Neil Gaiman on the Art of Storytelling: Part I

Techniques and tricks for finding ideas to develop into stories

My wife and I have been watching Neil Gaiman’s MasterClass on the art of storytelling. Gaiman wrote Coraline, which later became a movie. He’s also famous for the novel American Gods, which was adapted into a TV series, as well as for the comic book The Sandman.

Photo of Neil Gaiman by Ståle Grut/CC BY-SA

I make no claims to expertise when it comes to storytelling. In fact, I’m writing this particular Substack as a kind of note to myself on what I might want to return to in the future.

At present, I haven’t made it through all the episodes of the MasterClass, so what I include below comes from just the first ten episodes or so. If Neil goes off the rails later in the class, don’t blame me. Whereas he does offer some clichéd advice (like “trust yourself”), for the most part he offers some very substantial wisdom on the craft of storytelling.

Gaiman’s greatest strength as a teacher is his ability to pair craft advice with examples from his own life and work. You can talk about the importance of conflict in stories. You can explain the importance of asking what a character wants and needs at a theoretical level. But to hear Gaiman read from a story like The Graveyard Book and then illustrate these concepts in detail is very helpful.

Invention: Finding Ideas

If you have an appetite to tell a story, regardless of medium, the question of where to begin can be difficult. Gaiman gives a couple of tricks for finding ideas before developing them.

Perhaps one of the more interesting techniques he has is defamiliarizing familiar stories. The Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovksy once stated that the point of art was to make the stone stony again, to refresh perception. Relatedly, storytelling can begin (or perhaps must begin) with a familiar setup or tale. As I think I’ve said before, clichés matter for both rhetoric and poetics; they provide a starting point for the would-be communicator, and they allow us as communicators to both respect and subvert our audience’s expectations.

Gaiman gives the example of Snow White, a story that is well-known and the details of which most can simply take for granted. A prince kisses a princess while she’s asleep under a spell, etc. Yet, in Gaiman’s retelling, he invites us to reconsider Snow White as a vampire. Just look at her. She has charcoal black hair, blood red lips, and a pale face. Why is she asleep again? Casting Snow White as a vampire makes the evil stepmother the real hero of the story. In fact, the goal becomes to prevent the prince from waking her up.

Again, consider the famous story of Santa Claus. Gaiman’s “Nicholas Was” is a short story about a man damned to delivering presents to children for all eternity. It is a riff on the tale of Prometheus or Sisyphus, suffering some sort of eternal punishment for a crime committed. What did Nicholas do to deserve this fate worse than death?

Children’s books can be good. But they can also be notoriously boring. So the next time you’re forced (asked?) to sit through one, imagine how it could be otherwise.

Another game you can play to find ideas is to invent backstories for people or strangers in your life, when you’re commuting, when you’re in the grocery store, etc. I experimented with this myself the other day at our kids’ swim lessons. I imagined the swim instructor, a woman in her 60s, as also being a car thief in the evenings a la The Fast and the Furious. Strange, perhaps. But also oddly interesting, interesting enough for me to want to ask, “What else? What happened next?”

A third thing you can do is play the “what would happen if” game. Walker Percy does this in an extraordinary manner in Lost in the Cosmos. What would happen if a Confederate, an alien, and John Calvin showed up on the Phil Donahue show? What would happen if an astronaut and three women went out into space to investigate an extraterrestrial signal only to find out that it was a false alarm? And what would happen if they returned to earth only to find it destroyed? And only to find that there were just a few priests still alive, and one of them had to be pope?

Gaiman has a related idea to this “what would happen if” game, which he calls “confluence,” or the running together of two ideas. As an example, he asks the question: What would happen if a werewolf bit a chair? Would it come turn into a hairy chair and kill people whenever there was a full moon? Essentially, the “what would happen if” game is a thought experiment where you place familiar things in unfamiliar circumstances or vice-versa. Such decontextualization (or recontextualization) opens up new horizons and possibilities for story development.

Finally, with regard to invention and coming up with ideas, Gaiman gives the metaphor of the compost heap. You have within you scraps of inspiration from musicians, other artists, your own personal memories, etc. that can be used as fertilizer and fodder for stories. Your memories, especially, can help you to make up stories that appear real. As per Gaiman, a story is simply a credible lie that helps you convey the truth. All fiction, thus, is a type of extended metaphor and allegory, a means of perceiving one situation through (and “in terms of”) another. Fiction is thus a paradox insofar as it requires you to be an honest liar, someone who makes things up to draw people in to the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Perhaps above all, you want your audience to perceive you as sincere and honest, which requires a certain degree of vulnerability on your behalf. You have to be willing to write a miserable story. But even if you write one that’s not very good, you will have perhaps played around a bit, learned something, and even had some fun.

Thanks for reading, whomever you are. Next week I will offer more commentary on Neil Gaiman’s storytelling MasterClass. If you think others might find this interesting or thought-provoking, why not share it with them? And also, why not leave a comment or a question or a provocation below? As a note: Eric and/or Marshall McLuhan talk about metaphor as a means of perceiving one situation through (and “in terms of”) another. Kenneth Burke also talks about metaphor as synonymous with “in terms of.”