The Gulf Between Conception and Execution
Back in my teenage years, as a young comic book fan, I copied a quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and stuck it on my wall. I wasn’t a kid given to this kind of behaviour, but this fragment where Gaiman’s protagonist, Dream, describes the creation of the first Corinthian spoke to me even then: Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, and seemed to see before you another person, whom you slowly perceived to be yourself. Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from black metal. You had been frightened only of your reflection. But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still… A dark mirror… That was always the intention… But the gulf between conception and execution is wide and many things can happen along the way. Sandman #57, Neil Gaiman My admiration for this passage came in two parts. The first, unsurprisingly, lay in my youthful terror of exactly that kind of experience. Even at an age when I should have known better, I harboured a lingering fear of empty spaces and the uncanny moment when something familiar became strange and dangerous. But the part that really resonated was always the last line. Even at fifteen or sixteen years old, where my narrative focus was RPG games rather than fiction, I knew, acutely, that the conception of a project rarely matched the final outcome. Intentions changed, signals were misread, and paths could get
