If you ask ten writers how they work, you’ll get ten different superstitions: lucky pens, sacred hours, elaborate outlines pinned to a wall. Neil Gaiman has plenty of his own rituals — the fountain pens, the notebooks, the fierce protection of his writing time — but what makes his process worth studying isn’t the paraphernalia. It’s the underlying design. Across four decades and several mediums, Gaiman has built a working method that treats writing less like architecture and more like gardening: you plant something you don’t fully understand yet, you trust that future-you will know what to do with it, and then, later, you prune hard.

That distinction — gardener versus architect — actually comes from George R.R. Martin, who coined it to describe two opposite writing temperaments: the architect plans the whole structure before laying a single brick, while the gardener plants something and discovers, as it grows, what it’s going to become. Gaiman has repeatedly credited Martin with the phrase and adopted it as his own self-description, saying he can be an architect when he has to but would much rather be a gardener. Borrowed or not, it’s the single best key to understanding everything else about how he works: how he starts a book, why he switched to handwriting in the 1990s, how he treats revision as the real creative act, and why his advice to other writers is so often blunt and unromantic. This post walks through that process in full: where it came from, how it changed as his career moved from journalism to comics to novels to television, and what any working writer can actually take from it.

A Process Built in Stages, Not Discovered All at Once

Gaiman’s method was assembled piece by piece, and each piece came from a different phase of his career.

He started as a journalist in England, and that apprenticeship left a permanent mark. Journalism forced him to produce copy in volume, meet deadlines without excuses, and write cleanly under pressure — he’s said he learned to write as though he were being paid by the word and wanted to earn out. That training shows up decades later in his instincts about professionalism: deadlines aren’t an annoyance imposed on the “real” creative work, they’re part of the job.

From the mid-1980s, comics became the medium where he most wanted to prove himself — he’s described novels as feeling like cultivated fields and comics as a jungle, territory where things hadn’t been tried yet. The Sandman, launched in 1989, became the proving ground. Gaiman has said that its early issues were partly him trying on other writers’ voices, genre by genre, until somewhere around issue eight he heard something that sounded unmistakably like himself. That’s a telling admission: for Gaiman, “voice” isn’t some pre-existing essence a writer discovers by looking inward. It’s a byproduct of writing enough material that imitation wears out and your own habits become audible.

The next hinge point came in the early 1990s, when he began drafting Stardust — and switched, for the first time, to writing novels longhand. He liked the change enough to keep it as permanent practice. This wasn’t nostalgia for fountain pens. It was a deliberate intervention in his own cognition: handwriting slowed him down enough to think through each sentence before committing to it, and it created a hard boundary between the act of drafting and the act of revising, since typing the handwritten pages into a computer became a substantive second draft rather than clerical transcription.

American Gods marks yet another shift. Gaiman has called it his first major work without a co-writer, and he’s described its growth — from a single opening image to a novel of nearly 200,000 words — as something closer to accretion than architecture. He began with a direction, not a map, and let the book get larger than he expected as he followed it.

By the time you reach Coraline, which advanced some nights by only about fifty words before bed, and The Graveyard Book, which gestated for decades and was finally cracked open by starting from the middle instead of chapter one, a pattern is visible: Gaiman’s process isn’t a fixed system he applies uniformly. It’s a set of habits that adapts to the book, the medium, and the writer he currently is. By his own account in more recent interviews, he no longer works the way he did in his twenties — he’s had to build routines suited to who he is now, not who he used to be.

The Sacred Block: Routine and the “Write or Do Nothing” Rule

Gaiman’s daily schedule has changed enormously over the decades, which is itself instructive. In his younger years he was a committed night writer, working after everything else was done, often fueled by coffee and cigarettes into the small hours. After moving to the United States in 1992 and quitting smoking the following year, that late-night mode stopped working for him, and he gradually became more of an afternoon writer — describing a typical novel-writing day as clearing email first, then writing from early afternoon into early evening.

