from screenwriting?

Ah! I have always desperately wanted to be an actor, but alas, this is not a gift I possess. I don’t know what to do with my hands when I’m on stage. I can’t remember lines to save my life. My reactions as a person are wildly exaggerated, and so on stage they somehow look even more ridiculous! But, I figured if I couldn’t be on stage, I could certainly still be near it.   I’ll tell you a quick story: My senior year of high school, we were supposed to have a spring musical. Then, our drama teacher left to go work at another school, then the person who took over the program resigned mid-year and the musical was cancelled. I was furious. Though I am a fairly crappy actor, I’m a pretty good singer (and am really enthusiastic) and thought for SURE this was going to be the year I was going to be in the play! So I did what I thought anyone would do, and wrote the spring musical with a role for me in it! It was funny because I wound up being so busy with rewrites and eventually producing, that I had to recast myself in the show, direct it, and then wound up producing the other student-written one-acts that we needed to couple with my play to make it a full evening of theater. The whole point was to be IN the play! But once I saw how awesome my classmates were, I really couldn’t envision it any other way. From there on out, I stuck to what I did best. Lurked backstage like the Phantom of the Opera, and lived vicariously through the folks in the spotlight.    The second part of question is a little harder for me to answer. Aside from this project, most of my film work is documentary and movement pieces, so I don’t really write for the screen in a traditional way. Generally though, when I have written more straightforward screenplays, it’s a lot more “Show” and a lot less “Tell”. You think a lot more about what can be communicated with the character’s actions, their facial expressions, their moods, rather than what they’re saying. The classic axiom is “When you write a play, the audience should be able to know what’s going on just by listening to it. When you write a film, the audience should be able to know what’s going on even just by looking at it.” I try to just do that.

How did you get the inspiration for “To The New Girl”? How hard was it to take your words from paper to a live stage?

I went through a divorce in my early 20’s after a brief marriage, so the play itself is very loosely inspired by that emotional journey (not the factual one), but also by the women in my life who’d been through divorces as well. The stories I heard were both sad, and heartening. In their own way, they were telling young me that things would be hard, but you’ll get through it. I think I was trying to find a way to capture the essence of their advice to me to share with others, and wound up twisting it on it’s head a bit to tell the story we have now. 

Have you ever done spoken word yourself and what drew you to basing your play on this format? 

  I have incredible respect for those who tell their stories this way, and also it seems, they have made an obvious (if not intentional) impact on the way I tell mine, but I’ve never performed spoken word poetry.   I think the reason this way of storytelling appealed to me when I first started writing TTNG is that when you don’t have other characters to play off of, or a clear setting, it’s the voice of the character itself that tells you a lot about who they are. Is this character a fast talker? Does this person take long, deliberate pauses? Does this person invite you in, ask you to sit, and then tell you their life story? What do the answers to these questions tell you about how they live their lives outside of this play? When you bake in the pauses and emphasis, I think an actor gets a lot to chew on (or ignore, which is also fine). I think the acknowledgement that how and when we speak is almost as important as what we say, is something that spoken word poets and I have in common.  How did you find your “voices” for “Girl”? How many original actresses made the transition to the film? 

   The original production at SkyPilot Theater Company in Los Angeles was developed in close collaboration with their actors and the original director Jeanette Farr-Harkins. I went to auditions, heard the women in the company read their monologues, and as I heard them speak, I started to see my characters realized. A lot of those speech patterns you see in the play evolved from imagining specific actresses in these roles. How they talk and how they move in a helped ground these characters while I was writing.   Only one actress came from the original SkyPilot cast to the film- Samantha Carro. She played Elyssa in the original production. But Kelly Goodman is an actor from the original company, so when we were casting the role of Miriam, she came to mind really quickly.  What were you feeling during Opening Night? What emotions were you feeling listening to your words?

I wrote this play so long ago (I think I was 24, so about 10 years ago at this point), so whenever I see this show, it’s a little like hearing people read your diary from that age. It’s surreal, but also incredibly cool. It’s nerve-wracking, but I also have enough distance from it to be able to evaluate the work for what it is today. I also feel incredibly proud that this play has had a decade of performances, and humbled/lucky that my collaborators have chosen to take it to this distance.

