And once I had a name, I was ready to begin.

I wrote chapter 1 around December 1998. I was still trying to write it in the first person, and it wasn’t comfortable with that. Shadow was too damn private a person, and he didn’t let much out, which is hard enough in a third-person narrative and really hard in a first-person narrative. I began chapter 2 in June 1999, on the train home from the San Diego comics convention. (It’s a three-day train journey. You can get a lot of writing done there.) The book had begun. I wasn’t sure what I was going to call it, but then the publishers started sending me mock-ups of the book’s cover, and it said American Gods in big letters in the top, and I realized that my working title had become the title.

I kept writing, fascinated. I felt, on the good days, more like the first reader than the writer, something I’d rarely felt since Sandman days. Neither Shadow nor Wednesday was, in any way, an everyman figure. They were uniquely themselves, sometimes infuriatingly so. Odd people, perfectly suited for the odd events they would be encountering.

The book had a gender now, and it was most definitely male.

I wonder now, looking back, if the short stories in American Gods were a reaction to that. There are maybe half a dozen of them scattered through the book, and all (but one) of them are most definitely female in my head (even the one about the Omani trinket salesman and the taxi driver). That may have been it. I don’t know. I do know that there were things about America and about its history that it seemed easier to say by showing rather than telling; so we follow several people to America, from a Siberian shaman sixteen thousand years ago, to a Cornish pickpocket two hundred years ago, and, from each of them, we learn things.

And after the short stories were done, I was still writing. And writing. And continuing to write. The book turned out to be twice as long as I had expected. The plot I thought I was writing twisted and snaked and I slowly realized it wasn’t the plot at all. I wrote the book and wrote the book, putting one word after another, until there were close to two hundred thousand of them.

And one day I looked up, and it was January 2001, and I was sitting in an ancient and empty house in Ireland with a peat fire making no impression at all on the stark cold of the room. I saved the document on the computer, and I realized I’d finished writing a book.

I wondered what I’d learned, and found myself remembering something Gene Wolfe had told me, six months earlier. “You never learn how to write a novel,” he said. “You just learn how to write the novel that you’re writing.”

This was originally published on Powells.com in 2001, to accompany the launch of American Gods.