The Tim Ferriss Show - #366: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years To Do

Episode Date: March 28, 2019

“The biggest problem we run into is going, ‘This is who I am, this is what I’m like, this is how I function’ while failing to notice that you don’t do that anymore.” — Neil GaimanNeil Gaiman (@neilhimself) is the bestselling author and creator of books, graphic novels, short stories, film and television for all ages, including Neverwhere, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The View from the Cheap Seats and the Sandman series of graphic novels. His fiction has received Newbery and Carnegie Medals, and Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Will Eisner Awards, among many other awards and honours.His novelistic retelling of Norse myths, Norse Mythology, has been a phenomenon, and an international bestseller, and won Gaiman his ninth Audie Award (for Best Narration by the Author).Recently Gaiman wrote all six episodes of, and has been the full-time showrunner, for the forthcoming BBC/Amazon Prime mini-series adaptation of Good Omens, based on the beloved 1990 book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett.Many of Gaiman’s books and comics have been adapted for film and television including Stardust (starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer), Coraline (an Academy Award nominee and the BAFTA winner for Best Animated Film), and How to Talk to Girls at Parties, a movie based on Gaiman’s short story. The television series Lucifer is based on characters created by Gaiman in Sandman. His 2001 novel, American Gods, is a critically acclaimed, Emmy-nominated TV series, now entering its second season.In 2017, Neil Gaiman became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Originally from England, he lives in the United States, where he is Professor in the Arts at Bard College.Click here for the show notes for this episode.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home.

You can also do on-demand, which is what I do. We'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies. Hard to do that at the gym. Take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated.

There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand. And you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over, but I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities. So you can find what you're

in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time. And that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was. And it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So check it out. Discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio

experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com, that's O-N-E Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home. Anytime you want, check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Hello Monday, a new podcast from LinkedIn's editorial team. When I'm facing, say, a challenge at work, considering new career moves, or just trying to sort through my life, of course, like a lot of people,

I look to my friends, family, and mentors for support. The kind of advice that tends to stick, though, out of all the things they might say or ask, tends to be simple and powerful. For example, I remember when Kyle Maynard, who's been on the podcast, echoed to me a lesson he learned from a very well-known CEO. And that was when you ask people to rank anything from one to 10, including yourself, ask them to remove the number seven. And that means they have to choose between, in some cases, six, which is a barely pass. So that's a no-go. Or an eight, which is a strong endorsement. So you can use this

when asking people to judge work designs, give you feedback on writing chapters. You can use it with waiters or waitresses in restaurants when asking how much they would recommend a given entree. And it's incredible how much clearer the signal becomes when you just make that one change and remove seven. So along those lines, Hello Monday is a new podcast from LinkedIn's editorial team filled with this kind of advice, the kind that stays with you, the kind that you can actually use. Each week, host Jesse Hempel sits down with featured guests ranging from people like Seth Meyers, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, to uncover lessons you can apply to your career and to your life. For example,

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about relieving creative pressure to get more done. And the way she tells the story is much more detailed. But as she was approaching her follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love, she tried to write. She realized after the fact, when she sat down with the first draft and started to cry, she realized she tried to write for 6 million people and it just wasn't working. She felt overwhelmed. And instead, she decided to focus on writing it to her 10 closest female friends. And she realized at the time,

she didn't know how to please millions of strangers, but she did know how to reach those specific 10 friends, which it turns out is exactly what I did after throwing away four early chapter drafts for the four-hour work week. I took a very similar approach and wrote literally an email draft to two of my closest friends.

So this type of stuff really, really works. And you should check it out. So find Elizabeth Gilbert's episode and other episodes from Hello Monday on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm so excited because I'm about to share with you an interview that I waited 20-plus years to do. Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman. Who's Neil Gaiman? Neil's been one of my favorite authors forever. I first became fascinated by his imagination with the Sandman comics, graphic novels in the 90s, so much so, in fact, that I imported Sandman versions from different countries to help me learn foreign languages. My love for his work grew from there, from Anansi Boys to The Graveyard Book, which happens to be my favorite audiobook of all time, read by Neil, to Neverwhere I've Never Been Disappointed. And Neil has won just about every award in every genre he's tackled,

including Nebula and Hugo Awards, and his voice, as you will hear, is radio-perfect hypnotic. Since my very first podcast episode, back when this show did not even have a name, friends have asked me, who is on your list of dream guests? And Neil has always been in my top five. Oprah's another.

We'll get to that another time. Sadly, Neil very rarely does interviews, but after close to a decade, I'm not making that up of soft touches via Twitter and elsewhere. He finally agreed to sit down with me for around 90, 120 minutes, somewhere in there and get into all the details I could have ever dreamed of and more. I never thought it would actually happen and it did. I'm still on cloud nine and find it very surreal, to be honest. And in any case, if you listen to even a few minutes of this, you'll understand why I'm such a fan. And I'm going to read a bit more of his official bio and then we're going to get right into it. But just listen to the range in this bio when it comes to creative fiction and nonfiction. Neil Gaiman is the bestselling author and creator of books, graphic novels, short stories,

film and television for all ages, including Neverwhere, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The View from the Cheap Seats, and the Sandman series of graphic novels. His fiction has received Newbery and Carnegie medals and Hugo Nebula, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, and Will Eisner awards, among many other awards and honors. His novelistic retelling of Norse myths, titled Norse Mythology, has been a phenomenon and an international bestseller. And he won his ninth Audi Award for that. That is for best narration by the author. Nine, nine audio awards. And you'll get a taste of his voice and why people enjoy it so much. Recently, Gaiman wrote all six episodes of and has been the full-time showrunner for the forthcoming BBC Amazon Prime miniseries adaptation of Good Omens.

Based on the beloved 1990 book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett. Fantastic, fantastic book. And I've set up a redirect so you guys can find the trailer for this really easily. If you just go to tim.blog forward slash omens, that's tim.blog forward slash omens. It'll point right to the trailer for this, which you guys should check out. Many of Gay Men's books and comics have been adapted for film and television, including Stardust, starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, Coraline, an Academy Award nominee and the BAFTA winner for Best Animated Film, and How to Talk to Girls at Parties, a movie based on Gaiman's short story. The television series Lucifer is based on characters created by Gaiman and Sandman.

His 2001 novel, American Gods, is a critically acclaimed Emmy-nominated TV series now entering its second season. In 2017, Neil Gaiman became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Originally from England, he lives in the United States where he is a professor in the arts at Bard College. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at Neil himself, Facebook forward slash Neil Gaiman, and at NeilGaiman.com. And without further ado, my apologies for the long intro, but it's very warranted in this case, given the excitement on my part. Here is Neil Gaiman. Neil, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you so much. I have been hoping to have this conversation for years. And if I flashback for 10, 15, probably 20 plus years, I've been reading your work. I can't say that about many people I've ever met. And I mean, you've been asking me incredibly politely if I could do the podcast or anything vaguely,

you know, sort of edging around it and giving me open invitations for a good decade now. This is true. And I love the fact we've managed to do the occasional tiny goofy thing. I got to read a page of your book. That's right. That's right. You read a page of the book, which was incredible, because I find your voice, as many people do, rather hypnotic.

