WRITTER PROJECT PRESENTATION

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WRITTER PROJECT (WRITING)

SLOGAN
"All my life, I've felt that I was getting away with something because I was just making things up and writing them down, and that one day there would be a knock, and a man with a clipboard would be standing there and say, 'It says here you've just been making things up all these years. Now it's time to go off and work in a bank.'"

BIOGRAPHY

Gaiman was born in Portchester, England, in 1960. His mother, a pharmacist, and his father, the director of a company, encouraged their young son's reading habits. He devoured every book he could get his hands on as a child, working his way through the entire local children's library and partway through the adult collection as well.He read books in a number of different genres, especially comics, and he was particularly drawn to science fiction and fantasy works. While preparing for his own bar mitzvah, a Jewish ceremony marking a young man's transition to the world of adulthood, Gaiman became entranced by religious and mystical Jewish writings.As a teenager Gaiman began to outgrow the comic books he had loved as a child. Faced with a lack of comic books aimed at a more mature audience, Gaiman decided to fill that need himself. He wanted to write comic books when he grew up, although at the time he had no idea how to accomplish that goal.After graduating from high school in 1977, Gaiman became a journalist. He wrote articles for a number of British newspapers and magazines, including the Sunday Times, the Observer, and Time Out. In 1983 he and partner Mary McGrath had their first child, named Michael. In March of 1985 Gaiman wed McGrath, and that same year their daughter, Holly, was born. During that time Gaiman began writing short stories, including such titles as "How to Be a Barbarian," "How to Spot a Psycho," and "Jokers through History."

WRITTER PERIOD
While comic books had been around since the 1930s, the development of the graphic novel as a serious form of literature was relatively recent, and the rules for the genre were still being written. Gaiman was drawn to the experimental nature of adult-oriented comic books and graphic novels, and in the mid-1980s he began writing comics. He published the graphic novel Violent Cases in 1987. Violent Cases depicts a grown man's childhood recollections, with a visit to an elderly doctor as the starting point of those memories. While treating the four-year-old child for a broken arm, the doctor shares vivid stories from decades earlier, when the infamous gangster Al Capone was his patient.

After publishing Violent Cases, Gaiman came to the attention of celebrated publisher DC Comics. His next work, a three-part series called Black Orchid, was published by DC Comics, the first of Gaiman's many works to find a home there. The series revisits a character from DC's history, the crime-fighting heroine named in the title. Black Orchid is quite different from the typical female characters in comic books; Gaiman described her to AAYA as "vaguely feminist, ecological, essentially nonviolent. I liked the fact that at the end she doesn't get mad and start hitting people." For his next venture, DC asked Gaiman to revive another old character, and Gaiman chose the little-known Sandman, a character that originated in the 1940s. DC hired Gaiman to write a monthly serial featuring the Sandman, a career move intended to build the writer's reputation. Much to the surprise of both Gaiman and DC Comics, the Sandman series was an immediate hit.

STYLE

Neil Gaiman is an extraordinarily imaginative writer who works in a variety of formats, writing graphic novels , short stories, novels, children's books, and scripts for television and films. His works are classified in a number of different genres, from horror to fantasy to science fiction, and often he jumps from one genre to another within a single work. Gaiman understands the conventional rules of writing fiction, particularly comic books, but he rarely follows such rules, choosing instead to pursue whatever his imagination tell him to do.

BOOKS

Gaiman has achieved rock-star status among his millions of fans, and is best known for his Sandman series of comic books. He began writing Sandman installments in the late 1980s. After a break of several years from Sandman, he published the graphic novel Sandman: Endless Nights in 2003. In October of that year, Endless Nights reached number twenty on the New York Times bestseller list. Gaiman has also achieved success with a short novel titled Coraline. The novel earned a number of prestigious awards, including the Hugo and Nebula awards for outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy, and the Bram Stoker award, which is given to exceptional works of horror.

Gaiman's first novel was a comedic collaboration with English writer Terry Pratchett. Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (1990) 1989, . The novel uses slapstick comedy to address the most serious of subjects: the end of humankind. In 2003 Good Omens was named one of England's one hundred "best-loved novels" in a poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

In 2001 Gaiman released American Gods, perhaps his best-known work outside of his graphic novels. A typical Gaiman hodge-podge of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mythology, American Gods tells the story of ancient European gods who accompanied waves of immigrants to the shores of the United States, only to be discarded and ignored in modern society. They have been replaced by American-bred gods such as Media and Technology, and the old-time gods are fed up and looking for a fight with their newer counterparts. American Gods connected with Gaiman's many fans and earned new fans as well, all of whom propelled the book to a spot on the New York Times bestseller list. The novel won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, SFX (for outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy), and the Bram Stoker award for distinguished works of horror.