Why Neil Gaiman talking at you for 5 hours from your screen is totally worth $90

Neil Gaiman is having another moment. 

Next month the ultra-prolific author sees season 2 of the turbulent-behind-the-scenes, brilliant-on-the-screen series American Gods, now more closely based on his novel, premiere on Starz. A mere two months later, the screen version of Gaiman’s apocalyptic comedy book co-written with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, is unleashed on an unsuspecting world via Amazon Prime. 

And while all this was in the works, the bearded bard of all things mythological casually became a writing professor for the whole plugged-in planet.  

Gaiman’s course, titled “The Art of Storytelling,” is now available on the celebrity learning app MasterClass. I’m far from the only Facebook denizen to see the ad for this class dominate my news feed in recent weeks. Social media knows us nerds too damn well. (It probably also knows most of us have half-finished novels stuck in desk drawers.) 

Probably the most devilishly clever thing about MasterClass is its pricing structure. You get a single course with a celeb for $90 (the growing roster currently includes Serena Williams, Martin Scorsese, Gordon Ramsay and Hans Zimmer), but $180 gets you a one-year all-access pass. Getting all the classes for the price of two is a marketing sleight-of-hand that can make you forget that one is pretty pricey. 

Gaiman’s a great writer, but is his class worth it? That’s what I signed up to find out. I watched both Gaiman’s entire course and its closest analog from last year, Handmaid’s Tale author Margaret Atwood’s MasterClass, for comparison.  

What you get for your money

Sure, $90 is pennies compared to, say, the cost of a college-level writing course. But the MasterClass sleight-of-hand also covers up the total length of its videos, which is nothing like the length of time you’d get in that college course. 

Even after signing up, I had to do the math myself by totting up 17 class video runtimes. The answer: 4 hours, 48 minutes — or about 5/8ths of a season of American Gods. You’re paying a buck every 3 minutes 20 seconds. For the same price you could get 11 months’ subscription to Starz, or a dozen of Gaiman’s paperbacks. 

Now the good news: As pricey as that is, Gaiman’s Masterclass is really good! The author speaks in the slow, measured tones of a practiced storyteller, but he’s always going somewhere worthwhile. He doesn’t ramble. Or if he does, it’s a gentle, quick ramble that leads you to a magical glade. 

Like the best teachers, Gaiman is standing on the shoulders of giants

One of his themes is the importance of telling stories in as few words as necessary to be maximally effective — “don’t think you’re being paid by the word, imagine you’re paying by the word” — and he lives by that here. There is a higher ratio of memorable gems to noise than the average writing course. (I particularly liked his “character is dialogue.”)  

You’d have to try hard not to be inspired.

Emotionally speaking, Gaiman’s aim is true; like the best teachers, he leaves a strong impression of genuinely wanting to help bring out the author in you. Also like the best teachers, Gaiman is standing on the shoulders of giants. He dispenses private pearls from great writers such as Roger Zelazny, who told a young Gaiman to write short stories as if they were the last chapter of a novel he’d never written.

 Gaiman, who (laughably) calls himself “fundamentally lazy,” really liked that idea, and started knocking out top-notch short stories in a weekend. 

Speaking of non-laziness, commenters on several videos suggested using the speed feature to get to the point faster — as with a podcast, you could jack this whole thing up to 2x, and be done in under 2.5 hours. But another classmate had nothing but praise for “a delightful unhurried stroll with someone I love through a sublime country that appears under our feet just in time for each next step.” 

Image: masterclass screenshot

Those comments are one of two features that make each of the 17 short classes different to just watching Gaiman interviews on YouTube (of which there are quite a lot). There’s no weapons-grade trolling here, so there’s no need to waste energy tearing down trolls; just a lot of would-be writers sharing their own stumbling blocks and breakthroughs, offering encouragement to each other as you might expect in a real-world class. 

This is an aspect that MasterClass, which has now been up and running for three years, can and should take further. Emails after I completed both the Gaiman and Margaret Atwood classes invited me to keep the conversation going by “connecting with your classmates” on a page called “The Hub.” Alas! Apart from 25 photo challenges from the Annie Leibovitz class, this hub was entirely bare.

The other thing you don’t get from a regular Gaiman video is the course book — a beautifully laid-out 94-page PDF with more in-depth discussion of the topics in each chapter, plus pointers to useful online resources and suggestions for questions to ask about your own novel. (This gave me XML errors the first time I tried to download it, but seems to be working fine now.) 

It may be a little misleading to call this a ‘class’ — it’s more a really long, somewhat interactive TED talk.

There’s no actual coursework, however, and it’s not like Gaiman is going to be giving out grades at the end of the semester. It may be a little misleading, in fact, to call this a “class” — it’s more like a really long, somewhat interactive, more intimate TED talk broken down into manageable chunks you can download for offline viewing, with supporting material. (The PDF is also chunk-ified.) 

But at the same time, that may be all the aspiring writer needs to get going. For all their pearls of wisdom, the advice that both Gaiman and Atwood give boils down to basically the same thing: You learn writing by writing, and especially by finishing. 

You make lots of mistakes, you double back on yourself, you try the same story multiple times from multiple perspectives until you’re sure, as a reader, that it works. Atwood, who like Gaiman drafts her first drafts by hand, puts it most succinctly: “the wastepaper basket is your friend.”

Face to face

Gaiman is a better speaker than Atwood, who has a somewhat flat monotone. Atwood has better facial expressions; the cheeky, twinkling grin after she says something witty is almost worth the price of admission alone. But ultimately, both are more compelling after five hours than any introvert with a pen has a right to be.

That is a testament to the most fundamental part of the MasterClass formula, the thing that will probably ensure the company’s success going forward. These videos are tremendously good at fostering intimacy and immediacy (especially via the full-HD Apple TV app). The famous teacher talks directly to camera. MasterClass cuts to a side angle just often enough that the staring doesn’t get uncomfortable, but still it tickles something in our lizard brains. 

It’s the archetypal meeting with the Great Elder, the aspirational guru. We sit up and pay attention. 

The videos are shot in beautiful book-lined rooms that make you feel you’re in the author’s home, even though they’re probably in a studio (MasterClass wouldn’t tell us one way or the other). They are not, apparently, scripted. (Explaining point-of-view decisions, Atwood breaks out into a wonderfully bonkers sketch using a couple of boxes and a stapler.) 

They both seem to be dripping with story ideas. (Making a point about expectations, Gaiman notes that P.G. Wodehouse never had Bertie Wooster kill his butler Jeeves — and for a second, you can see him pause to consider whether that would make as great a subversive short tale as it sounds.) 

And they’re visual enough that you can’t just close your eyes and listen. Gaiman goes through scripts and key changes on an early Sandman comic. Atwood shows us the first draft of Handmaid’s Tale. Gaiman pulls his notebook out of his pocket, with some difficulty, just to show he’s always carrying one. Atwood sketches her initial idea for the Handmaid costume on an iPad. Every extract they read is somewhat animated, with highlights pulled out. 

Is all of that worth $90 per author? Your mileage may vary, of course, but by this point you’ve probably either dismissed it out of hand or are having a quiet argument with your wallet. My advice: Try one, and skip your next 18 coffeeshop lattes. This experience will deliver more of a writing jolt.