And then we got to do a very short chapter in Tribe of Mentors, the last book. Thank you very much for answering those questions. And it's just such a thrill to be able to spend time with you. I'm loving it. And I thought we could begin with the glorious beginnings. And maybe for those people who can't see this, I'll give some context. I have not just one recorder, but two, three, four different sets of audio. And that's in part because I was, or am, once bitten twice shy when

it comes to audio. And then you shared one of your early days stories. What happened? So, when I was 15, I really wanted to meet and talk to writers and artists I admired. And I couldn't figure out how you did this. I didn't know about conventions, if there were conventions back in 1975, 76. So I had a brilliant idea. I would start a magazine. The magazine, as far as I was concerned, didn't even have to exist. The fact that it went on to exist was really fun. And we called it Metro, which was a name I came up with because it sounded like a magazine. It didn't just sound like a magazine. It sounded like a magazine that you have heard of. And I love the fact that over the years metro magazines around the world actually do exist now but in 1975 they didn't but i could phone up and say what from metro magazine and

people go oh yeah um and you know our voices had broken so over the phone nobody knew that we were 15 um and i remember interviewing uh michael morecock uh who was an author whose work i loved with with my friend dave dixon who told me recently he just found the tape and is uh threatening to put it up as some kind of glorious podcast which i really hope he does um 15 year old neil Neil Gaiman and Dave Dixon interviewing Michael Moorcock. But the one that taught me my lesson was the, I think it was the second interview we did. Moorcock was the first. And it was Roger Dean and Roger Dean is an artist and designer most famous back then for the covers of Yes albums this beautiful sort of calligraphy and these floating islands and things like that and I got talking to some kid on the train who said oh yeah you know i know roger dean and so we phoned up roger dean's

publisher which was basically roger dean i think they were called dragon's dream and uh said you know like to interview roger went down to brighton um i remember the sheer amazement and joy of these paintings that were, as far as I was concerned, iconic religious emblems. They were, you know, and I didn't like Yes very much. In fact, I didn't really like much of the music that he'd done covers to. But I had a copy of his book, Views, and just loved it. There was a painting he did of some badgers um there was just these things um it felt very lord of the rings it felt very fantastical and there were these amazing paintings covered in dust propped up against walls and we

interviewed him and at the end of the interview i noticed that the tape wasn't going around and got home played it and you can hear there's 30 seconds of us talking there's 30 seconds of us talking in higher and higher pitched voices faster and faster like mad chipmunks and then it stops and that was the roger dean interview and i and the great thing about that was when seven years later i really was a journalist i really was going around interviewing people i was interviewing people for magazines that existed and, you know, had existed before we decided to do the interviews and things. I always carried spare batteries. I always carried spare tapes. If I could, you know, at the point where I could afford to,

I even carried a spare microcassette recorder just in case. Just in case. Two is one and one is none, as they say sometimes. And so the gods gifted you with a malfunction early. Exactly. One good malfunction and you learn your lesson. It is that pain thing. And we were chatting before we sat down to record as i was gathering copious beverages water and tea and and so on for us i'm using the royal us i suppose mostly for me and i got water too and we were talking about this location downtown where we're sitting and i've i've decided in the last few years to use locations outside of my home

for a lot of what I do because I found it, that is it being sitting at my kitchen table doing a lot to sometimes produce a malaise. This is this odd association or lack of dissociation between work and home. And I had read at one point that Maya Angelou, and I hope I'm getting that pronunciation right,

would rent hotel rooms to work on a lot of her writing. And then you brought up another name. So back in about 1997, I read an article by Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books, about how he wrote the James Bond books. And you read this article and you realize something, which is Ian Fleming did not enjoy the process of writing. I was always fascinated by the fact that several of Roald Dahl's most famous short stories were plotted by Ian Fleming.

Ian Fleming would... Really? Yeah, he gave Dahl... I had no idea. The two best short story twists, which are Lamb to the Slaughter, where the woman kills her husband with a leg of lamb and then cooks it um and feeds it to the detective who is going i cannot figure out what he was hit with uh is an ian fleming plot and so is the one about the evil antique dealer who finds this amazing antique um in you know on some farm and decides to cheat the farmers

and explains that, well, the thing isn't worth any money, but the legs, the legs are worth some money, so I'll give you 20 quid for the legs and is about to take away this million pound antique thing and the farmers helpfully rip off the legs and throw the rest of it away. They make this easier for you. And those plots were both Ian Fleming's.

And you start realizing, ah, you really don't like writing when you read his thing on how he wrote the James Bond books. You write a James Bond book in two weeks. You check into a hotel you have to check into a hotel somewhere that you don't want to be otherwise you might go out and walk around and become a tourist

you have to check into a not terribly nice hotel room otherwise you might luxuriate and enjoy it and instead what you want to be is focused on getting out. And then you, having nothing else to do in this town, in this place, you settle down and you write like a fiend. And you get your James Bond book written in two weeks and you leave this horrible hotel room.

And that was how he did it. And I have tried it a couple of times. I did it with the American draft of Neverwhere. That was the first one I ever tried. And I did the entire sort of American draft, which was a big second draft. The book had already been published in the uk but my american editor wanted stuff done because she pointed out that the book as it existed was written for people who knew knew that oxford street was a big street with lots of shops on it you know or whatever. It was written for Brits and Londoners, and she wanted something expanded. So I expanded it. And I was in a room with, as far as I remember, no windows in the, I think it was a Marriott,

in the World Trade Center, which is no longer there. But writing in that hotel room, you just wanted to be out. It seems to me, and you can't believe everything you read on the internet, so I want you to certainly fact-check me as needed, but that you also have or have had some internal rules.

So you can use your external environment to assist. But I read that, and again, feel free to correct, but making rules, the importance of making rules. Rules like you can sit here and write or you can sit here and do nothing, but you can't sit here and do anything else. That was always, and still is, when I go off to write. That's my biggest rule. Could you speak to that? Yeah, because I would go down to my lovely little gazebo at the bottom of the garden,

sit down, and I'm absolutely allowed not to do anything. I'm allowed to sit at my desk. I'm allowed to stare out at the world. I'm allowed to do anything I like, as long as it isn't anything. Not allowed to do a crossword, not allowed to read a book, not allowed to phone a friend, not allowed to, you know, make a clay model of something. All I'm allowed to do is absolutely nothing or write. And what I love about that is I'm giving myself permission to write or not write. But writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a while.

You know, you sort of sit there and you've been staring out the window now for five minutes and it kind of loses its charm. You're going, well, actually, might as well write something. And it's hard. I a writer, I'm more easily, you know, I'm distractible. I have a three-year-old son. He is the epitome of cuteness and charm. he's it's more fun playing with him than it is writing which means if i'm going to be writing i need to do it somewhere where i don't have a three-year-old son singing to me asking me to read to him demanding my attention um and i think that's i think it's a really just a solid rule

for writers it's like yeah you don't have to write. You have permission to not write, but you don't have permission to do anything else. It reminds me of another one of my favorite writers, you being the one who's sitting in front of me, John McPhee, nonfiction writer, who has spent much of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, but has written some incredible Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction. And I was lucky enough to take class with him 1000 years ago. And his, his role was very similar, but he didn't state it explicitly. He would sit in front of his first, as a young man, typewriter. And he could sit in front of the blank page and from

8 a.m to 6 p.m with the exception of a break for lunch and swimming it was the blank page or writing it was disallowed from doing anything else are there any other rules or practices that you also hold sacred or important for your writing process? Some of them are just things for me. For example, most of the time, not always, I will do my first draft in fountain pen because I actually enjoy the process of writing with a fountain pen. I like filling a fountain pen. I like uncapping it. I like the weight of it in my hand. I like that thing. So I'll have a notebook. I'll have a fountain pen and I'll write. If I'm doing anything long, if I'm working on a novel, for example, I will always have two fountain pens on the go,

at least with two different colored inks, at least. Because that way I can see at a glance how much work I did that day. I can just look down and go, look at that, five pages in brown. I wrote that. Half a page in black. That was not a good day. Nine pages in blue. That was, what a great day. And I, you can just sort of get a sense of, okay, are you working? Are you making forward progress? What's actually happening? And I also love that because it emphasizes for me that nobody is ever meant to read your first draft.

