Neil Gaiman

The high road to Gaimanland, however, is “The Sandman,” a comic book series compiled into a 10-volume set of graphic novels (plus ancillary books). To people who care about comics, “The Sandman” needs no introduction; it is a beloved, seminal work that bridged the gap between the form’s pop mainstream and its experimental fringe.

But, to be blunt, I’m not someone who cares much about comics. Despite having read and admired works by Art Spiegelman, Los Bros Hernandez, Alan Moore, Chester Brown, Chris Ware and others, I still belong to that tribe of readers who’ll pick a thousand words over a picture any day. I never would have sought out “The Sandman” if I hadn’t already been enchanted by “Neverwhere,” “American Gods” (Gaiman’s 2001 novel for adults) or the sublime “Coraline,” the children’s book he published last year.

Since those last two titles both hit the New York Times bestseller list, I’m surely not the only reader to first fall in love with Gaiman’s imagination via the medium of plain prose. Somehow, though, he hasn’t quite registered on the public’s consciousness as decisively as he ought to. He is, as one journalist put it, the famous author you’ve never heard of, a baffling fact in the age that made J.K. Rowling its darling.

Perhaps it’s Gaiman’s comics background that puts some people off, a prejudice in danger of being cemented by the publication this month of “The Sandman: Endless Nights,” a collection of graphic stories based in the Sandman universe. But Gaiman’s ongoing fondness for the medium shouldn’t discourage comics-wary readers from exploring his work; instead, the appearance of “Endless Nights” should be the occasion for confirmed prose junkies — Gaiman aficionados and novices alike — to make a foray, however brief, off the reservation. Trust me, it’s well worth the trip.

To newcomers, “Endless Nights” on its own probably won’t convey the allure of the Sandman epic. It’s a lovely hardcover collection, illustrated by some major artists in the field, but it feels a bit like a commemorative souvenir program to the main event. DC Comics’ arty imprint, Vertigo, makes the whole Sandman series available in 10 paperbacks, and that’s the place for novices to dive in, with Volume 1, “Preludes and Nocturnes.” Stick with it through Volume 2, “The Doll’s House,” and you’ll be hooked.

Gaiman sees himself as part of the age-old profession of storytellers, but unlike a lot of the tiresome people who go around referring to themselves that way, he’s right. His fiction, in its various media (he also writes screen- and radio plays), induces that blissful, semi-hypnotic state most of us first experienced as children, when the power of a book seemed to erase the world around us, and when reading felt almost like a drug. Gaiman is interested in all the traditional forms of storytelling — legends, folk and fairy tales, myth — and not just in the stories themselves, but the ways they get told. Not surprisingly, the hero of the Sandman epic is Morpheus, the King of Dreams, who also presides over stories.

Gaiman certainly wasn’t the first comics writer to draw on ancient myths, but he could be the first to really understand how myths work, not just as motifs but as nodes of meaning that gain new layers as we attach new experiences to old stories. For example, the Egyptian god Osiris, the Norse god Balder, Jesus and John F. Kennedy are all very different figures and yet — in some fundamental way having to do with how we understand them — also the same. As the British writer C.S. Lewis (a major influence on Gaiman) pointed out, a myth is a story that can be told and retold in very different ways and yet remain essentially intact. There is no original or correct version of the Orpheus myth, just countless ways of revealing it, and even people who haven’t heard the traditional Greek version recognize it as something powerful when they meet it in another form.

Gaiman’s fiction is teeming with gods — most memorably the has-been deities eking out a meager living in the contemporary United States of “American Gods” — but Dream isn’t one of them. He’s more of an embodied principle of existence, one of seven siblings, the Endless, who also include Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Destruction and Delirium. There’s a real danger of ludicrous grandiosity in this premise, but Gaiman counterbalances all the metaphysics with a quotidian funkiness. On one page the Sandman may be facing off against Lucifer in Hell, but soon enough he’ll be sulking at a family gathering or bickering with Desire, who thinks he’s a humorless stuffed shirt.

