How to Write Like Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman’s American Gods follows the exploits of Shadow, a man recently released from prison to find his world gone. A mysterious stranger offers him a job that ultimately leads him down a path straight between a war brewing in the heart of America between two very old and mythic groups.
Following the success of Game of Thrones, the story was recently picked up by HBO and is in the process of becoming a six-season show produced by Tom Hanks’ production company.
Gaiman, no stranger to incorporating mythology into modern settings, is known best for his work on the Sandman graphic novel series, Neverwhere, Stardust, Smoke and Mirrors, Coraline and Anansi Boys. Below, we gather some writing tips from Gaiman himself in his thoughts behind creating American Gods.
Begin with the whole story - Like Harry Potter or The Usual Suspects, the best stories interweave events and recall them back in the end, testing your perception of everything that happened. You have to know where you want to end up if you want to know where to begin.
You need more than a beginning if you’re going to start a book. If all you have is a beginning, then once you’ve written that beginning, you have nowhere to go.
I wrote Chapter One around December 1998. I was still trying to write it in the first person, and it wasn’t comfortable with that. Shadow (the protagonist) was too damn private a person, and he didn’t let much out, which is hard enough in a third-person narrative and really hard in a first-person narrative. I began Chapter Two in June 1999, on the train home from the San Diego comics convention. (It’s a three day train journey. You can get a lot of writing done there.) I kept writing, fascinated. I felt, on the good days, more like the first reader than the writer, something I’d rarely felt since Sandman days.
Write outside the box - In American Gods, Gaiman skillfully changes voices and subjects in his introductions to various chapters. For example, in several chapters, Gaiman builds on the theme of mythology by telling short stories about various gods, stories related but inconsequential to the central narrative. In another introduction, he even addresses the reader directly.
I wanted to write American Gods in what I thought of as an American style—clean, simple, uncluttered—and push the narrator further into the background than I had on previous books. But the narrator crept out in the “Coming to America” chapters, where I got to play a wider set of voices.
Craft a thorough setting - Gaiman narrates his hero through an America that even few Americans have experienced (most remarkable given that Gaiman is originally from England). As the protagonist explores the rural South, so do we. As the quirkiness of roadside attractions strikes his mind, so too do we experience these reactions.
I wrote about America a lot in Sandman, but it was a slightly delirious America—one built up from movies and TV and from books. When I came out here I found it very different from the country I’d encountered in fiction, and wanted to write about that.American Gods was, in my ways, my attempt to make sense of the country I was living in.
I expect that the owners of Rock City or the House on the Rock, and the hunters who own the motel in the center of America, are as perplexed as anyone would be to find their properties in here. I have obscured the location of several of the places in this book… You may look for them if you wish. You might even find them.
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