Your first draft can go way off the rails. Your first draft can absolutely go up in flames. You can change the age, gender, number of a character. You can bring somebody dead back to life. Nobody ever needs to know anything that happens in your first draft is you telling the story to yourself and then i'll sit down and type and i'll put it onto a computer and as far as i'm concerned the second draft is where i try and make it look like i knew what i was doing all along do you edit then as you're looking or translating from the first draft on the page to the computer?

Or do you get it all down as is in the computer and then edit? No, that's my editing process. I think that's my second draft, is typing it into the computer. And also, I love... So backing up a bit here. When I was... What was I? 27, 28? In the days when we were still in typewriters,

and there were just a handful of people with word processors, which were clunky things with disks which didn't hold very much and stuff, I edited an anthology. And enjoyed editing my anthology. And most of the stories that came in were about 3,000 words long. Moved forward in time, not much. Five, six, seven years, mid-90s, everybody is now on computer.

And I edited another short story anthology. And the stories that were coming in tended to be somewhere between 6,000 and 9,000 words long. And they didn't really have much more story than the 3 000 words ones and i realized that what was happening is it's a it's a sort of a computery thing is if you're typing putting stuff down is work if you've got a computer adding stuff is not not work. Choosing is work. So it sort of expands a bit like a gas. If you have two things you could say, you say both of them. If you have the stuff you want to add, you add it. And I thought, okay, I have to not do that because otherwise my stuff is going to balloon and it will become gaseous and thin. So what I love, if I've written something on a computer and I decide to lose a chunk, it feels like I've lost work. If I delete a page and a half, I feel like there's a page and a half that just

went away. And that's a page and a half's worth of work I've just lost. If I've been writing in a notebook, and I'm typing it up, and I can look at something and go, I don't need this page and a half and I leave it out I've just saved myself work and it feels kind of like I'm I'm treating myself so I'm just trying to always have in my head the idea that maybe I'm somehow on some cosmic level paying somebody by the word in order to be allowed to write that that if they're there they they should matter they should mean something it's always important to me and you mentioned uh you mentioned distraction earlier and your dangerously adorable son uh which I certainly agree with. I had read somewhere, actually, before I get to that,

this might seem like a very, very mundane question, but what type of notebooks do you prefer? Are they large, like legal pads? Are they leather-bound? What type of notebooks do you like to work with? When they came out, I really liked, I've used a whole bunch of different ones. I bought big drawing ones, which actually turned out to be a bit too big. I kind of liked how much I could see on the page.

Those were the ones I wrote Stardust and American Gods in, sort of big size. But they weren't terribly portable i went over to the moleskins and i loved them when they first came out and then they dropped their paper quality and dropping paper quality doesn't matter unless you're writing in fountain pen because all of a sudden it's bleeding through and all of a sudden you're writing on one page leaving a page blank because it's bled through and writing on the next page um and joe hill about uh six or seven years ago, Joe Hill, the wonderful horror fantasy writer, suggested the Leuchtturm to me. And so my usual notebook right now is a Leuchtturm because I really like the way you can paginate stuff in them and the thickness of the paper. And they're just like sort of moleskins, but the Porsche of moleskins.

They're just better. And I also have been writing, I wrote the Graveyard book, and I'm writing the current novel in these beautiful books that i bought in a stationary shop in venice um built into a bridge somewhere in venice there's a there's a little stationary shop on a bridge and they have these beautiful leather bound blank books that just look like hardback books, but they're blank pages. And I wrote the graveyard book in one of those. I bought four of them. And now I'm using the next one on the next novel. And it may well go into another one. I'm not sure. And then at home, I say at home, my house in Wisconsin, which is where my stuff is.

You know, we live in Woodstock, but I have an entire life's worth of stuff still sitting in my house in Wisconsin. And it's become archives. It's actually kind of fabulous having a house that is an archive. But Waiting for Me in that House is a book that I bought for myself about 25 years ago. And before I die, I plan to write a novel in it. And it's an accounts book from the mid-19th century. It's 500 pages long. Every page is numbered.

It's lined with accounts lines, but very faint, so it'll be nice to write a book in it. And it is engineered so that every single page lies flat. And it's huge and it's heavy and it just looks like a book that you know dickens or somebody would have written a novel in and i've just been waiting until i have an idea that is

huge and weird and dickensian enough and um whether or not i actually get to write it in dip pen, I'm not sure. But I definitely want to write it in a sort of old Victorian, something slightly copper platey. One of those old flex nib pens that they stopped making when carbon paper came in. Just so I can get that kind of spidery Victorian handwriting. I'm just imagining you putting pen to the first page when you finish the first page and what that will feel like. That's going to be a good day. It will be either a good day or an incredibly bad day. I'll get to the end of the first page and say,

oh, no, I have this pristine... But it is the thing that I tell young writers, and by young writers, a young writer can be any age. You just have to be starting out. Which is anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it because there's nothing there to fix you mentioned a word and it might be that i'm

a little slow moving because i'm from long island but leichtum how do you spell that word uh l-e-i-c-h i think it's t-t-u-r-m and i got it and then 1917 i think is the the uh their twitter handle is definitely like storm 1917 and i'll put that in the show notes for folks so you'll be able to find it since you gave me uh and i'm not intending to turn this episode into a shopping list but i've never used fountain pens really i have not and my my assistant my dear assistant uh does she loves using fountain pens she enjoys the act i've i've had a few sloppy false starts and then been rather impatient but if if I wanted to give it a shot, are there any particular fountain pens or criteria that you would use in picking a good pen?

You know, the biggest criteria I would use in picking, um, if you have the choice is go somewhere like New York's fountain pen hospital. Um, is that a real place? It's a real place. It's called the Fountain Pen Hospital. They sell lots of new pens.

They recondition old pens. They look after pens for you. And try them out. Because the lovely thing about fountain pens is they are personal. You go, no, no, no. And then you find the one. I tend to suggest to people who are just nervously, you know, I've never used a fountain pen, what should I do? And I will point them at Lamy, L-A-M-Y, who have some fabulous starter pens.

And they're not very expensive, and they're good. They do a pen called the Safari. But they have a bunch of good starter pens. And they're just nice to get into the idea of, do I like doing this? Let's see, what am I using right now? What have I got in here? I've got, so, this one here is a Pilot.

It's a Namiki, and it's a flexi nib ever so slightly. When you put down weight on it, the nib will spread. It's a beautiful, beautiful pen. That one's a pilot. I think this one here is the Namiki. And it's really weird because Namiki is pilot. So I don't quite understand that. Maybe it's a sort of Toyota Lexus thing. I think it is. It's that kind of thing. This one here is called a Falcon. And again, you put a little bit of weight on it

and the line will just spread and thicken, which is part of the fun of fountain pens and I will just you know I'll go and play there's a lovely Italian when I got my ate my agent I did a thing some years, when I realized that I was losing a lot of actual writing time to signing foreign contracts. And... This is for books. This is for books. Or occasionally, you know, for stories or for things being reprinted around the world.

And the contracts would come in and there would be big sheaves of them because I get printed all around the world and foreign contracts a lot of them you have to sign a lot you have to do a lot of initialing and and I would sit there going I have just spent 90 minutes signing a pile of contracts and I love that I got to sign it. But so I contacted my agent. I said, can I give you like power of attorney? Would you mind just, can you just sign these things for me? And she's like, absolutely.

Great. So I got her. She'd never used a fountain pen. And I got her a fountain pen. I actually went to the New York Fountain Pen Hospital with her. And did the thing of showing her pens and going, what do you like? And then I got her a Visconti, which is just these lovely Italian pens. And mostly I love the sort of the slightly fetishistic bit of having bottles of beautifully colored ink. When you start talking to fountain pen people, they really, they pretend to be interested in what pen you like.