Perhaps Gaiman’s most popular creation is Dream’s older sister, Death, an adorable, ankh-wearing punkette who kindly leads the newly deceased to their fate. Death is the sensible, peace-making, considerate sibling among the Endless, and when she first appeared in the comic’s eighth issue, she became an instant hit. As Dream sits glumly in lower Manhattan’s Washington Square Park (he’s in the doldrums after completing a major quest), she shows up to give him a good talking-to, accusing him of being “the stupidest, most self-centered, appallingest excuse for an anthropomorphic personification on this or any other plane.”

“The Sandman” keeps doing this, balancing the callow satisfactions of conventional genres with a playful argument against the kind of personality that makes someone obsess about such things to begin with. At its most limited, pop culture directed at men is a shabby little tango between fantasies of mastery and self-pity (“Only I can save the world, and yet I can never truly be part of it” — that sort of thing). Gaiman can play that tune, but he keeps introducing new and more challenging partners and steps.

Morpheus, for example, is the epitome of late-adolescent Goth cool, a gaunt, chalk-skinned, ebony-haired hipster who can brood with the best of them — plus he has superpowers! Yet the entire Sandman epic is also an elucidation of Morpheus’ emotional and personal failures (romantic as well as familial), culminating in his recognition of his own isolation and obsolescence. Similarly, “Neverwhere” is partly an old-fashioned boy’s adventure story, but the hero is neither especially brave nor notably gifted, just an ordinary fellow whose only sterling quality is kindness. Gaiman the author points his readers toward a richer, more grown-up way of understanding life and stories than that offered by tortured superheroes, alienated loners or strapping champions. Some say that Morpheus looks a bit like his creator, but Gaiman’s secret twin is Death, a witty, charming escort to the next stage of our existence.

For Gaiman, one of the chief uses of enchantment is not to escape from the real world, but to illuminate it. In “Neverwhere,” when Richard, by association with its scruffy denizens, joins the world of London Below, he also becomes, if not quite invisible, at least profoundly unmemorable and radically unremarkable to the inhabitants of London Above. That’s only a slight tweak on the actual world: I walked past a homeless man yesterday who held up a sign reading “Everyone ignores me.” He lives in New York Below.

Much of what passes as fantastic literature these days doesn’t maintain any fertile relationship with the real. Even the classic works of British fantasy that Gaiman uses as touchstones, the novels of Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton, to name a few, feel insular, like retreats from the world into an imaginary realm untouched by modernity. Gaiman, on the other hand, is ever eager to expand his compass and take in everything, the new mixing exuberantly with the old. “The Sandman” contains everything from vamps on old-time horror comics, to ersatz (but convincing) African folk tales to references to the devastation of the first Gulf War to snapshots of urban life featuring single mothers, transvestites and a touchingly devoted pair of lesbian lovers. In “Neverwhere,” London’s Tube becomes as mysterious, romantic and perilous as Olde England’s Forest of Arden.

Nevertheless, Gaiman has never lost touch with the spellbinding voice of classic British fantasy. He reproduces it perfectly in “Coraline,” his most polished piece of writing yet, as far as prose is concerned; every sentence is distilled to its essence. Gaiman, like Lewis, builds his narratives from images; even when the connective tissue doesn’t hold up (as it sometimes doesn’t in “American Gods” and mostly doesn’t in the fairytale-like novel “Stardust”), the individual pictures retain their potency.

In “Coraline,” a little girl wanders through a magical door in her family’s sitting room to discover a replica of her house on the other side, presided over by her “other mother,” a sinister and overly affectionate person with shiny black buttons instead of eyes. The other mother holds her captive, demanding that Coraline acquire her own pair of buttons. It’s a very, very creepy book, but also funny and, despite its weirdness, true to life about the way certain adults treat children. A friendly if sarcastic cat explains the other mother’s motivations to Coraline: “She wants something to love, I think … Something that isn’t her. She might want something to eat as well. It’s hard to tell with things like her.”

“American Gods,” Gaiman’s most recent major novel, shows how this generous and resourceful writer keeps enlarging his scope. The task he sets for himself — building a fantastic epic on a core of mythic material that feels authentically American — is a tough one. The revelation in the novel’s climax doesn’t ring entirely true, but the method Gaiman uses to get there does.

