Neil Gaiman: The truth according to Sandman

Two days after I interview Neil Gaiman, the venerable sci-fi and fantasy magazine Locus reports his beatification by the Vatican, intimating that "official recognition of his sainthood" can only now be a matter of time. Admittedly I interview Neil Gaiman on 30 March but, even as an April Fool you sense that the Locus parodist picked his target carefully: for a long time Gaiman has occupied a place about as close as the genre of fantasy literature gets to the divine. Fans appear at his signings clutching copies of the Sandman comics like holy relics, while new converts - drawn by his last novel, Anansi Boys, which went in at number one on the New York Times list - pick through the stacks of earlier work with the ecstatic expressions of a fed 5,000.

On this particular afternoon, at Forbidden Planet in London, a tired-looking Gaiman is scribbling his way through the last date of a European paperback tour. The place looks emptier than usual until you realise that the queue filters in through a door at the back, extending from there the length of the street behind. Yet despite his fading voice, despite the cramp in his hand, this is a smallish turnout for Gaiman: in Brazil, he explains, 1,250 people once rolled up to a similar engagement. "After 700 of them, the shop cut the line," he relates drily, "and the remaining 500 people explained in an enthusiastic Brazilian way that if they weren't allowed to see me they would of course have to riot and destroy the shop. And the manager enthusiastically said - Join the line! So I signed until two o'clock that morning."

Parisian fanarchists, meanwhile, want to talk about his novel Neverwhere, which takes place in a subterranean shadow-London. "They use it as a kind of ur-text," he says, "because there is another Paris below ground. People go catacombing; they offer to take me down there. They steal keys, they can get anywhere in Paris at night, but their whole thing is about leaving things the way you find them. So they took over an old Victorian swimming pool and brought in a film projector, and they all got into the pool and watched films projected on the side of the wall at 4 o'clock in the morning, and then it was all just cleaning the place up afterwards, leaving it, disappearing."

Gaiman's famous dark shock of hair (there's even a website devoted to it) is unbowed by today's ordeal, waving gently about him as he smiles, signs, doodles, trades stories and shakes hands with acolytes and readers. This is after a morning during which, in addition to this interview, he's risen early to meet the novelist Joe Hill (author of Heart-Shaped Box), done a spot for the BBC, worked on a story for a Chatto anthology that "isn't quite cooked yet", run it by his daughter Holly, learnt that a story from his latest book is up for a Hugo award, blogged about that... You find yourself wishing a holiday on the man.

Even for him, this has been a busy year. As well as his brilliant new story collection, Fragile Things, just out in paperback, Gaiman is currently associated with three films in production. There's Stardust, an adaptation of his enchanting second novel, which features Robert De Niro, Ian McKellen, Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes and Ricky Gervais. He scripted a version of Beowulf, starring Ray Winstone, which promises the fascinating spectacle of Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother and John Malkovich playing Unferth. Finally, his terrifying novel Coraline is under adaptation by Henry Selick, creator of The Nightmare Before Christmas; voices are by Teri Hatcher, Dakota Fanning and French and Saunders.

Adaptation isn't always an easy process, but he's happy with all three. "I was lucky when I was very young that my first graphic novel, Violent Cases, was adapted as a stage play," he says. "It wasn't very good, which was good because it was absolutely faithful: every word of what I wrote was up on the stage. They took exactly what I'd done and put it up there, and it didn't work. At that moment I became so much less of a purist on adaptation; it's a different medium." But he tells a worrying story of someone sending him a script for Sandman, his long, diverse and meditative fantasy sequence: "The first line of dialogue was 'Aha, foolish mortals! As if your puny weapons could hurt me, the mighty Lord of Dreams!' I got 15 pages in and thought: I can't do this."

On the process of writing, meanwhile, he is clear, inclusive and infinitely courteous. "I remember when I was about seven," he says, "reading C S Lewis's Narnia books and discovering the concept of the parenthetical aside to the reader from the omniscient author. And going, I want to do that. I thought, wow - look, you can chat directly to the reader! You're God!"

Gaiman's blog, a Web tool of frightening power inspected daily by a devoted readership, expounds his resolutely clear-headed attitude to the process of creation. "I think writing is the coolest thing you can do," he now says, "and I think it's a craft. I think being a writer is magical, and it's like being someone who can make a table. I don't think those two things are contradictory, but I think you do people - especially people who want to be writers - no favours if you lead them to believe that what you do is unattainable. The writing that helped me become a writer was people like Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock occasionally: these guys who would write about the nuts and bolts of becoming a writer, and let me understand that I could do that: all I had to do was write a really good short story."

He's helpfully exact about what makes one of those, as well. "It has to have that lovely, logical, just gutting inevitability. That's where you want to get to in fiction, whether popular fiction or high literary fiction or whatever - you want to get to the point where everything feels inevitable, where what you're getting is a true, and I use this word in the Sandman sense: a true account of what happened." He smiles. "True, in the sense that it's much more real and important than facts."

To order a copy of 'Eternals' (Marvel Comics £19.99) for £17.99, or 'Fragile Things' (Headline Review £7.99), both with free p&p, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897