But they don't care because they found their own pens that they love. And they say, what do you use? And I, you know, I use Pilot 823s for signing, and I actually now, I bought a Pilot 823, because it's just a fantastic signing pen. It's a workhorse, it keeps going, and I got one in 2012, and it was my signing pen. I signed through Ocean at the End of the Lane. You know, before the book had come out, I had already pre-signed, you know,

written my signature 20,000 times with this pen. I've seen footage of you icing your hand after some signings. That was the signing tour that I really got into, icing my hand and wrist and arm. And, you know, i did the numbers and as far as i can tell i have signed about one and a half million signatures with that pen uh which remained and i had to send it off to pilot at one point not because the nib was in trouble because the the plunger mechanism was starting to stick and they fixed it for me and sent it back. And then my three-year-old son found a place behind a cast-iron fireplace

in our house in Woodstock, where if you just insert your father's Pilot 823 pen, which you have found on the table, just to see if it would go in there, you can actually guarantee that nobody, without disassembling the house, I mean, we actually have to take the entire house apart to uninstall a cast-iron fireplace from 1913

to get at the pen. So I've got, that pen now has been given as a sacrifice to the house gods, and I need to get at the pen. So I've gone, that pen now has been given as a sacrifice to the house gods, and I need to get a new one. It strikes me, at least it seems as we're talking, that many of the decisions you've made, the tools you've found and enlisted, act to make not writing unappealing or at least boring after five minutes and to

into sort of enhance the act of writing to make it something that is enjoyable i don't i don't know that's true that is true and but they also exist for another reason which is kind of weird which is to try and trivialize what i'm doing and not make it important and freighted down with weight because that paralyzes me. When I started writing, I had a typewriter. It was a manual typewriter. When I sold my first book, I had the money to buy an electric typewriter um what was that first book

oh gosh I actually don't remember whether I bought the electric typewriter with the money from a book called ghastly beyond a book of science fiction and fantasy quotations I did with Kim Newman, or whether I did it, whether it was for the Duran Duran biography that I did. Either way, I was just 23. And what I would do back then is I would do my rough draft on scrap paper, single spaced, so that it couldn't be used.

And also so that I could get as many words on and, you know, paper was expensive. And then, so I could always do that. And I remember the joy of getting my first computer and just the idea that I wasn't making paper dirty. Nothing mattered until I pressed print. And that was absolutely and utterly liberating. And then, you know, a decade on, picking up a notebook it was for Stardust of which I

decided that I wanted the rhythms of Stardust to be sort of very antiquated rhythms and I thought I there's probably a difference to the way that one writes with a fountain pen. 17th century writing, 17th, 18th century writing, you notice tends to go in very, very long sentences and long paragraphs and i my theory about this is that one reason why you get this is because you're using dip pens and if you pause they they dry up so you just have to kind of keep going it forces you to do a kind of writing where you're just you're going for a very long sentence and you're going to go for a long paragraph and you're going to keep moving in this thing and you're sort of thinking ahead um with if you're writing on a computer you'll think of the sort of thing that

you mean and write that down and then look at it and then fiddle with it and get it to be the thing that you mean. If you're writing in fountain pen, if you do that, you just wind up with a page covered with crossings out. So it's actually so much easier to just sort of think a little bit more you you slow up a bit but you're thinking the sentence through to the end and then then you start writing you write that and then you pause and then you write the next one um at least that was the way that I hypothesized I might be writing. And I wanted Stardust to feel like it had been written in the late 1920s. And I thought, well, to do that, I should probably get myself a fountain pen and a book. So that was how I started writing that. And again, what I loved was suddenly feeling liberated.

It was like, ah, I'm not actually making, words are not going down in phosphor on a computer screen. This trivializing is, I think, very, very important. And I'd love to dig into it a little bit because this is something that's come up quite a bit, initially very unexpectedly with people I interview on the podcast. I remember having a conversation with Sean White, a legendary snowboarder. And I asked him what he said to himself, what was his internal monologue or dialogue

right before the gate opened for the last run in the olympics for the gold medal and his answer was who cares which surprised me and he said yeah because if in effect if i apply an incredible amount of weight to myself it's going to do nothing but handicap me and you do see or there are many examples of of writers of musicians who have sort of crumbled with sophomore syndrome after a success and had great difficulty putting out work. You've put out a lot of very, very good work. I've read and listened to and watched a lot of your work. What are other things you do to remove that weight, if anything? Are there things you say to yourself when you commit to writing a book, when you sign the agreement with the publisher for yet another novel? Is there any other advice that you would

give or any other things that you do that help to remove the sort of psychological performance anxiety? Well, if you're me, you tend to do the things that are not actually financially sensible, but make life easier. I write, I like writing things that nobody's waiting for. It's much more stressful writing things that people actually are waiting for, that people care about. It's why it felt wonderful to follow American Gods up with Coraline. Nobody even knew that I wanted to be a kid's author. And it was an odd kind of thing to be. And I've just written this giant novel that's won all of the awards and it's

incredibly adult and it's thick and it's a proper book and look i got the hugo and look i got the nebula and so on and so forth and then um here's a book nobody's waiting for. So you worked on that before anyone knew? In other words, you hadn't set expectations? I thought Coraline was unpublishable. In fact, I was told it was initially. And I started it for my kids, my daughter in particular, Holly. I showed it to an English editor who told me it was completely unpublishable.

We moved to America. The idea was that I was writing it in my own time, but I didn't have any own time. Somewhere in there, I sent it to my friend Jane Yolan. I mentioned to Jane, who was an amazing children's author, but also at the time was editing a line of books. And she showed it to, she wanted to buy it. And the people upstairs at the publishing house said, absolutely not. And, and you know this was just the first third of coralline hadn't even got bad yet um and uh and i put it away and then a few years on i looked around and realized i now had another daughter I now had Maddie and she was a baby and

she was getting bigger and if I didn't finish that book you know there's this book I started for Holly and now Holly's too old almost and and I needed to finish it so I sent it to my new editor but I sent it to my adult editor I didn't have a children's editor um Jennifer Hershey at, trying to remember, were we at HarperCollins at the time or was it still Avon? I think it was still Avon. It hadn't yet been, Avon got bought by HarperCollins, which is how I became a HarperCollins author. And she read it and she called me up and she said, this is great. What happens next? And I said, send me a contract and we will both find out. So bless her, she did.

And so I went back to writing it because now it was actually something that actually had a delivery date attached. And I did not have the time to write it in. It wasn't like I had more time. And I remember what I did was I had a notebook by the side of my bed and instead of reading three or four pages a night and then turning off the light and going to sleep i would write maybe 50 words of caroline which doesn't seem much right before bed right before bed so i wasn't right reading before bed i was just writing before bed but i got a bed and i

would reread what i'd written on caroline and. And I would do, you know, five or six lines of Coraline. But if you do it that way, you know, you've written a page a week. And so it kept moving forward. And then we went on a cruise, a fundraising cruise for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which is a First Amendment thing. And I was working on American Gods, and I did not pack, due to a packing error, the American Gods notebooks. But I did have the Coraline book with me.

So on that cruise, I got to write quite a bit more Coraline. And then a couple of months later, I was starting to despair of ever finishing American Gods because I'd been writing it by that point for at least 18 months and figured that I had about a year to go and uh just said fuck it and wrote Coraline and just finished it and sent it off to my publisher and it's like here is a book you can publish this and they're like that's great but we'll wait for American Guards do you tend to work on multiple projects at once i used to i used to be really good at working on multiple projects at once i think i have to start um i think i have to start accepting that i'm not as good anymore at that. What does that mean?