What’s stayed constant isn’t the clock. It’s the principle behind the clock: protect the block absolutely, whatever hours it occupies. Gaiman has described making writing time genuinely sacred — putting the phone away, killing the Wi-Fi, and reducing the choice down to something almost punitive: you can write, or you can do nothing at all. Not read. Not make a call. Not do a puzzle. Just sit there, bored, until writing becomes the more interesting option.

It’s a strategy that doesn’t wait for inspiration or focus to show up on their own. It manufactures them, by making boredom the only alternative. That’s a very journalist’s-eye-view of creative discipline: don’t romanticize the muse, engineer the conditions.

Tools That Do More Than Sit on a Desk

Gaiman’s fountain pens and notebooks aren’t collector’s affectations — they do real procedural work. Since the mid-1990s he’s typically kept at least two pens loaded with different colored inks going during a novel, partly so a glance back at the page can tell him, at a glance, whether a given day was thin or productive. His notebook of choice has shifted over the years — large drawing books for Stardust and American Gods, Moleskines afterward, Leuchtturm notebooks once Moleskine’s paper quality changed, and leather-bound blank books picked up in Venice for The Graveyard Book.

The deeper reason for all this is the same one behind the move to longhand in general: the computer, in Gaiman’s account, tempts him to fiddle with a sentence endlessly or pad thin material because adding words costs nothing. Handwriting imposes friction, and that friction is the point. It forces more thinking before commitment. And because the first typed pass through a notebook draft functions as a genuine second draft, cutting material during that transcription feels like relief rather than loss — trimming a page and a half feels like saving yourself work, not destroying it. That’s a small but psychologically shrewd trick: it turns the normally painful act of cutting into something rewarding.

As for output, Gaiman resists the idea of one sacred daily word count. He’s cited wildly different numbers depending on context: 300 words a day is enough to finish a 90,000-word novel within a year; some nights on Coraline moved the book only fifty words forward; one hotel-bound push to finish Neverwhere produced six or seven thousand words in a single day. The lesson isn’t a target. It’s that Gaiman thinks in terms of momentum and continuity rather than quotas.

Starting With “Something,” Not With Everything

Ask Gaiman how he plots a novel and he’ll tell you, more or less, that he doesn’t — not in the sense of diagramming a full structure in advance. On the podcast Scriptnotes, he’s said flatly that he is “definitely not” an architectural plotter. He’s called himself a gardener: someone who plants things without fully knowing what they’ll become, trusting that a later version of himself will figure out how to use them.

That doesn’t mean pure improvisation, though. Gaiman almost always starts with something — a strong opening line, an image, a character, a governing metaphor, or a structural model borrowed from elsewhere. For The Graveyard Book, the opening image (a toddler happily circling a graveyard on a tricycle, and the thought that a child could be raised by the dead the way Mowgli was raised by wolves) came first; the eventual structural model — closer to Mary Poppins, a set of linked stories, than to The Jungle Book he’d first assumed — came later, once he understood what kind of book he was actually building. Sensory image first, formal solution later. That’s the pattern across most of his major work: he begins with enough to move, not enough to guarantee the destination.

There’s an apparent tension here worth naming directly: Gaiman also warns hard against polishing individual scenes to a shine before you understand the whole book — he calls that kind of premature perfectionism a trap. But he also describes typing and effectively second-drafting the first half of Anansi Boys while he was still first-drafting the second half. The way to reconcile these isn’t that he’s inconsistent; it’s that he distinguishes between light, recursive revision (fine, even necessary) and local perfectionism that stalls the larger draft (not fine). Keep moving forward on the whole is the rule. Don’t let one gleaming paragraph hold the rest of the book hostage.

Where Ideas Actually Come From

Gaiman has answered “where do you get your ideas?” so many times that he has a whole essay about it, and his answer is almost aggressively unglamorous: ideas come from daydreaming, boredom, noticing things, and asking “what if” persistently enough that a question turns into a story. There’s no lightning bolt in his account — just disciplined attention paid to ordinary curiosity.

