“Writers are otters,” states Neil Gaiman, firmly. (…)
“Otters are not trainable,” he explains. “Dogs are trainable – if you want them to sit you train them and give them rewards and they sit each time. But otters… if they do something cool and you give them a fish, the next time they’ll do something even cooler. Or they’ll try to do something completely different. I think that most writers – or at least a lot of us – are otters.”
From this Guardian piece; via Jenny.
Tags: Neil Gaiman
September 21, 2009 at 1:15 am |
Actually, in some parts of theworld, they do train otters, to fish for humans. The link below shows actual pictures of this being undertaken in Bangladesh.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dark_rain/2081223368/in/photostream/
They are somewhat trainable, since you still have to have them tied to a rope as you will see in those pictures.
I don’t known what this means for Neil Gaiman’s analogy.
Cheers!