The battered hero of classic hardboiled detective fiction is, in a way, the Hercules of our time. Gaiman sends a man like that, ex-con Shadow Moon, into noir’s typically skanky situations, and sets him up for the usual rounds of beatings and betrayals. But Shadow’s companions and adversaries in these adventures are a multicultural potluck of defunct gods and demons, withering away due to lack of worshippers, hustling and grifting in order to get by while they plot their big comeback. Not only did Gaiman learn enough about an obscure dualistic Slavic deity to slip him into the novel, he also researched enough about prison life to make Shadow’s memories of that seem convincing as well.

There’s a story in one of the early Sandman comics in which a writer who has angered Morpheus is cursed by the Dream King with a surplus of ideas. He goes staggering through the streets of London, plagued by scenarios that come so fast he can’t set them down. It’s a pop-Borges cavalcade: “A city in which the streets are paved with time … a were-goldfish … a man who inherits a library card to the Library of Alexandria.” You get the impression this guy could be yet another aspect of Gaiman, whose imagination is forever making odd and fruitful leaps to parts previously unknown, leaps that somehow always bring him back home again. In Gaiman’s case, though, this onslaught is no curse. For those of us lucky enough to have discovered him, it’s a blessing.

The Faulkner acquisition is only the latest prize in a literary shopping spree for HBO and other television companies. The premium cable network is currently at work on adaptations of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad, and Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods,” in addition to its ongoing series based on the novels of George R.R. Martin (“Game of Thrones”) and Charlaine Harris (“True Blood”). Fox will be turning Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” into an hour-long dramatic series, as well, and Salman Rushdie is at work on an original show, “Next People,” for Showtime. The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it’s about time.

Television and the novel, while not exactly soul mates, have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film. Yet any novelist can testify that the second most common question he or she hears from readers (after “Where do you get your ideas?”) is “Who would you like to see playing [main character] in the movie?” Fantasizing about the film version of a favorite book seems to be very common, but you have to wonder why. Rarely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film, although when they are — as with the Harry Potter, “Twilight” and “The Lord of the Rings” franchises — popular enthusiasm can certainly be enormous.

Far more often, however, the results are disappointing — let the recent adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” stand as a case in point. Much of a novel has to be cut to fit a 90- to 120-minute dramatization, and this can mean more than just the loss of supporting characters or scenes. Most movies conform to a three-act structure (some screenwriters will insist that it’s actually a four-act structure), a form with a proven ability to hold audiences’ interest through a single viewing. Novels, meant to be read over multiple sittings, have more freedom. Trimming a novel like “Bleak House” to fit the three-act format alters the fundamental shape of the work, often subtracting from the novel the very roominess and complication that made you love it in the first place.

A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world. Furthermore, while theatrical film is a medium in which the director reigns, in television, as Rushdie told the Observer, “the writer is the primary creative artist. You have control in a way that you never have in the cinema. ‘The Sopranos’ was David Chase, ‘The West Wing’ was Aaron Sorkin.” Although television is, like film, a photographic medium, it need not rely as heavily on visual storytelling or gifted but capricious actors to fill in its nuances. Buffy Summers is a memorable character, replete with layers and contradictions, largely because she was written that way — as the undistinguished post-”Buffy” career of actress Sarah Michelle Gellar illustrates.

Nevertheless, apart from a brief miniseries boom in the 1970s and ’80s (“Rich Man, Poor Man,” “Shogun”), the mass-market imperatives of broadcast television kept it and the novel apart until the advent of cable. Literary people wrote off TV as a “vast wasteland” — a fair cop, it must be said — with occasional oases like “Twin Peaks,” the groundbreaking serial drama created by the eccentric film auteur David Lynch. After one thrilling season, Lynch’s relationship with ABC went south, and so did the show, cementing the notion that the medium itself (rather than the broadcast network system) militated against quality and originality.

A network like HBO, however, doesn’t need to attract large audiences; rather, it aims to persuade a much smaller population of subscribers that it’s worth paying a little extra every month to see better programming. With “The Sopranos,” HBO ushered in the idea that serialized drama can aspire to an excellence (particularly in writing and performance) comparable to that of film, and with “The Wire,” critics got in the habit of comparing such series to novels. The fact that established crime novelists like Richard Price and George Pelecanos wrote for “The Wire” surely fostered that notion. Other cable networks expanded the possibilities of the genre with such serial dramas as “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men.”