Dreams and nightmares, though, do carry unusual weight in his process. While writing Sandman, he’s described waking from nightmares thrilled rather than shaken, jotting them down immediately, and filing them away as material. A dream about a dead wife, mentioned in his essay “All Books Have Genders,” sat dormant for years before it found a home in American Gods. The pattern is consistent: a dream fragment isn’t automatically a story. It’s a charged scrap that gets stored until it attaches itself to something larger.

What the record doesn’t show, interestingly, is a single tidy journaling system. Instead there’s a scatter of capture devices across the decades — notes typed into a battered Atari palmtop while working on American Gods, a notebook kept by the bed during Coraline, entire novels handwritten start to finish, nightmares scribbled down the moment he woke. It’s constant capture without a unifying formal method — closer to a habit of vigilance than a system.

Reading feeds the same well, on a much longer timescale. Gaiman has said that most of the research for his fiction happens long before the book itself exists: you read, you half-forget what you read, and it composts into something usable later. To understand any subject, he’s said, he tries to understand its folklore first — which is why the reference list behind American Gods sprawls across Norse mythology, African folklore, Native American belief, cryptids, and American regional history. That’s not research commissioned by an idea. It’s a standing ecological substrate an idea can grow out of.

Sometimes research gets physical. For the tenth-anniversary edition of American Gods, Gaiman described writing the opening chapter on a train from Chicago to San Diego, then driving back roads from Minneapolis to Florida along routes his protagonist Shadow might plausibly take — and getting back on the road whenever he got stuck. He’s said he tried never to write about a place he hadn’t actually been. Travel here isn’t a side errand to gather color; it functions simultaneously as research and as a cure for being stuck.

On being stuck at all, Gaiman is characteristically unsentimental. He doesn’t treat writer’s block as a mystery to be waited out — his “write or do nothing” rule is itself the primary defense against it, and his advice elsewhere boils down to: when things go wrong, make art anyway. In an earlier essay he’s even more stark about it, describing writing as sometimes simply you against the blank page, a fight the page occasionally wins. He doesn’t romanticize the difficulty. He expects it and answers it with ritual and discipline rather than inspiration.

Revision: “The Second Draft Is Where the Fun Is”

If there’s one idea that most defines Gaiman’s actual philosophy of craft, it’s this line from one of his journal posts: the second draft is where the fun is. The first draft, in his account, is an explosion — its only job is to exist, despite laziness, despite the nagging sense that it’s rubbish, despite everything. It’s private and it’s allowed to be a mess.

After a cooling-off period, his revision method gets specific: print the manuscript, read it as though it were written by someone else, and mark it up hard. That pass focuses on a handful of jobs — fixing what plainly failed, reinforcing the themes that are actually working, cutting whatever undermines them, and, eventually, recognizing that you could polish forever and choosing to stop instead. Titles, in his account, sometimes only reveal themselves at this stage too.

He’s selective about who sees a draft before an editor does. He’s said he doesn’t typically show unfinished work to family, but he does have a small group of trusted beta readers he turns to, usually for shorter work. A principle attributed to him and often repeated by other writers captures his approach to feedback well: when readers say something isn’t working, they’re usually right about that; when they tell you exactly how to fix it, they’re usually wrong. In other words, trust the diagnosis, distrust the prescribed cure.

Editors, in his telling, do more than catch typos — they function as genuine creative partners. He’s described doing a substantial American rewrite of Neverwhere after his U.S. editor pointed out that the original British text assumed too much familiarity with London geography. And he’s credited editor Jennifer Hershey with effectively reviving the unfinished manuscript of Coraline simply by asking what happened next — turning a stalled, dormant project into a live obligation.

Collaboration as Cognitive Extension

Gaiman’s long creative partnership with Terry Pratchett on Good Omens offers the clearest window into how he works with another writer. By his own account, the two of them traded messages, tried out jokes and scenes on each other, wrote the first draft quickly and then took much longer over the second. When Gaiman got stuck on how to pay off a plot thread involving the character Chernobog’s hammer in American Gods, it was a conversation with Pratchett — not a solitary breakthrough — that unlocked the solution. Collaboration, for Gaiman, isn’t just splitting up labor. It functions as an extension of his own thinking.

