I was, of course, wrong. I didn’t do that at all. What I did instead was, in retrospect, much more interesting: I created an America that was entirely imaginary, in which Sandman could take place. A delirious, unlikely place out beyond the edge of the real.
And that satisfied me until, following my American wife and my desire for an Addams Family–style house, I came to live in America.
Slowly—and it took a while—I realized both that the America I’d been writing was wholly fictional, and that the real America, the one underneath the what-you-see-is-what-you-get surface, was much more interesting than the fictions.
The immigrant experience is, I suspect, a universal one (even if you are the kind if immigrant, like me, who holds on tightly, almost superstitiously, to his U.K. citizenship, long after his accent has become rather dodgy). On the one hand, there’s you, and on the other hand, there’s America. It’s bigger than you are. So you try and make sense of it. You try to figure it out—something which it resists. It’s big enough, and contains enough contradictions, that it is perfectly happy not to be figured out, and somewhere in there you realize that the very best you can hope for is to be like one of the blind men in the fable who each grasped an elephant by its trunk, its leg, its side, its tail, and who each decided that an elephant was like a snake, a tree, a wall, a rope. As a writer all I could do was to describe a small part of the whole.
And it was too big to see.
I didn’t really know what kind of book I wanted to write until, in the summer of 1998, I found myself spending forty-eight hours in Reykjavík, in Iceland, and in the middle of that stay I knew what my next book was. A bunch of fragments of plot, an unwieldy assortment of characters, and something faintly resembling a structure came together in my head. Maybe it was because I was far enough away from America to see it clearly, maybe it was just that its time had come. It would be a thriller, and a murder mystery, and a romance, and a road trip. It would be about the immigrant experience, about what people believed in when they came to America. And about what happened to the things that they believed. I’m English. I like being English. I’ve kept my passport. I’ve as much of my accent as I could. And I’d lived in the U.S. for almost nine years. Long enough to know that everything I’d learned about it from the movies was wrong.
I wanted to write about myths. I wanted to write about America as a mythic place.
I went back to my hotel room and wrote a three-page-long rough outline—more of a loose description of the book I had in my head. I tried calling it Magic America (after the Blur song), and that didn’t seem right. I tried calling it King of America (after the Elvis Costello album) and that didn’t seem right either. So I wrote American Gods (not after anything) at the top of the first page of the outline, and figured I’d come up with a better title sooner or later.
I’d not started writing the novel by the time the publisher sent me the cover. It showed a road and a lightning bolt and, in large letters, a title: American Gods. There seemed no point in fighting it—to be honest, I was starting to like it—and I started to write.
It’s a big book, but then America’s a big country, and trying to fit it into a book was hard enough.
American Gods is the story of a man called Shadow, and the job he is offered when he gets out of prison. It is the story of a road trip. It tells the story of a small Midwestern town, and the disappearances that occur there every winter. I discovered, as I wrote it, why roadside attractions are the most sacred places in America. I learned a lot about gods, and about secret organizations, and wars. I discovered many other strange byways and moments. Some of them delighted me. A few scared me. Some of them amazed me.
When it was almost done, when all that remained was to pull together all the diverse strands, I left the country again, holed up in a huge, cold, old house in Ireland, and typed all that was left to type, shivering, beside a peat fire.
And then the book was done, and I stopped. Looking back on it, it wasn’t really that I’d dared, rather that I had no choice.
This is an expanded version of the essay written for the Borders website in March 2001, and which appears on neilgaiman.
OTHER BOOKS BY NEIL GAIMAN
FOR ADULTS
Stories (edited with Al Sarrantonio)
Fragile Things
Anansi Boys
American Gods
Stardust
Smoke and Mirrors
Neverwhere
Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett)
FOR ALL AGES
The Graveyard Book (with illustrations by Dave McKean)
M Is for Magic
Coraline (with illustrations by Dave McKean)
Odd and the Frost Giants (illustrated by Brett Helquist)
Crazy Hair (illustrated by Dave McKean)
Blueberry Girl (illustrated by Charles Vess)
The Dangerous Alphabet (illustrated by Chris Grimly)
The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (illustrated by Dave McKean)
The Wolves in the Walls (with illustrations by Dave McKean)
Every effort has been made to locate and contact the owners of material reproduced in this book. Omissions brought to our attention will be corrected in subsequent editions. We gratefully acknowledge the following for granting permission to use their material in this book:
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.