      How did the idea of making “To The New Girl” from the stage to screen make you feel?

As an artist, in general, I’m very “let’s throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks” so I was on board from the get go. I also trust Laura Hunter Drago, our producer, with my very life so I knew for sure she was the person to trust with this project.    I want to note that I was a little skeptical about there being widespread excitement for this project (sometimes I get in my own head about “why would anyone want to see my plays?”), but once the Kickstarter campaign was funded, I knew we’d have the support we needed to get it done. Laura never doubted it though. It’s amazing to have a producer with so much confidence in herself and confidence about the work. Did I mention I love her?

Did you have to make any adjustments in your play to fit the film?

Thankfully, not really. Since it’s such a simple script and setting (and it was workshopped pretty thoroughly), there weren’t a ton of edits needed to the final version of the screenplay.  You are also a  working professional,how do you balance your work life with your creative one?

I don’t 😊 It’s always kind of feast or famine either way. There are some times when I have the chance to throw myself into my writing and really go for it, and other times I have to hunker down and work so I can eventually support the writing. I think other writers definitely have more discipline in this way. I admire them greatly. 

Where do you find the time to write and what is your process like?

   At the moment, even in the pandemic with the layoff, I’m not writing a ton, but I am reviewing and revising work that I did in the past and making updates. I’m also seeing which projects I should be pushing for the next phase of production and which ones need to go to the back burner for a little longer. What I’ve found over the course of my career is that things that I worked on in the past have a way of becoming relevant again with time. TTNG is a lot like that- though I wrote it over ten years ago at this point, it has a new life and audience with the film. All that’s old is new again!    When I am in writer mode though, it’s a little like a faucet. I’ll sit down over the course of a few days, get the whole ugly story, warts & all, out of my brain in a few sittings. This, of course, comes after months of thinking about the characters, hearing how they talk in my mind, and wondering what is it about this time in these characters lives that makes this part of their story interesting? Why am I dropping in on them now? Why would the audience want to see this?    For example: With TTNG, I think we’re dealing with an emotionally charged moment for these women. They have something to say, they’re going to say it, and we (as a stand in for the woman they can’t say anything to) are going to hear it. We become a part of their journey- that’s why we’re here. After the inital brain dump,I honestly spend the next few months workshopping,rewriting,etc until I have something I can share with theater companies/filmmakers that I’ve worked that might be excited about it. Sometimes my collaborators love it! Sometimes they really don’t,or it’s not a fit for their audience. From there,I make a decision about next steps.Do I keep tweaking it or do I put it on the shelf for another time?

   What do you enjoy about teaching theater? Do you feel live theater still has a viable voice in the face of all the streaming channels we have now? 

There’s nothing I don’t enjoy about teaching theater, especially with younger students. It’s always a joy to share what you love with people, and watch them do it on their own in their own way. |  One of my favorite classes I ever taught was with a group called Determined to Succeed in Los Angeles. They paired me and my friends Nikki Adkins (an amazing children’s playwright), Elizabeth Dragga (founder of the non profit Book Truck), Jac Sanchez (a wonderful children’s librarian) and Jaime Robledo (an accomplished LA Theater Director and Writer) with local middle school students, and together we helped them write, produce, direct and star in their own plays. The kids were already so awesome, but it was fun to see them blossom over the summers into actors, writers, and directors. I hope that even if it didn’t instill a lifelong love of theater, that it taught them to be confident in their writing, proud of their stories, confident public speakers, and most importantly generous collaborators. Theater teaches all of that.

How can live theater connect with new generations?

