Imagine you’re sitting on a plane. Your seatmate just so happens to be a popular author, maybe even a bestseller.
Do you recognize them?
Probably not. The literary world isn’t known for its rock stars. Even uber successes like Stephen King, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts can move around discreetly in public. Unlike professional athletes or actors, they can coexist in the same universe as us “ordinary” folk.
Not Neil Gaiman, though. He’s the literary equivalent of a rock star. Known for his charming words and prolific output, Gaiman’s work spans everything from novels and comics, to children’s books and even an episode of Doctor Who. He packs huge auditoriums wherever he goes. All this becomes even more impressive when you consider that it’s happening today, when more of us are streaming videos or texting to pick up a book.
I wanted to know how Neil Gaiman did it. Here are some more insights into his creative process, assembled from a collection of interviews.
Inspiration Is for Amateurs
If you’ve just discovered Neil Gaiman, you’ll probably wonder where to start. Because his work spans different genres and mediums, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Couple that with his prolific social media output, the fact that he and his wife, Amanda Palmer, recently had a son, and constant globetrotting for signings and other events, and you’ll ask yourself: Does this man even sleep?
Perhaps the biggest lesson creatives can learn from Gaiman is his refusal to wait for inspiration to strike.
You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees. You write on the good days and you write on the lousy days. Like a shark, you have to keep moving forward or you die.1
Gaiman is refreshingly honest about his struggles here. On some days, the writing feels effortless. You churn out thousands of words before even realizing what is happening. Your fingers can’t move fast enough. This is the magical high – of being in flow and in touch with your creative subconscious – that we’re all chasing.
But not all days are created equal. Gaiman has his bad days too. His prescription? Write right through through. Keep working, even when uninspired. Focus on the sentence, shot, or brushstroke directly in front of us.
Writing is like building a wall. It’s a continual search for the word that will fit in the text, in your mind, on the page. Plot and character and metaphor and style, all these become secondary to the words. The wall-builder erects her wall one rock at a time until she reaches the far end of the field.2
In the end, it’s this consistent output that will be rewarded. That’s what allows Gaiman to look back on his work and surprise himself with just how much he has created. Whether he’s feeling inspired is besides the point. Gaiman is frank about his inability to notice differences in quality between the “good days” and the “bad days:”
The problem is now you are doing a reading and you cannot for the life of you remember which bits were the gifts of the gods and dripped from your fingers like magical words and which bits were the nightmare things you just barely created and got down on paper somehow! Which I consider most unfair. As a writer, you feel like one or the other should be better.3
This is a liberating lesson for all of us. How we’re feeling during creation doesn’t matter. By showing up consistently and putting our hearts into our work, we’ve already won.
You Will Despair at Some Point – And That’s Okay
Self doubt is a strange beast. Some of us struggle with it daily. Others can create happily for months – only to be hit by a vicious wave of doubt when the work is complete. It might even come years or decades after your art has reached an audience. No one is immune!
This is something that even masters of their craft like Neil Gaiman struggle with as well. In one article for NaNoWriMo, he tells a fascinating story about his experience writing Anansi Boys:
The last novel I wrote… when I got three-quarters of the way through I called my agent. I told her how stupid I felt writing something no-one would ever want to read, how thin the characters were, how pointless the plot… And instead of sympathising or agreeing with me, or blasting me forward with a wave of enthusiasm – or even arguing with me – she simply said, suspiciously cheerfully, ‘Oh, you’re at that part of the book are you?’
I was shocked. ‘You mean I’ve done this before?’
‘You don’t remember?’
‘Not really.’
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You do this every time you write a novel. But so do all my other clients.’4
It’s critical to point out here that this wasn’t coming from Gaiman at the beginning of his career. Anansi Boys was written years after Sandman, the series of graphic novels that catapulted Gaiman to super stardom. Fortunately, he could rely on an experienced agent to assure him that doubt – even downright despair – was just a stage of the creative process.
Although he didn’t realize it until his agent pointed it out, Gaiman struggles with this during every story he writes. The same goes for practically every other creative out there.
Simply expecting to despair at some point during the process – knowing that countless others have felt the same feelings you will and persevered to create masterpieces – offers comfort to continue. Doubt is like a speed bump on road to your final destination.
Believe in Your Art
Spend a few minutes watching one of Neil Gaiman’s speeches on YouTube, and he comes across as incredibly confident and articulate.5 The guy oozes British charm. There’s good reason why he often narrates his own audio books. Seriously – his narration of Neverwhere is like candy to my ears.
Gaiman’s confidence also translates to his art, crackling through every paragraph he writes. No matter how experimental the character or plot, he leaves an impression that he sincerely believes in his voice. Far be it for me to say for certain, but I suspect that a good deal of Gaiman’s confidence is innate, and the rest came from decades of difficult work.