It means that in the old days, when I was young, I would have at least three things on the go, which was great, because if I got stuck on any one of them, I would do the other. Even when I was writing American Gods, I would always have the next of the sort of the coming to America short stories

in my head. So if I got stuck on Shadow, I would just take a week and I'd do one of the coming to America stories and then I'd go back to Shadow again. But these days, I don't think I'm as good at that anymore. I think I am.

I think it's great to have three or four things going on, but there is that point where I start looking at myself and going, actually, I'm getting less done. I'm not doing that thing where I get stuck on project A so I just immediately nip over to project B, it takes me a little ramping up time to get to the headspace now, project B. And at the point where I have projects A, B, C, and D all waiting for me, what I do is look at them, make a noise like lurch from the Addams Family.

You know, one of those one of those kind of noises i go off and make a cup of tea and play with ash or something um so i think actually i it's one of those things where you just know thyself i think i now have to start going no just just one thing at a time which also also means I'm going to have to say no to more introductions and things. And I love doing introductions. Introductions, you mean writing introductions? Writing introductions. Writing introductions to other people's work. Writing introductions and essays and things where you go, here is a thing I love.

I want to, I can get it to the world. I can tell people why I love this thing. And maybe they'll discover it. And every now and then, and you know, sometimes, you know, your introduction makes no real difference in the scheme of things um and then sometimes you know james thurber um i was told i could bring you know that that they would bring the the 13 clocks back into print if i wrote an introduction to it so i was like yes i'm writing an introduction to it and then because it has an introduction by me, I've run into many hundreds of people who I assume are representatives of thousands of people over the years who said, you know, I picked up that book because your name was on the cover. And oh, my God, it's become my favorite book. You know,

I read it to my kids. It's amazing. And I go, good. That's what it's for my favorite book you know i read it to my kids it's amazing and i go good that's that's what it's for that's why you do this you mentioned uh writing right before bed so i'd love to talk about the maybe not the scheduling but the timing of writing so i was was doing prep for this conversation and came across an interview in which you said that for nonfiction, you can kind of write wherever it happens to fall. If it's a script or something else, but that for novels, very often you tend to write between, say, 1 and 6 p.m. Where you'll handle email, maybe writing a blog post and so on in the morning. And I'd love to chat about that because many of the writers I've spoken to,

and I'm sure it differs person to person, but tend to write either very late or very early because they feel like they avoid distraction. When I started out, from the age of about 22 when I was a young journalist, 26, 27, a starting out comics writer. You know, all through there,

I was a late, late, late night writer. Nothing really happened until the kids were in bed, nine o'clock I might have faffed her out a little bit during the day but now it's all done and now I'm getting down to work and at two or three o'clock in the morning and I I'm writing in England at this point, I may phone a friend in America just to talk enough to make sure that I'm awake. So that's what I did. And I was a smoker and a coffee drinker,

and it was great. I moved to america in 92 gave up smoking 93 stopped drinking coffee went over to tea um and tried being a late night right tried carrying on being a late night writer and gradually realized that i wasn't really anymore what tended to happen was somewhere around one in the morning i'd be writing away and then i would lift my head from the keyboard at four o'clock in the morning and have three thousand pages of the letter m and um just go okay that this doesn't really work anymore for me. And then I started rescheduling, trying different things out. Part of what I discovered, particularly about being

a novelist, is writing a novel works best if you can do the same day over and over again um the closer you can come to just groundhog day you just repeat that day you you set up a day that works for yourself um you know i i the last novel that i actually wrote um i was at tori amos's wonderful house in florida she has this lovely sort of house on the water that she's lent me many times to go and write in. And I went down there, and I would get up in the morning, I would go for a jog, come back, do my yoga,

get dressed, and get in the car, drive down to a little cafe where there were just enough people around that I knew that other people existed, but nobody that I would ever be tempted to talk to. And I would order myself a large cup of green tea, sit in a corner, and just start writing and i would do that day over and over and over and over and you know a couple of months later looked up and and i had the ocean at the end of the lane which was only meant to have been a short story anyway it just kept going um and i i that i think works really really well i also think that the

the most important thing for human beings is to be aware of the change you know the the biggest problem we run into is going this is who i am this is what i'm like this is who I am. This is what I'm like. This is how I function. While failing to notice that you don't do that anymore. I'm perfectly aware that I may one day become one of those people who wakes up early in the morning and goes and writes. My friend Gene Wolfe, who is now in his late 80s and is one of the finest writers that America has, for years was an editor of a magazine about factories. I think it was called Plant Engineering. And so he'd get up at four o'clock in the morning and write for an hour before anything else, before the day started, before he had to leave for work, and before anybody else was up. And that was how he did it. I cannot imagine getting up in the morning and just writing. That's not how my head

works. I need a while to get here. But I can absolutely imagine that one day I'll have become one of those morning writers from having been a late night writer in my youth and an afternoon writer in my in my middle age in my dotage i could absolutely become a morning writer in your dotage i think that's going to take a while uh i do want to ask you a question related to a name that came up a little earlier and that is, this of course, I think I'm getting right because it comes from a reliable source, which is your blog.

My blog is a pretty reliable source. I think it's very reliable. And for those who know your work outside of the blog, I'd really encourage you to read some of your work on the blog. There's some really touching personal work, one in particular about your gorgeous white

dog, whose name I'm currently... Just such a beautiful piece that, in fact, I owe you thanks for because it led in part, there are many factors, but to me getting my first dog as an adult, Molly, which I put off for decades. So thank you for that. But this question, beautiful piece, is related to Holly. And I'm going to use this as a very sneaky way to ask you a question that you'd probably dislike being asked. And it involves 57-year-olds. So my understanding is you were convinced to speak to your daughter's class about where ideas come from. And what I noted here, I'm not going to ask it that way, but the line that stuck out was you get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. What if dot, dot, dot? What if you woke up with wings? If only, if only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals.

I wonder dot, dot, dot, if this goes on, this is one I really liked. You know, if this goes on, telephones are going to start talking to each other and cut out the middleman. Wouldn't it be interesting if dot, dot, dot. And the question I'm going to ask as a follow-up doesn't have to map perfectly to this, but I would love to hear the Genesis story of the Graveyard Book. And the reason I ask about that book specifically is that it is my absolute favorite fiction audiobook of all time. And I remember the exact moment when I finished the Graveyard book in audio. And there are multiple versions, people have asked me. I have not listened to the ensemble version.

I'm sure it's spectacular, but not to sound creepy. I do find your voice very soothing. And I finished it as my plane was, not my plane, let me rephrase, as a plane was landing. And I had a few minutes before we landed, and I thought about restarting the book so it's it's had a a wonderful place in my heart in my mind where did that book come from so actually i can give a slightly better answer to that now than i could have done a year ago or I have done for previous years because I found something accidentally recently which gave me an insight into stuff on it.

So I was 25 years old. It would have been 1984, 85, maybe even into 86. I was living in Sussex in a little town in a very tall house. My dad owned the house. Actually, what he owned was a shop underneath, but the house sort of came with it. And because little old English towns go back for a long time, the house was at least 300 years old. And it was across a little lane from a country graveyard and the house was incredibly tall and incredibly thin you get a couple of rooms and then you get stairs

and i had a son who at that point was two years old um and his favorite thing was his little tricycle. And the problem with little tricycles is you cannot ride them around houses like that, otherwise you die. You hit the stairs and you die. So every day I would take him and his little tricycle over the road to this little churchyard, and he would pedal happily over the road to this little churchyard.