The influence moves both ways; Egan has said that “The Sopranos” was one inspiration for “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” The novelist Mark Danielewski (“House of Leaves”) recently signed a $1 million contract with Pantheon Books for a serial novel, “The Familiar,” to be published in 27 volumes, with a new book appearing at four-month intervals. Although this naturally reminded quite a few observers of Charles Dickens, who published his novels in serialized installments, when interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, Danielewski said that he’s thinking in terms of five-book “seasons,” citing the television model.

A peculiar twist to these developments is that a novel that must be cut to accommodate a movie-length running time may still be too short to fill a 13-hour season and beyond. Some novelists are now writing additional material based on their supposedly finished works. Gaiman, who recently published an “author’s cut” (with 12,000 more words) of “American Gods” on the 10th anniversary of that novel’s publication, told an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that he’s writing a sequel and two spinoff stories, as well as at least two episodes of the series itself.

“American Gods” — which recounts the adventures of assorted deposed pagan deities reduced to working regular jobs in the New World — lends itself well to such add-ons. (Gaiman’s 2005 novel, “Anansi Boys,” is an “American Gods” satellite.) The boundaries of a novel like “The Corrections,” by contrast, seem less porous, yet Franzen recently told New York magazine that he was plumping up “The Corrections” for the HBO adaptation: “Minor characters in the book are becoming very substantial characters in the show, too. It’s fun. I’m coming back to the book as a stranger, essentially 12 years after I wrote it, and I’m filling in blanks that were deliberately blanks, but I’m having the pleasure of filling them in.”

No doubt the print edition of “The Corrections” will remain the canonical version of the novel, but if the additional material is written by Franzen himself, albeit for television, it will have a status that someone else’s adaptation will not. Are the previously undescribed histories of the fictional characters in “The Corrections” actually part of “The Corrections,” even if they don’t appear in the text version of the novel? Will the series end where the book does, or will the narrative continue? If so, for how long, and who will write it?

A definitive ending is one thing that serialized dramas don’t promise. (The agonies of “Deadwood” fans denied such an ending are legendary.) When it comes to literary adaptations, this may be a miscalculation. America’s top-drawer television producers ought to take note of their British counterparts and apply their newly elevated standards to reviving the fine art of the miniseries. After all, even Dickens knew when to call it a day.

Further reading

The New York Times on David Milch’s planned adaptations of William Faulkner works for HBO

Jonathan Franzen discusses the forthcoming adaptation of “The Corrections” with New York magazine

The Los Angeles Times on Mark Z. Danielewski’s projected serial novel, “The Familiar”

Neil Gaiman describes his work on the HBO series “American Gods” at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as reported by the Guardian newspaper

Jennifer Egan tells the New York Times about the forthcoming HBO adaptation of “A Visit From the Goon Squad”

Recently, Gaiman kicked his advocacy up a notch by agreeing to hand-select and produce a line of audiobooks in partnership with the audio download retailer Audible.com. Neil Gaiman Presents released its first five titles last month; they include the novel “Land of Laughs” by Jonathan Carroll and “You Must Go and Win” by musician-turned-essayist Aline Simone. Future releases will include books by the early 20th-century American author James Branch Cabell (the target of a once-notorious censorship suit for writing an “offensive, lewd, lascivious and indecent book”) and “Dimension of Miracles” by Robert Sheckley, a work Gaiman likens to “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and which will be narrated by television personality John Hodgman.

Most omnivorous audiobook consumers have been frustrated by the relatively limited selection of available books (especially if you’re looking for something besides best sellers). Neil Gaiman Presents is part of a larger enterprise by Audible.com, called ACX (for Audiobook Creation Exchange). It aims to bring new titles to the public by hosting a service through which authors (and other rights holders) can connect with professional narrators.

“The short-term reason I got involved with ACX,” Gaiman told me, “is that there are books I love that I want to bring to the world. The long-term reason I signed up is because I want to live in a world where every book that exists has a great audiobook.” I telephoned him to find out more about Neil Gaiman Presents and why it’s been so difficult to get a wider variety of audiobooks to the ears of America’s readers.

Have long have you been an audiobook fan?