Non-professional readers matter too, in smaller but real ways. The Graveyard Book moved forward in part because his daughter Maddy, hearing the opening pages read aloud, asked what happened next. That’s not a workshop critique, but it’s a fast, reliable test of whether tone and momentum are actually working — arguably faster than any amount of theorizing about craft.

Comics and television bend his collaborative instincts in different directions. He’s described a comics script as functioning like an informal letter to the artist — written to get them “complicit” in the same imaginative project, since the artist is simultaneously camera operator, cinematographer, actor, and production designer all at once. Writing comics, he’s said, also trained him to overdescribe when he first moved into prose, because comics scripts require spelling everything out for an artist; he had to consciously learn to pull back and describe only the telling detail, leaving room for a reader to do part of the imagining.

Television changed something more specific: his tolerance for creative control. He’s generally been willing to let adaptations of his novels take their own liberties, on the reasoning that the book already exists as he wrote it. But with the Good Omens television adaptation, carried out in part as a promise to the late Terry Pratchett, he became far less willing to compromise on tone. The shift wasn’t about the medium itself so much as a personal sense of stewardship over work he felt responsible for protecting.

Style: Three Lineages Meeting on the Page

Gaiman’s prose carries the fingerprints of three very different apprenticeships. Journalism gave him economy and velocity — a habitual instinct to write as though every word costs something. Comics gave him pacing and a cinematic sense of the reveal, but also, paradoxically, an early tendency toward overwriting in prose that he had to train out of himself, learning to trust a single well-chosen detail rather than spelling out a whole scene. And myth gave him his recurring subject matter and, more importantly, a working theory of what myth is for: old story-material as compost, folklore as a way of understanding anything, fantasy as a mirror that lets readers see the ordinary world from an unfamiliar angle.

Voice, in Gaiman’s own account, isn’t something you find by searching inward — it’s something that emerges from writing in volume until imitation of other writers wears thin and your own habits start to surface on their own. He’s pointed to a specific moment, issue eight of Sandman, as when he first heard something in his own writing that sounded like himself rather than a genre he was borrowing.

He’s also unusually attentive to how prose sounds rather than just how it reads. In a journal post about listening to writers read their own work aloud, he advises paying attention to where a good reader’s voice rises or falls, and what makes a listener speed up or slow down — treating prose as something closer to sounded rhythm than static arrangement on a page.

What Working Writers Can Actually Take From This

None of this is an argument for buying fountain pens or building a writing cabin. The specific tools are incidental; the underlying design choices are the transferable part.

Build friction into your drafting, on purpose. Whatever the mechanism — handwriting, a different app, a deliberate change of medium between draft and revision — separating the act of composing from the act of tinkering protects a first draft from being edited to death before it’s even finished.

Protect boredom instead of waiting for focus. The “write or do nothing” rule works because it removes every escape hatch. Attention, in this model, is something you structure, not something you wait around for.

Start with enough, not everything. An image, a voice, a single strong line, or a borrowed structural model is sufficient to begin. A complete blueprint is optional, and for Gaiman, usually absent.

Finish before you polish. Local perfectionism — endlessly shining one scene before you know whether the whole book works — is one of the few things Gaiman consistently warns against. Move forward on the whole first.

Let research run on two clocks. Long, unstructured reading composts for years in the background; sharp, targeted research — a trip, a specific book, a fact-check — happens only when the story demands precision.

Expect voice to be earned, not discovered. It shows up after volume and risk, not before. If your early work sounds like someone else, that’s not a failure of authenticity — by Gaiman’s own account, it’s simply what the early stage of finding a voice looks like.

Gaiman’s career doesn’t offer one fixed method so much as a demonstration of what it looks like to keep redesigning your process as the medium, the decade, and the writer you’ve become all change under you. What stays constant isn’t the schedule or the pen. It’s the underlying commitment: reduce the noise, keep the draft moving, trust what accumulates, revise without mercy, and make the page worth turning.