And he would pedal happily round and round the paths through the gravestones. And I remember just the thought process. I remember going, he looks so happy here. He looks really comfortable. There is something very sweet about a little kid riding a tricycle through a graveyard. And I thought I could do a story about it. Wouldn't it be fun to do a story about that? You could do a story like it will be like, you know, a kid in a graveyard getting brought up

by dead people. And then I thought, actually, Kipling already kind of did that once with the Jungle Book, which is a kid in a jungle being brought up by wild animals and teaching him the things that wild animals know. So I would have to have a kid in a graveyard being taught the things that dead people know. And I went up to my office, my little office, sat down at my typewriter, and started to write. Now, when I've told people this in the past, I've said I wrote a couple of pages and realized that it wasn't good enough. And I was wrong.

I actually wrote an entire first chapter, I discovered. Because about a year ago, looking for something else, I found it. And it wasn't very good. What was fascinating and delightful about it was the portrait of the kid, which was very obviously a really, actually looking back, a quite good pen portrait of my son Mike, who is now a… That you did. That, you know, I'm describing the baby and I only knew one so so it's it's Mike And that was really interesting but story doesn't work and I think I forget I think I've got a This is there's a demon in it I don't have um who i think is the person who winds up being the person who kind of accepts him into the graveyard um you know nothing's quite right but there's a central idea there

but i wrote i remember writing that and just going okay this is a better idea than i am a writer so i need to put this off and about a decade later i came back tried it again and this time you know at least according to memory it was only a couple of pages and again i went oh no still not good enough for this may i pause for one second yeah you must have ideas for potential stories all the time yeah but this was different this was one where i knew i knew it had legs and i knew it was real and i knew it was good um and in fact you know it was interesting there was a point where i thought i wasn't gonna do it and i kind of gave the idea to Terry Pratchett. We'd had our photos taken in a graveyard

and we were talking about graveyards and kids. And I said, well, there's this book that I was going to write and this is what I was going to do in it. And what is lovely is Terry didn't do any of that exactly, but he wrote a book called Johnny and the Dead, which was sort of taking some of the stuff, but it wasn't close enough that I couldn't then still do my story.

But what was great is I knew that this was still important and I still wanted to tell the story and over the years I would just let it accumulate. And finally, in about 2003, I finished writing, I think it was Anansi Boys. Which I also listened to on audio. Ah, Lenny Henry. Isn't he brilliant? Incredible.

Incredible. Such a great read. And I got to the end of Anansi Boys, and I thought, you know, I don't think I'm getting any better. I think this is now, as a writer, I'm probably me.

That's probably it. I may improve, you know, a tiny bit, but it's not going to be the leaps and bounds that I know that I was. So I have absolutely no excuse for putting off the graveyard book. But when I've started the other two times and pages of The Witch's Headstone, chapter four. And did emotionally exactly the same thing I always do. I had always done at that point with the graveyard book, which is, ah, it's just not good enough. It's not good enough.

My daughter, Maddie, because at this point, we're in the Cayman Islands on a small holiday, me, Maddie, and Holly. Maddie comes out the sea, wanders over to me, and says, what are you doing? I said, I'm writing a story. She says, read it to me. So I read her the first page and a half that I'd written. And she said, what happens next?

So I kept going. And I think I would have absolutely have been capable of giving up and failing at that point, except Maddie wanted to know what happened next. So I kept writing. And by the end of that, I'd written a story that felt like it worked. I had the tone. I had the voice. I had Silas.

I had all of that stuff. What a great character, by the way. He's so lovely. Silas. And then I started at the beginning. And the one thing that I have no idea where it came from, because it was just sitting in the notebook when I came to start. It's like I'd written it at some point in the previous five years, knowing that it would be, you know, knowing that I would have to start at some point was just the line, there was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife. And knowing that that was the first line of

the story. And feeling kind of, you you know having very mixed feelings about that because going well on the whole this story is going to be very loving it's going to be very tender it's going to be about growth it's going to be about families it's going to be about villages it's going to be about people but the first few pages are going to be absolutely terrifying. And that was the first line. Yeah, I think you've certainly delivered on the first few pages being very, very terrifying. I'm going to go back and listen to that again.

Maybe I'll try Ensemble this time around. The Ensemble is really... And I'm not just saying this because for me you know listening to one of my own audio books is a lot like back when you were young and we had answering machines and you would

be listening to messages people had left for you and then you'd suddenly hit your own voice and it's just like no i don't sound like that um but i but it's derek jacoby who is one of england's greatest actors as the narrator you the cast of people like miriam margolis reese shearsmith just this fabulous cast so you mentioned a name that i was planning on bringing up anyway and that is terry pratchett yeah and i think many people who at least in the united

states are less familiar with terry than perhaps they they should be could you tell us who Terry is and how you first met? Terry Pratchett, later Sir Terry Pratchett, was an English writer who died in March 2015. He was a humorist, a satirist, best known for the Discworld novels set on a flat earth, which is on the back of four elephants on the back of an enormous turtle swimming through space. And he was my friend. Um, Terry and I met when his first book, first Discworld book, The Color of Magic, was due to come out in paperback. And we met for years and years. We would tell everybody that we met in a Chinese restaurant.

And again, a few years ago, i found my desk diary from 1985 and i thought ah there's terry and me meeting in february uh 1985 i wonder which um chinese restaurant it was it turned out we actually met on like the 28th of january and was Bertarelli's Italian restaurant in, was it Gouge Street? I think it was Gouge Street. Proving that memory is gloriously fallible. Embarrassingly so since I'd actually filmed a piece to camera in a Chinese restaurant restaurant um about terry's passing um but it's you know i was a young journalist uh terry at the time was working as the press officer for the uh central electricity board in the uk and um we hit it off. In a way, it's just that sort of thing where you go,

oh, you have the same kind of mind that I have. Not exactly, but the Venn diagram of overlap is... It was the point where we got onto the subject of grimoires, of occult books. And Terry mentioned that he had come up with one called the Necro Telecomnicon, the Book of the Telephone Numbers of the Dead. And I said, that's really weird. I've just come up with one called The Leva Fulvarum Paganarum, The Book of Yellow Colored Pages.

And it's going, oh, we have the same kind of head that goes to the same kind of places. And we became friendlier. Friendlier. After a while, Terry would start sending me his books to read as he was writing them um you know a floppy disk would arrive and it would have 30 000 words on it of a novel or my phone would ring and terry would say hello, it's me. So which is funnier? And he'd just be writing and he'd want somebody to talk to.

So I had written a book called Don't Panic, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion, which was great. I got to work with Douglas Adams. I got to rummage through Douglas's filing cabinets and obscurity stuff. I'd written the whole book of who Douglas was and what Hitchhiker's was. And I realized by the end of it that I could write in that style. Classic English humor with funny footnotes and things like that. That was something I could do. And I had an idea for a book inspired really by reading The Jew of Malta. I've been reading Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. I've been reading Marlow's The Jew of Malta, and there's just a line in it

where these evil Jews meet, and they compare evil that they've done. And I thought, you know, you could do that scene with demons, and it would be really nice if you got demon number one, who's done lots of evil, demon number two has done lots of evil, and demon number three, who just hasn't really, you know. And that was the start. So I wrote, and I had this idea about a baby swap,

kind of like the omen, but it all goes wrong and it becomes a nice kid. So I wrote 5,000 words of this thing. And I sent it to a few friends to look at. And then Sandman and Books of Magic took over my life and my time and didn't really think about it. I knew that it was a thing and I knew I'd get to it one day. And then I got a phone call from Terry. How much later was this? Maybe eight months, nine months.