I remember at age 9 or 10 staying up to catch the BBC classic serial of “Mansfield Park” on Radio 4. They’d do 15 minutes a night. I just thought it was a great story. I had no idea who Jane Austen was.

I got my second wind when CDs started coming out. Before that, the packaging had made things so unwieldy. You’d have these huge things with cassettes in. The first giant CD thing I bought was Stephen King’s “Bag of Bones,” read by Stephen King, which was a 20-CD set. The problem with that was that they were $60 and you’d only play them once.

In 2003, I was told by an audiobook publisher I’d met that they probably had at most a year until the audiobook division of this publisher would be closed down for good. The economics didn’t work. The tragedy was that the packaging was what was killing them. Then I saw my first iPod and thought: You know, I don’t think it’s as dead as they think.

Did you always read your own work?

As long as they would let me. The ones I didn’t read, I didn’t read for a reason. I didn’t do “American Gods” because — as was demonstrated on “The Simpsons” last night — you don’t want to ask me to do even a bad American accent. You do not want a story that is meant to feel absolutely accurate in terms of place to have an English person doing his idea of an American accent.

Then there’s “Anansi Boys,” my favorite audiobook of all of my stuff, partly because I imagined [actor] Lenny Henry reading it while I was writing it. And partly because there is no way on God’s green earth that I’m going to do an audiobook that has four little old Jamaican ladies in it. I still tell people that if they like “Anansi Boys,” the real version of it is Lenny reading it. That’s the author’s preferred text.

How did Neil Gaiman Presents come about?

Basically, what Don Katz [CEO and founder of Audible.com] said to me was, “How would you like your own record label? We need a Judas goat” — actually, he didn’t say Judas goat; I did, because it’s a fun word — to lead these other authors and show them it’s not scary. And not just authors. Agents and publishers also have these rights and could be doing this.

Why is there so much hesitation?

For me, the tragedy of audiobooks is that the physical limitations and impossibilities of putting out complete novels as audiobooks in the days of LPs and then pretty much in the days of cassettes, meant that the costs and the odds were always against you. Most books aren’t out as audiobooks. If you like a book, it’s probably not been done as an audiobook.

Publishers would take audio rights but then never do anything with them. Don wants to circumvent the process. That process is that you persuade your publisher to do an audiobook and then you have no control over who gets cast, or who reads it. You have no quality control over pronunciation or goofs or anything like that. And then your publisher brings it out and then your publisher remainders it.

That is the problem that ACX was created to solve — and for me it’s also the problem that it’s highlighting. I’m hitting it more and more. All I know is that there could be lots and lots of audiobooks out there that aren’t. For years it didn’t matter that the rights were held by people because nobody could do anything anyway. But we’re not in that world anymore.

Did you start out with a list of titles you’d always wanted to see adapted? I know I have quite a few.

I had authors and titles. There’s an amazing number of them where we’re still looking for the rights. With some, I contacted the author and the author said, “Sure,” but we’re still down the rights rabbit hole with agents and publishers trying to figure it out. The first five books that have come out on Neil Gaiman Presents have simply been the first five books that were ready. I went out to a huge bunch of authors of books I liked to see what we could see.

And you found all the narrators through the ACX exchange?

In one case, I cheated and leaned on a friend. That was for “Dimension of Miracles.” It’s such a great book. There is no one who likes “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” or who cares about what Douglas Adams did who wouldn’t enjoy it, but I needed a voice for it that is as iconic as Peter Jones’ or Stephen Fry’s — a voice that would have that kind of quality, but also be American.

The book begins on Madison Avenue in the early ’60s. I thought: Who could give me that iconic voice, with the urbane, American quality it has to have, and who can deadpan a joke as well as Stephen Fry or Peter Jones? So, naturally, I thought: Hodgman. And I leaned on him, which consisted of saying, “Will you do this?” He had never read the book, so was astonished by it, loved it and immediately understood why I’d asked.

Did you have a concept for the collection as a whole?

It’s very much being defined by “books I like.” The plus side of Neil Gaiman Presents is that it’s all stuff I like. The downside of Neil Gaiman Presents is that you do not have to like it too. I can’t imagine that anybody completely shares my tastes in anything. I’d love it if people tried new things.

