AVC: Anansi Boys follows the same idea—you're adding your own spin to characters who have been around for a very long time. Is there any way to explain what interests you about existing mythologies?
NG: God, no. It's like trying to explain one of those basic hungers, like food or sex or whatever. "Why do you feel this daily urge to place these comestibles in your mouth and chew and swallow?" "I just have to do it." Mythology is one of those things... "I can not do it," he said, sounding rather like a heroin addict explaining that he can go a week without if necessary. I could do stuff that isn't mythic, but I love mythic stuff. I love playing with gods, I love playing with myths. A lot of it has to do with that they're the basic places stories come from. They're the clay that you make the bricks out of. I just like digging around in the clay. I think the thing I was happiest about with Anansi Boys was, I got to do a story that was about stories, about storytelling, about the power of myths, and about how we create our own stories. I felt like I'd managed to do it in such a way where someone could read the entire book and never notice what it had been about—just enjoyed spending time with Fat Charlie and all these characters.
AVC: At the same time, on a macro level, it's an Anansi trickster story, a form of traditional tale, albeit in a more modern format. Do you consider the structures of fables when you're writing?
NG: It's more unconscious. Especially in Anansi Boys, it was incredibly frustrating to write, in a good way. I always say that if you're a novelist, the challenge is not writing what you think ought to happen, but trying in some way to write what did happen in a world that doesn't necessarily exist. Everything should feel right; nothing should ever feel strained or forced. In Anansi Boys, I was chugging along writing my book. Then I got to this point in the middle where suddenly I'm looking at one character who's in a lift, and I'm thinking, "If you go up, if you keep doing what I think you're going to do, then in two pages' time, you will get killed. And I'm not sure what that does to the book that I plotted." The thing that I thought I was writing certainly didn't have a murder in the middle. I wrote the next two pages, the murder happened, and I stopped writing the book for four months. I wanted to compost it. I tried to figure out what I was doing, and eventually I decided that I could still keep it a comedy. It was sort of figuring out that weird line between horror and comedy. I came to the conclusion that in comedy, everybody gets what they need, whereas in horror, everybody gets what they deserve. I decided that at the end of the day, I was going to give everybody what they needed.
AVC: You said earlier that you don't like working with outlines. Do your stories often go off in unexpected directions as a result?
NG: Sometimes. The process of writing Sandman was very interesting. I wound up having to do that weird Charles Dickens-y thing that nobody gets to do these days, except for people writing comics. Which is write a 2,000-page story in public. And writing it with no room for change—I couldn't go back to change things that had already come out. In a novel, you can always go back and make it look like you knew what you were doing all along before the thing goes out and gets published. If you need a gun in a desk drawer, and you realize that in Chapter 11, you can go back and put it in that desk drawer when you opened it in Chapter 2. So if I'm going to need the gun, I'm going to have to do it in some other way that's satisfying, or I don't have a gun.
AVC: So you didn't work very far ahead on Sandman?
NG: I knew the shape, but the shape was always... It's like hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles. You know more or less where you're going to be when, and you have a fair idea of where you're going to hit on the way, but you don't know everything that's going to happen. You don't know that the car may break down at some point and leave you stranded in St. Louis for a week, or whatever.
AVC: Do you have future plans for Sandman at the moment?
NG: I'm thinking about doing something for the 20th anniversary, which will come up in three or four years. The nice thing about Sandman was that it was a story and it got told, and it's weird... At the time that I was writing it, the idea that 20 years later, it would all still be in print, and be available, and be more popular than it ever was before, would've been completely incomprehensible. Now I'm in this sort of a strange world where they sell more and more every year. We're now in this lovely world in which graphic novels are hip and trendy, and cool libraries and bookstores make sure they have their graphic-novel sections. And if they do, they have Sandman books.
AVC: What's the current status of your film version of Death: The High Cost Of Living?
NG: I should be having a long budget phone call with New Line on Monday. It got to the point where we were looking at going into production this year, and then it became apparent—once we got to the point where everyone was willing for us to go into production this year, we would be busting out against my book-signing tour, which was kind of immovable. The idea of starting shooting, and not having the days to overrun, and having to try to finish the movie, then go on a book tour, and then go into post-production, seemed faintly lunatic. Everything's been put off to early this year, but we have a budget meeting next week. So with luck, it'll keep chugging along.
AVC: Do you have an actress in mind for Death?
NG: Yes. [Chuckles.]
AVC: And you don't want to talk about it?
NG: [Cheerfully.] Absolutely not.
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