We figured that since American Gods has
recently been released in paperback that it was now a
good time to talk to Neil Gaiman.
But where to begin? It is near impossible when
talking to someone like Neil to not retread over
things that he has spoken about a thousand times
before. So, we decided to let him talk and in doing
so, he sang us a song about TV shows and told how the
Pulitzers can sometimes seem like the Special
Olympics.
Not only that, no, not by a long shot. We
also discuss his future work with Marvel Comics, his
thoughts on the Spider-Man and Lord of the
Rings movies, and all the latest
news on his many film projects, including Books of
Magic, Death: High Cost of Living, Good Omens, and
an adaptation of his new children's book, Coraline. If you've been
looking for the conclusive Neil Gaiman interview,
well, let us be so bold as to say that you've found
it.
Thanks to Lorraine Garland for helping set this up
and be sure to check out Neil’s website at neilgaiman.com
for information on his new children’s book Coraline.
Dan Epstein: You researched American Gods for a
long time. What originally inspired the novel?
Neil Gaiman: I did, although I researched it
incredibly lazily. The most exciting thing that I did
to research it was move to America. In some ways it
was being researched and other ways it was an attempt
to try to understand the country I had moved too.
What began my fascination was the way that a lot of
the English and European folktales that have crossed
the Atlantic had lost their magic. The stories were
still there; the Appalachian Jack stories being the
perfect example. Like Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack
the Giant Killer, except after being told in the
Appalachians for a few years by the English people who
came over, they made all the magic go away.
That fascinated me. Just one of those weird things
you found. Then trying to make sense of America by
wondering if there were huge gulps of America that I
wasn't getting. Just as there is in England. But I
gradually figured that there wasn't, not in the same
way anyway. There is a very “what you see is what
you get” quality to America.
However, there is a lot of local history, which is
because of the strange and frequently transient nature
of America. Fifty percent of the people you bump into
in whatever town you're in are from totally different
states than the one you are in. Then some of them have
been there forever. That's fascinating to me and so is
the fact that so many of both those kinds of people
lived near me in Minneapolis.
When I did the interviews for the hardcover edition
of American Gods I kept talking to journalists
based in New York or Los Angeles who really loved it
but would always say during the interview implicitly
or explicitly, "The only thing I don't understand
is why you set a book in flyover country." As if
there wasn't enough reality in the rest of the
country. Like America really is like that weirdo New
Yorker poster with just New York and L.A. and that’s
it.
The joy and fascination of America is to go on the
roadtrips that I sent Shadow [the main character in American
Gods] on. I took all those routes; I would just
head out and drive before I wrote those sequences. I
wanted to know what kind of things you would see and
run into. I also wanted to get a spatial sense of
America, which I didn't have. The weirdest thing about
traveling in America is that if you travel by plane,
and I have for all my book tours, I've probably been
to more American cities than the most Americans. But
it’s like being in a transporter beam. You show up
at an airport, you get into a plane, you wait a period
of time and you're at another airport just like the
one you left. You forget the distances involved, how
far away everything in America really is. I wanted to
put all that in the book. And meanwhile I spent ages
just getting books on America. I've been researching
mythology and folklore since I was six so that was the
easiest part. Except every now and then I would want
to put a certain god in and even the Internet couldn't
help.
DE: The library could often be a better choice.
NG: Well, a library is often a better choice. It's
astonishing given the nature of the Internet, with how
broad it is but at the same time how not deep it is.
We think of the Internet as something with an enormous
amount of information, it's only at the point where
you try to research Slavonic gods that you find its
limitations.
DE: Many artists start a project to figure out why
they started it. Is that what you did and did you
figure it out?
NG: Absolutely. I didn't start writing American
Gods because I knew what I thought about America.
I started the work to figure out what I thought about
America. I think I figured out a lot. For instance,
the view changes from where you are standing at least
from this position. There is stuff there to be
interpreted but there is also stuff that had a huge
effect on the nature of the plot and ended up changing
it. Initially I was really into the new gods versus
the old gods and as I wrote it I realized that when
you’re a new god in America its very easy to become
last month's new god.
DE: A lot of gods get put into prison in America.
NG: Right, it's very easy to fall from grace. I
tried to get that in as well.
DE: Mike Mignola recently did a Hellboy
novel that involved Norse mythology [Hellboy: Bones
of Giants written by Christopher Golden]. I asked
him if he felt that Norse mythology was treading upon
Marvel's Thor books. Mignola said that one of the
reasons he did it as a novel and not a comic book is
because he would have been drawing too much like one
of his main influences Jack Kirby or writing too much
like Stan Lee. Was that something that occurred to
you?
NG: Like so many others I got hooked on Norse
mythology through the Kirby/ Lee stuff. Having said
that, what they created is not very much like Norse
mythology. Every kid who gets bit by the mythology bug
through Mighty Thor thinks this is cool, and then they
go out and get a copy of Tales of the Norsemen
[by Roger Lancelyn Green. Puffin Books 1960] or The
Norse Myths [by Kevin Crossley-Holland]. Then they
sit down, read and find that Thor is this red-bearded
cuckolded idiot, this over muscled guy that everyone
is scared of but he's not very bright. Plus every
other character is much more interesting than him.
Particularly Odin.
DE: Was American Gods always meant to be a
novel?
NG: Oh, yes. I had rehearsed some elements of American
Gods while I was doing Sandman. I remember
there was one great speech I had written for Loki
during the final Sandman storyline, the Kindly
Ones. I had Loki speak of the new gods of freeway. It
stuck in my head because it was much too big and
weird.
But I really wanted to try doing things. I love
comics. If it's not my favorite medium then it's
probably my second favorite medium. My favorite is
probably audio plays. There was definitely a feeling
with American Gods that I wanted to do
something that was very much a life as a novel. I was
going to use some of the techniques that I figured out
for Sandman, like the short stories in the
novel, they allowed me to expand the scope of the
story I was telling. That was very much something I
was doing during Sandman. You can do a short
story set in another time period and it will give you
a much broader picture of what you are doing. I
figured that stealing from yourself doesn't count.
DE: There's a great quote by Julius Epstein,
co-author of the screenplay for Casablanca. He
had the perfect formula for all stories. "Act I,
get your guy up a tree," he explained. "Act
II, throw rocks at him. Act III, get your guy out of
the tree." It doesn't work any other way. Is
something like that why you started Shadow, the main
character of American Gods, from such a low
point?
NG: Yes, I guess in many ways it is. But also I
wanted explore someone who lost everything. Not only
are you up in the tree but you're naked, there's
thunder and lightning, you have nothing to eat, and
the friend who was going to join you in the tree just
died. It was how far down can we start. I wanted
someone who had nothing to lose. Looking back on it I
wanted to write someone who is essentially a vacuum,
and slowly fill it. To write someone who was not a
hero in any way but someone we would understand by
hanging around with them.
There is a quote from C.S. Lewis where he says,
"Alice in Wonderland works because Alice
is a normal little girl. To write about how odd things
happen to odd people would be too much." So I
took that to heart with American Gods a little.
Having abated that in Neverwhere and Stardust,
in some ways the books were lesser than they could
have been. Because Richard [Mayhew, Neverwhere's
protagonist] was this wonderful, cheerful twenty
something everyman and because Tristran Thorn [main
character in Stardust] was this Victorian
everyman. I thought, Shadow is not going to be
anybody's everyman, he's going to be very much
himself, this dark very ambivalent figure whose life
and history we're going to figure out as we go.
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