I love the fact that I’m bringing Jonathan Carroll to wider audience who might not otherwise know his work. I’ve loved Jonathan Carroll’s work for 20-something years. But I don’t expect that everyone who likes Jonathan Carroll’s “Land of Laughs” is also going to like M. John Harrison’s “Light,” a challenging, weird work that in many ways defines what’s most interesting about early 21st-century science fiction. It’s a challenging novel and it’s not about falling in love with characters.

I imagine there are some books that will never be adapted for audiobook — like Tom Phillips’ “Humument.” But apart from that, I’d like to think there will come a day when pretty much anything that was published in prose or in poetry you can listen to.

There are those who would say that that’s not “really” reading.

I remember reading a piece by Harold Bloom where he explained that audiobooks were not books because the proper experience goes in through the eyes. The reading experience is only an ocular experience, not an auditory one. That had me sitting there thinking about old John Milton, who obviously was not a proper writer at all because he couldn’t even see what he was writing. He was dictating it to his daughters who wrote it down. What kind of a faux poet was he?

What I realize when I’m doing an audiobook is that I actually have a much closer relationship to the text than I do when I’m reading. There’s no temptation to skim. You often notice things that the author in all probability thought he or she had buried brilliantly in the text, sitting there in plain sight. I first noticed this phenomenon when I was reading Diana Wynne Jones’ books to my daughter. I normally get to the end of a Diana Wynne Jones book and think, “What just happened?” and have to flip back to figure it all out. We weren’t getting that because I was reading it aloud and everything was there for you.

Audiobooks have certainly become a lot more popular of late.

People are really busy. One of the joys for me of audiobooks is that you can do them while doing something else. I no longer have commuting time anymore. The evil nature of email is such that simple downtime tends to fill up with people needing things from me. Writing time is at a premium. I’m no longer doing many long drives.

So my reading time becomes my exercising time. I lost 30 pounds on “Bleak House” earlier this year. That was awesome.

Can you talk a bit about the importance of the right narrator, and how much that person can add to or subtract from the audiobook experience?

I remember once talking to a best selling author about audiobooks. He’d written a book that was narrated by a 20-something black male and the audiobook was read by a 50-something white female. He had no say in this and after listening to it for five minutes he stopped, feeling physically sick.

In some cases, when the author is alive and available, I cede that choice to the author. I become the production entity and I’ll cast a deciding vote if the author says it’s between three narrators he or she likes equally. If the author’s alive, I want the author happy. That’s the most important bit.

Narrators have a huge part to play. With one of the authors we’re doing for Neil Gaiman Presents, James Branch Cabell, the first round of auditions were all from actors who clearly thought, “This is a work of fantasy and there’s magic in it, therefore I have to do this in English accents and everything has to be portentous.” I listened to seven people in a row kill every joke on the page by not noticing it was there.

It was the only case in which I had to write a little essay, saying “Look, this is a cultured Southern gentleman making jokes, occasionally quite filthy ones, with a completely straight face and with gentle irony.” I listened to another four or five auditions after that and the one that made me say, “You!” was the first time it was funny. I was laughing at the jokes. Finally I could hear them.

It’s very weird. You’re listening to five people read, and one of them will make you want to hear what happens next, will make you want to keep going.

Even though it’s the exact same words. It’s remarkable how much the reader contributes.

I had something like this deciding between 17 different versions of “Bleak House.”

Which one did you end up picking?

I went with Hugh Dickson. It was the BBC version. Huge thumbs up for Hugh Dickson!

The several dozen people who contributed to the story seemed to have fun, and perhaps that’s all that really matters. A Web 2.0 version of the old surrealist parlor game known as “exquisite corpse,” the twittered story was intended as a publicity stunt for BBC Audiobooks America’s line of “distinctive single-voiced and full-cast dramatized audiobooks,” and surely succeeded at that. Yet BBCAA intends to publish an audio-only version of the story, read by Gaiman himself, which makes this as apt an occasion as any to raise some questions about the creative potential of social networking. How is a good story invented? Is it yet another of those decision-based endeavors that can, according to the technotopian, freakonomical wisdom of our time, be performed better en masse than by the hopelessly antiquated individual? Can fiction be crowdsourced?

