I’m Neil Gaiman
and I’m beautiful Lake Kleifarvatn near Reykjavik in Iceland, because...
20 years ago I had an idea for a book called American Gods.
And it all started here
As a writer, I feel like I have an obligation to travel.
I want to be able to describe things well.
I want to know how the world works.
I want to feed the hopper in the back of my head,
and I want those memories there.
There is a kind of reality
to what those memories are, what they do, and what they then imbue the fantastic with.
American Gods is a novel about America
but it’s also a novel about immigrants and immigration.
It’s an immigrant novel because I was an immigrant.
I moved to America in 1992 and spent six or seven years looking at the place I was living,
and trying to understand it.
The way I that I decided to understand it best was to write about it.
Back in 1998 I had flown to Reykjavik.
I wandered around the city.
It was Sunday. Everything was closed.
But I found a tourist centre that was open and I wandered in
and looked down and saw a table top diorama.
This is the Icelandic Viking Museum,
and inside this building is something that may have inspired the beginning of American Gods.
So this is fascinating. It’s a diorama.
And what it shows is the original Norse settlement,
in Vinland. In the new land up in Newfoundland.
Looking at this, 19 years ago, and thinking, ‘All of these people,
the people who came across, I bet they brought their gods with them.’
And then I thought, ‘But when they left, did they leave their gods behind?’
And suddenly in my head, I had a novel.
It was a whole book. And I even had a working title.
I thought, ‘I’ll call it American Gods, until I come up with something better.’
But I never did.