Gaiman discusses the importance of believing in one’s art:
The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.6
He has fostered this confidence since early in his career, even admitting in an interview that he lied about the magazine editors he worked with to land freelance writing jobs:
I have to confess that I lied appallingly. I listed all the people I’d like to write for, figuring that there was no way this editor was going to ring up every other editor in the world and say, ‘Has this guy ever written for you?’ Although what is very, very peculiar is now, looking back at it, over the next five years I did write for absolutely everybody on my list.7
Not that Gaiman recommends this career move – especially in our transparent age of ubiquitous social media. But his story illustrates a certain assertiveness that he carries with him no matter what he writes.
Many authors stick to one medium. They specialize in one (or maybe two) genres. Gaiman, however, defies categorization. He shifts confidently between mediums and genres. Consider his novels, comic books, film credits, and even song lyrics. Like the cult favorite film director Wes Anderson, Gaiman follows his obsessions.
This confidence has helped turned “Neil Gaiman stories” into a genre of their own. He is in a position most artists would kill for – being able to create whatever type of story that inspires him right now – simply because he has always been willing to experiment and stretch himself in new mediums.
One has to wonder how many of our creative blocks are self-imposed. What would you create if you had Gaiman’s confidence? What story, painting, or film speaks to your soul?
Don’t Be Afraid to Go Old School with Your Creative Process
Like most prolific creatives, Gaiman is less interested in the latest gadgets than the work itself. It’s all about doing what’s necessary to produce new material consistently – even if your process is different from most.
Because Gaiman’s writing process isn’t sacred to him, he’s willing to tweak it to optimize creative output. One of the most significant discoveries in his career occurred in 1999, when he decided to write Stardust in longhand instead of a word processor:
I wanted to inject the kind of feeling to recreate the kind of sentence structure, emotion, the whole thing people had in, say, the 1920s. I wanted a slightly archaic voice. Most of all, I didn’t want to do what I know that I do when I’m working on a computer.8
Adopting an old school approach helped Gaiman stop tinkering with his first drafts while he was writing them: a major creative roadblock up until that point. It also forced him to think through every sentence more thoroughly, resulting in cleaner, sparser prose:
I was sparser. I would think my way through a sentence further, I would write less, in a good way. And when I typed it up, it became a very real second draft – things would vanish or change. I discovered that I enjoyed messing about with fountain pens. I even liked the scritchy noise the pen nib made on the paper.9
Gaiman has stuck to this method (first drafts in longhand, then typing it out on a word processor) ever since. There’s a lesson for us all here. Just because new technologies or tools are available, doesn’t necessarily mean we must use them. Experiment, track the results, and see what works best for you.
On the Genesis of Ideas
One of Gaiman’s perennial frustrations is trying to figure out a satisfactory response to the ever-popular audience question: Where do you get your ideas?
After decades of struggling, he finally decided to simply respond, “I make them up. Out of my head.”
This response leaves a lot of Gaiman fans disappointed. Perhaps they are expecting elaborate rituals, feverish brainstorming sessions, or some other creative magic.
Gaiman, however, shatters those myths. In his view, everyone is always coming up with ideas all the time. The difference is that creative people have trained their minds to notice when it happens.
It’s easy to assume that a great concept places you inches from the finish line in your next creative pursuit. But if you’ve created art for long, you know all too well that the execution is the important part. Here’s Gaiman’s take:
The ideas aren’t the hard bit. They’re a small component of the whole… And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you’re trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.10
One of his recommendations to capture ideas is to simply start thinking like a child would, by asking yourself questions like:
- “What if?” (you woke up with wings, your sister turned into a mouse, etc.)
- “If only…” (real life was like the Hollywood musicals, you could shrink yourself as small as a button, etc.)
- “I wonder…” (what she does when she’s alone, what my neighbor really thinks of me, etc.)
- “If this goes on…” (telephones are going to start talking to each other, automation will leave us all without jobs and nothing to do all day, etc.)
- “Wouldn’t it be interesting if…” (the world used to be ruled by cats, only a small percentage of the globe could speak, etc.)
To Gaiman, ideas come in three different types: images, people, or places. Once you have the kernel of a good one, you can water it by asking open-ended, what-if questions. This is how ideas become fully fleshed concepts, or in the author’s case, story plots.
- NaNoWriMo Pep Talk from Neil Gaiman
- NaNoWriMo Pep Talk from Neil Gaiman
- A Conversation With Neil Gaiman
- NaNoWriMo Pep Talk from Neil Gaiman
- Neil Gaiman 2012 Commencement Speech “Make Good Art“
- Neil Gaiman: 8 Good Writing Practices (Gotham Writers)
- A Conversation With Neil Gaiman
- A Conversation With Neil Gaiman
- This Is What A Handwritten Novel By Neil Gaiman Looks Like
- Where Do You Get Your Ideas?
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Neil Gaiman: Creativity Advice from a Genre-Bending Literary Rockstar – Corey Pemberton