Although this is far from the first Twitter-generated story, Gaiman may be the ideal writer to preside over such an undertaking. No popular author better demonstrates how openly borrowed material can be transfigured by the force of a powerful imagination. His work combines elements of fairy tale, folklore, classic British children’s fiction, comics, horror and hard-boiled mystery. “Coraline” taps into the tradition of countless stories about bored children who find portals to other worlds, partakes of the evil-stepmother motif from the Brothers Grimm, structures it all into a save-your-parents quest reminiscent of “A Wrinkle in Time,” and so on, but Gaiman’s limpid style and heady imagery (those button eyes!) also make it indisputably original. The Newbery-medal-winning “The Graveyard Book” performs a similar alchemy by combining Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” with (improbably enough) the modern-day serial-killer thriller. This method makes Gaiman easy to imitate but — and here’s the rub — impossible to equal.

Gaiman’s kickoff sentence for the the BBCAA story is, “Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, ‘We don’t love you anymore.’” What follows, coaxed out of the Twitterverse, is a patchwork of extremely familiar motifs: malicious animated puppets, cuddly talking animal pals, an ominous castle, a sinister music box and spookily chanted rhymes — all tied to the obligatory chase after objects of obscure magical importance (otherwise known as plot coupons).

The twittered story (which as of this writing has no title) is Gaimanesque, yes, but only really in tone. Much of it is simply lifted — from “Coraline,” from “Alice in Wonderland,” from “The Wizard of Oz” and, above all, from the storehouse of shopworn Hollywood clichés — to form a patchwork that never resolves into anything more that just that, a hodgepodge of random stuff you’ve seen a zillion times before. The considerably muddled narrative describes the adventures of a girl who is either 1) kidnapped by her mirror reflection and trying to get home or 2) bravely attempting to rescue her little brother from an evil queen, or both (it keeps changing), but Sam’s exploits turned out to be far less compelling than the spectacle of their composition. Witnessing this story come together was an object lesson in the trials of collaboration and the limits of the wisdom of crowds.

Here’s how it worked: Although anyone could tweet a suggested next sentence, an editor at BBCAA selected which ones would be incorporated into the canonical version of the story. (Gaiman’s involvement in the creative phase of the operation seems minimal, which didn’t keep one participant from grandiosely claiming to be “writing an audiobook with Neil Gaiman” elsewhere on the Web.) Oddly enough, no one was bothered by this “gatekeeping” role, even when the BBCAA editor repeatedly rebuffed a campaign to give a minor character a bigger role in the plot. (He/she later gave in, though.) Anyone who took a good look at the chaotic selection of potential paths forward could see that somebody had to steer. Yet, even with a skipper, much of the time the tale didn’t seem to be sailing anywhere but in circles.

It’s tempting to attribute this meandering quality to the lack of a master plan. However, contrary to what people often think, improvisation is a vital part of the fiction-writing process. Remarkably few single-person authors outline their plots in advance of writing. Many, like the science-fiction novelist Samuel Delany, report that they start out with a few images and then see where their intuition leads them. “Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction,” Delaney once wrote, “it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader.”

Nor is the problem always a matter of too many people pulling the story in too many directions. True, if you’re only going to get one or two of your own sentences into the end product, you’re going to want them to be boffo. Consequently, most of the proposed passages represent bids to initiate a pivotal plot development (“Suddenly” has to be the most popular adverb deployed), attempts at high drama (“‘No!’ The Queen shrieked, ‘this will not be allowed! He is mine!’”) or articulations of some grand insight or theme (“You have to face her. She’s part of you”). Without much in the way of simple scene-setting or nuance, the story lacks texture, atmosphere and the variety in pacing and intensity that makes fiction dramatically effective. Instead, with the emotional volume knob stuck on high, the result is just one damn thing after another.

Still, most of the participants have a pretty firm sense of what the parameters of “a Neil Gaiman story” ought to be, and even the rejected tweets had more in common than you’d expect. There was the occasional marginally literate non sequitur — “‘Sir, do you know what is this egg?’ Asked Sam to the badger. ‘Of course, lady. This is an Catoblepas eggs.’” (Huh?) Yet even these fell within the same essential thematic register. There were few contributions that came entirely out of left field — no Mach-5 race cars, say, or sessions of Parliament.