In the example with the middle schoolers, I think we saw a lot of intergenerational give & take. We taught them how to tell their stories in a new way and helped them start to understand why the stories we tell are important. On our end, we learned a lot about what’s important to middle school students- what makes them laugh, what makes them sad, what makes them hopeful, and were able to drop any preconceived notions we had about “kids that age”. They consistently demonstrated heart and maturity beyond what I would have thought possible from 12 year olds (shows what I know), and gave us an opportunity to think about all we had in common, even being more than decade older.   (On a personal note, I also learned what YOLO means, which was great. I have used this term now unironically for long past it’s cultural expiration date to the eyerolling of everyone I know under the age of 25.)    Live theater, particularly new plays, provides a platform for those who don’t always have the most power in the room (like kids) to tell the people who do (like grownups) about their lives. It elevates and validates the stories being told. A production that does this successfully says to its creators and collaborators “This show/film was absolutely worth the time we invested, the money we invested into making it happen, and we also believe it’s worth the time and money our audience is investing as well.” It says to the audience “We trust you enough to know what to do once you’ve heard these truths” (This holds up for comedies as well as dramas, I think).    This is why live theater is so important. Not to say that every show you’re going to see will be transcendent (I know I’ve written some real stinkers) but again, at its best, you’re in the moment with those characters and their lives and their joys and sorrows. They become a thread in the tapestry of your understanding and empathy toward other people. You can’t replace that in-person connection. This is why it’s invaluable not only to have live theater but to have live theater that represents and values diverse voices and stories, and now more than ever elevates those who are underrepresented in the canon. 

What do you like doing when you’re not at work or writing? Do you have hobbies,causes,activities you like to do?

In the pandemic I’ve become a pretty enthusiastic gardener! I’m also enjoying cooking with the plants that come out of said garden. I also work as a volunteer activities coordinator (at least I did in the before times) for a local organization called ECHO that provides day support for medically disabled community members. Otherwise, I like hanging out with my husband, Bryce, and my dogs, Bridget & Neptune.  What will be your next project?

I’m currently in post-production on a documentary film chronicling the stories of Black equestrians in the county where I grew up with my friend and producer Nola Gruneisen. It’s called “You Should Be In Here, Too” and we’re scheduled to complete it hopefully next year!  The cheetah and I are flying over to watch you launch your latest play but we are a day early and now you are stuck playing tour guide,what are we doing?

Wow! I’ll have to find some Cheetah Friendly places 😊

   My perfect day in the hometown area: Start by seeing a matinee at the Angelika Mosaic Movie Theater in Merrifield, VA. They have the best popcorn in town and a fabulous film festival- The Northern Virginia International Film & Music Festival.  

Then we’d want to talk about what we just saw, so I’d suggest the Lake Anne Brew House in Reston. It’s a great place to have a beer while looking at a Lake. Perfect for post-movie conversation, and they have a patio, so totally cheetah-friendly. And then grab a substantial bite to eat at Ariake Sushi down the street. 

The next day, you should definitely take a drive out to Middleburg, VA (where Laura and I met, and most of my new film was shot) and visit The Upper Crust bakery for a Cow Puddle cookie. From there, you’ll enjoy the rolling hill drive toward the Shenandoah National Park. Stop at the Apple House for donuts near the entrance to the park. You won’t regret it.

    I like to thank Sam  (and Christa!!!) for taking the time to sit and talk with us about her new film,live theater and life in general. I can’t wait for “TTNG” to drop because I really believe its going to change and reshape a lot of people’s lives…..both from the creative side and also from the audience side. The fim will be drop this month on Amazon Prime so you’ll have plenty of chances to see it.

I like to thank you,the reader,for reading and supporting this interview. Feel

8 Questions with……….playwright Samantha Macher Its 7:00 pm hot/humid Welcome to "8 Questions with......." I was recently sent a new film called "

[shg11]

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

Its important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. Im going to tell you that libraries are important. Im going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. Im going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: Im an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So Im biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And Im here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And its that change, and that act of reading that Im here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What its good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldnt read. And certainly couldnt read for pleasure.