And he says, yeah, that thing you sent me, are you doing anything with it? And I said, well, no, I'm doing Sandman. I'm doing Books of Magic. He said well no i'm doing sandman i'm doing booksmagic he said well i know what happens next so either sell me the idea and what you've written so far or we can write it together now as far as i was concerned that was a lot like michelangelo ringing you up and saying yeah do you want to paint a ceiling together this weekend? You know, you're going, I loved Terry's craft. Terry became, somewhere in there, before the arrival of J.K. Rowling, the best-selling novelist in the UK.

I mean, tens of millions of copies. Millions upon millions of copies. This was before that. This was, you know, he just retired from the electricity board to become a full-time writer. I knew how good he was. And I'm like, this is a fabulous apprenticeship. So even though I didn't have the time, I said yes. And my life, you know, I look back on it,

I'm just really glad that I was 27, 28 when I was doing this because I couldn't do it now. I mean, just physically and mentally couldn't do it now. But I would write Sandman until midnight. I would write the Books of Magic from midnight until about 2.30. And I would write Good Omens from 2.30 until about 6am. And then I would get up at one o'clock in the afternoon. And my answering machine would have a little blinking light on it. And I would get up at one o'clock in the afternoon, and my answering machine would have a little blinking light on it, and I would press the button,

and the tape would rewind, and then Terry Pratchett's voice would come out of it, and he'd go, Get up, get up, you bastard, I've just written a good bit. And, you know, that was, so that was the process of writing was very fast very mad um that was the first draft second draft took us took us much longer um but you know we we had good omens we had this wonderful incredibly collaborative book um it was almost

immediately bought by hollywood and terry and i went out and had one of those hellish awful hollywood experiences that you laugh at when other people tell you in their stories about them because you're like it can't be that bad it's And it's like, no, it really is that bad. And it really was that bad. And then over the years, Terry Gilliam tried to make it into a film, which we loved the idea of. Then we were going to do it as a TV series and we couldn't really find somebody to adapt it and eventually terry

terry and i had a deal that we would never do anything individually on good omens it had to be together or not at all and then one day he emailed me and he said, look, you have to do this. You have to do this because you're the only other person who has the same amount of love for and understanding of the old girl that I have. And I want to see it before the lights go out. And then, and I said I said okay and then Terry died which meant that now it had become this sort of last request and if the upcoming Good Omen series is good which I believe it is a lot of what makes it good,

a lot of what, because I was the showrunner. I wrote it and I showran it. But I think what makes it good is I wasn't prepared to compromise on it. And I am normally very prepared to compromise. I'm encouraging when other people want to bring ideas to the table. I'm like, yeah, go do something fun with this. I've already done the book or whatever. But in this case, I had a Terry Pratchett in the back of my head,

who I had to please. And, you know, the producers would say, well, Neil, I know you've written this sequence where Agnes Nutter, the witch, is taken out and burned. And it's, you know, we have villagers and we have, it's the 1640s and you've got a giant bonfire and an explosion and all of this kind of stuff. And we thought we could save a lot of money and do it just as well if we had woodcuts of what happened and the narrator telling the story. And I would be like, okay. And then I would stop and I would think, what would Terry think about that? I'm like, Terry would have nothing polite to say about any

of these people. And it's like, you know, I'm sorry, we're gonna have to do it the way I wrote it. And the way it is in the book, we're not doing it with woodcuts. And, and it was like that all the way through. It was like, you know, just trying to hold the line and make this thing that Terry would have been proud of and using stuff that we came up with in the book, using stuff that we'd come up with talking after the book, stuff that we would have put into the next book if there ever had been one,

and just making it all something that Terry would have been proud of. And it's been really wonderful. This South by Southwest has been the first time anybody has seen anything from Good Omens. And we showed some clips. And hearing audiences laugh was kind of amazing. It was like, oh, it does work.

They're liking it. They're loving it. It does work. You showed me only a very short clip, but I know the book. And I'm familiar with it. And with the work you've done or any work or characters I deeply care about, I collected comics from my entire childhood. I still have probably 10,000 polybag comics that I've refused to get rid of.

And every time a comic book movie would be made in my younger years, because they were not done generally very well, I would sort of peek through a crack in my fingers to see how characters would turn out. And it was always very stressful for me because I had so much invested in many different characters. And just I'll give a thank you to Hugh Jackman for getting Logan and Wolverine right, which was a huge relief. And seeing this clip, it really gave me the feeling that you'd pulled it off. That it lived up to my experience as a reader and a listener. I think mostly we have.

And I think that is, a lot of that is casting. Michael Sheen and David Tennant were perfect. And they'd never really been anything before. Because they go up for the same parts because they are very similar actors and people were like why would you cast them why don't you go you know they it's like casting the same person you can well yeah it kind of is actually and it's one of the reasons why it

works so well they have joked about and i'm not sure if they're joking about if ever i write a stage play version of good omens they would go on tour with it and alternate roles each night that's a brilliant idea wow i want to uh well first i should say and and we'll put this certainly in the show notes and everywhere else and in the people have already heard in the introduction, but where can people learn more about Good Omens? That's a really good question. Well, one thing that I would recommend you do is read the book, Good Omens, the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

And it won't spoil anything for you with the TV show. There's enough stuff in there that I put in for people who knew the book. There are Easter eggs in there where only somebody who's read the book will know that something is funny or know why something's happened. But there's also things that people who read the book will not be expecting. So that's the first thing. YouTube or any Amazon Prime ads have the ad for Good Omens Up, the trailer. You can go and watch that. it's a lot talkier than the trailer the trailer is is a lot of it is things going bang because that's what they like putting

in trailers um you know if it were me i would my trailer would have just been sort of like you know three minutes of two characters talking it's's like, here you go, here's the trailer. If you like this, you'll like the show. But I think very wisely, they put in, you know, giant walls of fire and heaven and hell and hellhounds and all of the glorious stuff. You mentioned a word, apprenticeship. What are the types of things that you learned from Terry or picked up?

The biggest thing, looking back on it, that I learned from Terry was a willingness to go forward without knowing what happens. You might know what happens next, but you don't know what happens you might know what happens next but you don't know what happens after that but it's okay because you're a grown up and you will figure it out

you know the there's lots of metaphors for writing a novel. And George R.R. Martin, for example, divides writers into architects and gardeners. And I can be an architect if I have to. But I'd rather be a gardener. I would rather plant the seeds, water them,

and figure out what I'm growing as they grow and then prune it and trim it and, you know, bleach it, whatever I need to do to make something beautiful that appears intentional but at the end of the day you have to allow for accidents and randomness and just what happens when things grow

so the joy of Good Omens really I mean the best thing about Good Omens was having Terry Pratchett as an audience. Because if I could make Terry laugh, I knew, you know, that it's like hitting that bell in, you know, hitting the thing in the circus with the hammer. If you bing the bell at the top. And that's what I did when I could make Terry laugh. He is no longer with us and uh i'd be curious to know how he faced mortality because i i for instance have alzheimer's on both sides of

my family so i've had the opportunity to observe people with alzheimer's which is can be very, very difficult. How did he approach his own mortality? Terry made an astonishingly powerful... I mean, he faced it head on, and he made two or three incredibly powerful documentaries. One about Alzheimer's. The one that ripped me up emotionally was the one about assisted suicide. It was the one about the right to die, which Terry became a very firm believer in

and made his film as a piece of polemic about should you be allowed to turn off? Should you be allowed to go, okay, this is the situation I'm in and I'm in this body and I'm done. And, you know, he followed a man to Switzerland where he went through the end of life process. They turned off the cameras while he did. And it was incredibly moving. The last time I saw him confided in me very proudly that he did have the death cocktail. And that it was hidden away, but that it was there for him when he was ready. And I knew at that moment he was never going to take it because Terry had a kind of rear brain Alzheimer's. Memory was basically okay, but shapes weren't. The physical world had fallen slightly apart on him.