Instead of being bombarded with too many ideas, what the twittered story really suffered from was too few. The handful of contributors who could come up with interesting motifs or turns of phrase had no idea how to constructively inject these into the whole, while the ones who were good at moving the plot forward tended to write exclusively in clichés. The dialogue is particularly lamentable, imported exclusively from the most formulaic of action movies: “‘Events are already in motion,’ the Prince said. ‘We must act’”; “Sam screamed ‘Nooooo’” “‘Sam! Listen to me!’ the Prince shouted, ‘You must go, we will hold them off, now RUN!’” I was thinking they’d managed to hit every overplayed note of the blockbuster pulp factory except for the venerable “Don’t die on me, damn it!” — when, sure enough, Sam sobs to the stricken Prince, “No, you can’t die!”

The same tired devices turned up over and over again. Any shift in the action always seemed to be accompanied by a mysterious glowing light, and the heroine was forever being “enveloped” or “engulfed” in this glow, if not in darkness or some other featureless miasma, as a way of getting her from one indistinct setting to another. At one point she even finds herself transported to a featureless, solid blue vacancy — much like the green-screen backdrops used to film connect-the-dots CGI blockbusters.

Despite an endless series of chase scenes, by the fourth day of tweeting with the projected 1,000th-tweet end point approaching, the plot wasn’t especially close to a resolution, and key elements remained unexplained. Who was the evil queen (besides a lift from “Coraline,” “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and “Snow White”), and what did she want? What promise had Sam broken? Who didn’t love her anymore? What exactly had happened to her brother? Why had she been sucked into the mirror? What was her reflection doing back in the real world? She’d collected two sidekicks (a badger and a wisecracking puppet, motivations unclear), as well as a green marble egg that intermittently pulsed (pulsing being almost as commonplace as glowing in this story), a gold key, a blue crystal rose, a music box with an evil talking doll inside and a confusing back story involving royal twins, a puppet maker, a magpie with a magic mirror and several doppelgängers, none of which added up to a coherent explanation of what was going on. A lot was happening, and it was all pretty boring.

Consensus began to break down, despite efforts among the contributors to sort out the loose ends while the BBCAA editor was off getting lunch or a little shut-eye. Occasionally a sentence made an obvious plea for answers (“It was that voice again. That voice that had haunted her the first time she reach the castle. And then she realized …”), but no one took up the challenge, leaving those ellipses sadly unfulfilled. It’s so much easier to just introduce another new development! As @Toujours_Diva, the group’s self-appointed heckler, wrote sarcastically, “You know what this story needs? A few more extraneous characters.” (Some of the collaborators interpreted that as a sincere suggestion.)

Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: “When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room.” Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you’ve got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason. Well past the purported 1,000-tweet limit, Sam was still reviewing the pieces of the puzzle confronting her and wailing, “I don’t know how to put it together!” She was not alone. At one point, BBCAA put up a poll asking participants where Sam should end up after yet another engulfment, and the response was evenly divided among several major alternatives. Then they tried literally smooshing all the characters and plot coupons together (because they’re all part of Sam!) in a climax that involved yet more glowing and pulsing. And it still wasn’t over. People were confused and, it seems, still dissatisfied. Time for another poll! Even the ol’ “It was all a dream/the ravings of a lunatic” finish was seriously contemplated.

At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, “Where do you get your ideas?” but the real question is “How do you make sense of your ideas?” Delany believed that good writers read so much that they “internalize” certain “literary models” and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story’s proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.

But gather together a hundred people who don’t really know how to do this and they’re still not going to be able to do it. Even if a handful among them actually do have some aptitude, their efforts will be sabotaged by the well-meaning but misguided inclinations of the rest of the group. Like any art, good fiction requires a combination of talents — eloquence, inventiveness, pragmatism, decisiveness and taste — rarely found in a single person, and a prevailing feeling for form that can only be located in a single person.

Most of us do recognize the real thing when we see it in action, but that’s another matter. As Delany put it, “While many — or even most — people can internalize a range of literary models strongly enough to recognize and enjoy them when they see them in … new works that they read, very few people internalize them to the extent that they can apply them to new material and use them to create. Lots of people want to. But not many people can.” Not many people, and certainly no crowds.