Its not one to one: you cant say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, its a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if its hard, because someones in trouble and you have to know how its all going to end thats a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, youre on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I dont think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of childrens books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. Ive seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

No such thing as a bad writer... Enid Blytons Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Its tosh. Its snobbery and its foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isnt hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a childs love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian improving literature. Youll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen Kings Carrie, saying if you liked those youll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen Kings name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. Youre being someone else, and when you return to your own world, youre going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Youre also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And its this:

The world doesnt have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

Its simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere youve never been. Once youve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while were on the subject, Id like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if its a bad thing. As if escapist fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldnt you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Tolkiens illustration of Bilbos home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollins

Another way to destroy a childs love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the childrens library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the childrens library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader nothing less or more which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, weve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. Thats about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Photograph: Alamy

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. Its a community space. Its a place of safety, a haven from the world. Its a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account.

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us as readers, as writers, as citizens have obligations. I thought Id try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers and especially writers for children, but all writers have an obligation to our readers: its the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all adults and children, writers and readers have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. Im going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. Its this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world weve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. If you want your children to be intelligent, he said, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

This is an edited version of Neil Gaimans lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agencys annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/15/neil-gaiman-future-libraries-reading-daydreaming

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Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

Its important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. Im going to tell you that libraries are important. Im going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. Im going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: Im an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So Im biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And Im here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And its that change, and that act of reading that Im here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What its good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldnt read. And certainly couldnt read for pleasure.

Its not one to one: you cant say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, its a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if its hard, because someones in trouble and you have to know how its all going to end thats a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, youre on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I dont think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of childrens books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. Ive seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

No such thing as a bad writer… Enid Blytons Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Its tosh. Its snobbery and its foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isnt hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a childs love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian improving literature. Youll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen Kings Carrie, saying if you liked those youll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen Kings name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. Youre being someone else, and when you return to your own world, youre going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Youre also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And its this:

The world doesnt have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

Its simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere youve never been. Once youve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while were on the subject, Id like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if its a bad thing. As if escapist fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldnt you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Tolkiens illustration of Bilbos home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollins

Another way to destroy a childs love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the childrens library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the childrens library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader nothing less or more which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, weve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. Thats about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Photograph: Alamy

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. Its a community space. Its a place of safety, a haven from the world. Its a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account.

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us as readers, as writers, as citizens have obligations. I thought Id try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers and especially writers for children, but all writers have an obligation to our readers: its the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all adults and children, writers and readers have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. Im going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. Its this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world weve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. If you want your children to be intelligent, he said, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

This is an edited version of Neil Gaimans lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agencys annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

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Feb 1 2017

Basics. What are the basics of a relationship?

Have I done things in the relationship that didn’t truly come from myself? Do I do things because I think she wants them or because I think it will promote a good relationship? You can’t lie to yourself and today I want to figure out if I am doing this.

She is worried that she loves parts of me that are not actually me. And shes worried that down the road, if I have taken a path that is not by my choice it will be extremely deteriorating. There are some things that I think can be seen as not coming from me. Like reading articles. This is an interesting topic for me. She brought up the idea that reading articles helps extremely well with intellectual conversation. She pointed this out and I realized that I would love to have more opinions on topics from day to day. I started reading them for 2 different reasons. First, the idea in my mind about conversing with people and knowing what they’re talking about and having an opinion on things excited me. And secondly - I wanted to have more intellectual conversations with her (because I know she loves it - and it would be good for us). This is the part that could be seen as not my choice. Which I realize looks like I am only doing something so I can be compatible with her. And which makes it even worse, my article reading only lasted for a reasonably short amount of time. I think it didn’t last for a few reasons. 1 - I have always had a bad memory. And I like to blame it. People so often talk about movies or even stories from my past, but I just don’t have a recollection of it. I think this idea drove me away from reading articles, because if I can’t remember what they said, how will I be able to talk about them? 2 - I wouldn’t find anything that interesting very often. As I sit here, I want to better myself with knowledge for future conversations. I believe this is completely without Kathryn. It feels like something is holding me back. Is it something that will come in time? I know that I have so much progress from even a couple years ago with school. I feel way more driven. I feel like most of the things I am learning I am actually learning about because I want to. Because I want to know more about the world. Not just to get a passing grade to get a degree. Not just to make it through the week so I can go out and get drunk with my friends (like I used to honestly). Kathryn led me to realize the benefit of working hard. She may think that she forced me or guided me to be something I am not - But I believe she opened my mind for me to realize what is inside of me the whole time. I think this is a similar story for quite a few things. Just reading in general. I’m reading this god awful novel about a plant managers efficiency problems, and I love it. It’s not like its even a good story. But I know I like reading, I know that a book has the power to suck me into it. I used to read a lot when I was a kid. Vampire books, RL Stine books all that stuff. I know inside myself there is a book worm hiding out. I like the idea of myself hanging outside, laying on the grass reading an adventurous novel. If I told Kathryn this I know she would think I’m just trying to appeal to her, but that idea genuinely excites me. But anyways I have gotten away from reading in the last many years, and again, something seems to be holding me back from going out and buying a book and diving in. And when I say I know that I love reading, this is what I mean. And I think she believes I say it just because I know she likes to read. Whereas I am here saying it from the heart, but it’s something is just holding me back. Am I lazy? I don’t know. Is it who I surround myself with? My friends are very social, present oriented people. When I say present oriented, I mean lets watch tv lets hang out lets get drunk lets play games. Would it be different if I lived alone? Or would I migrate towards them anyways? Maybe I seek belonging. I might not be as good at being by myself. I know that I enjoy the presence of people. Even if it just hanging out in the same room. 