You know, he couldn't see things. He couldn't perceive objects. He could still think straight, but all of your spatial recognition, all of your object recognition stuff was failing. And I thought, even if you've got this stuff, you can't find it.

You can't get something from a hidden place. Nobody else is going to get something from a hidden place for you. And also, I thought, and you've hit, you're now actually beyond the point where you ever wanted to be. You didn't want to be here. You wanted to have stopped four or five months ago. But now you're here. And if you're here, you're here to the end.

And indeed, a few months later, he fell into unconsciousness. And a few months after that, he stopped completely. But it was inspiring. It was inspiring watching Terry talk about Alzheimer's, bringing Alzheimer's, which everybody has to deal with one way or the other, into the public consciousness as something that was okay to talk about, not as something slightly shameful that happens to grandpa. And also just talk about the right to die. Talking about it as a human right. And it, you know, I really, and I understand, you know, you can list out to me all of the reasons why it's a bad idea. And look, you know, here's a creepy family. And if they could kill mum for the money, they would.

And right now they've got her in a home. But they would have killed her and announced that she wanted to do it herself or whatever. I get all that. But also I get that the right not to be alive, the right to end it all, the right to go, okay, I've come as far as I can in this and it's okay to stop before I become something

that is a shallow shadow of who I once was. You know, that has to be a right too. How does it feel as, as such a close friend of his to be able to, to share this work that you created together? Weird. Really, really weird. The, the the the um mostly it's wonderful and then sometimes it isn't and um saturday night amazon had taken over a you know 19 000 square foot lot turned it into the garden of earthly delights it has a bookshop in a corner and hairdressers and a giant tree in the middle that serves alcohol it has wings that if you stand in front of them and activate some kind of instagram filter um or maybe it was a Snapchat filter,

will make the wings start to flap. Oh, you know, just filled with wonderfulness. And I'm there, and we have singing nuns, and then a Queen cover band come on. And I'm looking around and there's Jon Hamm and David Tennant and Michael Sheen and all my guys from my lovely American Gods cast come over and they're hanging out. I'm getting to introduce, it's like introducing your two families. And I was kind of melancholy because, and I knew that I should just be enjoying it.

I knew I should just be going, this is magical. This is the kind of fun, wonderful thing that you don't get very often in your life, and I should just be exalting in it. And instead, I'm just thinking, I wish Terry were here. He would have loved the nuns. He would have had a great time with the Queen cover band and he would have been just, you know,

grumbling to me about tiny details and enjoying it or taking enormous pleasure in tiny details and enjoying it or taking enormous pleasure in tiny details and, you know, having, deciding which color wings he liked having best or whatever. He would have loved it. And he's not around. And then by the same token, I know Terry well enough to also know the way that Terry was built and who Terry was. We probably would never have got to this point

had Terry been alive. Because if you're doing something like making a big TV show or something, something this big and this complicated, where things can go wrong, sometimes when things are getting weird or things are going wrong or the BBC are going a bit mad or whatever the only thing you can do is just focus on the outcome and just keep going and keep a steady course and so on and so forth and i knew terry well enough and worked with terry long enough to know that he was absolutely constitutionally incapable of doing that. You know, at the point where things, any one of a dozen places

where all we would have to have done is just keep on going. And, you know, Terry would have been making the phone calls to the head of the BBC or the head of Amazon or, you know, telling Jeff Bezos exactly what he thought of him. It was just like, no, that's just the wrong thing to do right now. So there's also that sort of weirdness of going, had Terry been around, we probably would never have got here. But getting here was all about making this thing for terry which he also wasn't here for which is why i'm saying you know so so a giant interwoven panoply of of strange emotions

absolute joy in having made it joy and having made it for terry because um nothing else would have stopped me writing novels for three and a half four years um but that did i think i have to imagine he'd be thrilled to see you in this amazing circus uh just before this piece of work is released to hopefully millions more people who will be impacted by the work. I think, and I think he would have loved, I think he would have loved so much of this and also being Terry,

he would have loved the fact that then people will come and pick up Good Omens, the book, and then they'll go and read Discworld books, and that will make Terry even happier. Neil, this has been so much fun. It can't be 90 minutes already. 90 minutes. That flew.

It did. It did. And I certainly hope it's not the last time we have a chance to have a conversation. We'll have to do it again. We only just got started. I would really love to. And I know we have, well, let me not state it that way. Many, many of my fans are your fans.

And just as Terry shared his gifts with the world, you continue to share yours. And it has an impact. It helped me through some very tough times was able to transport me delight me shock me scare me and take me through a whole range of emotions i didn't at the time even though i had access to so i want to thank you for making good art and sharing it with the world you've done a great job you are so ridiculously welcome thank. And do you have any closing comments, thoughts, remarks, anything you'd like to say before we wrap up? No, not really.

I genuinely enjoyed... One of the great things about having you as a fan is the books arrive arrive from you and they actually get read um and you know and i learn from them because you go off and and explore parts of things that i'm never going to um and and so i appreciate that too enormously thank you so much. And for everybody listening, we will include links to everything we've discussed. Including fountain pens. Including fountain pens. This might be the time to buy some stock.

And everything that came up will be in the show notes, as always, at tim.blog forward slash podcast. You can just search Neil or Gaiman and it will pop right up. And Neil, once again, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate it. And to everyone listening, until next time, read widely, check out Good Omens, and chat soon. Bye. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me?

Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

This episode of The Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Hello Monday, a new podcast from LinkedIn's editorial team. When I'm facing, say, a challenge at work, considering new career moves, or just trying to sort through my life, of course, like a lot of people, I look to my friends, family, and mentors for support.

The kind of advice that tends to stick, though, out of all the things they might say or ask, tends to be simple and powerful. For example, I remember when Kyle Maynard, who's been on the podcast, echoed to me a lesson he learned from a very well-known CEO, and that was when you ask people to rank anything from 1 to 10, including yourself, ask them to remove the number 7. And that means they have to choose between, in some cases, six, which is a barely pass, so that's a no-go, or an eight, which is a strong endorsement. So you can use this when asking people to judge work, designs, give you feedback on writing, chapters. You can use it with waiters or waitresses in restaurants

when asking how much they would recommend a given entree. And it's incredible how much clearer the signal becomes when you just make that one change and remove seven. So along those lines, Hello Monday is a new podcast from LinkedIn's editorial team filled with this kind of advice, the kind that stays with you, the kind that you can actually use. Each week, host Jesse Hempel sits down with featured guests, ranging from people like Seth Meyers, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love,

to uncover lessons you can apply to your career and to your life. For example, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about relieving creative pressure to get more done. And the way she tells the story is much more detailed. But as she was approaching her follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love, she tried to write. She realized after the fact, when she sat down with the first draft and started to cry, she realized she tried to write for six million people and it just wasn't working. She felt overwhelmed. And instead, she decided to focus on writing it to her 10 closest female friends. And she realized at the time she didn't know how to please millions of strangers, but she did know how to reach those specific 10 friends.

Which it turns out is exactly what I did after throwing away four early chapter drafts for the 4-hour work week. I took a very similar approach and wrote literally an email draft to two of my closest friends. So this type of stuff really, really works. And you should check it out. So find Elizabeth Gilbert's episode and other episodes from Hello Monday on Apple Podcasts

or wherever you listen to podcasts. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on demand, which is what I do. We'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20

minute ride in my undies. Hard to do that at the gym. Take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand. And you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers and I tend to do on demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over. But I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities so you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time and that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat

your personal best. Now that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me but they really 100 hit the nail on the head i was very very impressed with how motivating it was and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing which quite honestly takes a fair amount i can get quite lazy particularly with anything that edges on endurance which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me so check it out discover this cutting edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com. That's O-N-E Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com

and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started.