 I was quiet on this issue when we were talking about it because I didn’t know for sure what was going on. I have a tendency to be influenced very easily, and am not the best at defending myself. In this case I was overwhelmed about what was going on, and I took her thoughts for fact. 

She asked me what I want in life, what I would like my future to be, and for me to take her out of it. I will try to do this.

My future.

I feel like I kind of model my future after my dad. I don’t know if its by accident or not. I want a job that I love - unfortunately I don’t know what that is yet. A job where I can go to work and it is challenging and rewarding. A job that I am excited to wake up for, not just because it pays good. I want to be able to get up early (hard part right now) have nice suits and shoes that I get dressed up in and feel fulfilled during the day. To come home feeling accomplished, like I added some sort of value during the day. I want to be someone people look up to. Whether that’s in a business or just in life in general. I want to build a company and a brand that I can be proud of. I want a hand in that. I want at least 2 kids who I can come home to and they’re exited to see me. I want to show those kids how to love and how to be respectful. I want them to know how much I love them and I never want them to feel alone. I want a family where everyone is open with each other and respectful of one another, and filled with laughter and smiles. And of course the most important lady in my life, my woman. I want her to be as happy as humanly imaginable. Just as goofy and weird as me, never getting tired of each other in all ways you can think of.

Also what I know most is how I feel with her. The feelings that I get with her are extremely potent and amazing, and I kind of feel like they are getting swept under the rug. 

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Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

Its important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. Im going to tell you that libraries are important. Im going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. Im going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: Im an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So Im biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And Im here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And its that change, and that act of reading that Im here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What its good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldnt read. And certainly couldnt read for pleasure.

Its not one to one: you cant say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, its a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if its hard, because someones in trouble and you have to know how its all going to end thats a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, youre on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I dont think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of childrens books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. Ive seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

No such thing as a bad writer… Enid Blytons Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

Its tosh. Its snobbery and its foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isnt hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a childs love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian improving literature. Youll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen Kings Carrie, saying if you liked those youll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen Kings name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. Youre being someone else, and when you return to your own world, youre going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

Youre also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And its this:

The world doesnt have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

Its simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere youve never been. Once youve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while were on the subject, Id like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if its a bad thing. As if escapist fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldnt you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Tolkiens illustration of Bilbos home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollins

Another way to destroy a childs love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the childrens library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the childrens library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader nothing less or more which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, weve moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. Thats about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Photograph: Alamy

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. Its a community space. Its a place of safety, a haven from the world. Its a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account.

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us as readers, as writers, as citizens have obligations. I thought Id try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers and especially writers for children, but all writers have an obligation to our readers: its the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we ve lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all adults and children, writers and readers have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. Im going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. Its this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world weve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. If you want your children to be intelligent, he said, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

This is an edited version of Neil Gaimans lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agencys annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

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