The Tim Ferriss Show - #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost)

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance, so you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. I've recommended it since the 4-Hour Body, which was, God, eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral greens complex,

Starting point is 00:00:41 probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very, very comprehensive. And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient-dense proper meals, but sometimes you're busy. Sometimes you're traveling. Sometimes you just want to make sure that you're getting what you need. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. It's also NSF certified for sport, making it safe for competitive athletes as what's on the label is in the powder. It's the ultimate all-in-one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy scoop. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience

Starting point is 00:01:22 a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday,

Starting point is 00:02:16 I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free.

Starting point is 00:02:48 And you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast. Some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing,

Starting point is 00:03:20 special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Optimal minimum. 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 seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show.

Starting point is 00:04:21 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

Starting point is 00:05:11 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.

Starting point is 00:05:57 Neil Gaiman is the best-selling 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 audio award for that. That is for best narration by the author. Nine, nine audio

Starting point is 00:06:34 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 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.

Starting point is 00:07:08 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.

Starting point is 00:07:23 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 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.

Starting point is 00:08:10 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 i got to do 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 uh rather hypnotic and then we got to do a very short uh chapter in tribe of mentors the last book thank you very

Starting point is 00:09:07 much for answering those questions and uh it's it's just such a such a thrill to be able to spend time with you i'm loving it and i thought i thought we could begin with the the glorious beginnings and maybe uh 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,

Starting point is 00:10:01 if there were conventions back in you know 1975 76 um 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 um which was the 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.

Starting point is 00:10:39 But I could phone up and say, from Metro magazine, and people would go, oh, yeah. I've heard you. And, you know know our voices had broken so over the phone nobody knew that we were 15 um and i remember interviewing uh michael moorcock uh who was an author whose work i loved with with my friend daveixon, who told me recently he just found the tape and is threatening to put it up as some kind of glorious podcast, which I really hope he does. 15-year-old 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.

Starting point is 00:11:31 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. I remember the sheer amazement and joy of these paintings that were,

Starting point is 00:12:17 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 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. at 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 um i always carried spare batteries i always carried spare tapes um if i could you know at the point where i could afford to i even carried a spare microcassette recorder

Starting point is 00:13:53 just in case just in case two is one and one is none as they say sometimes and so the gods 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're 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 uh that is it being sitting at my kitchen table doing a lot to sometimes produce a malaise.

Starting point is 00:14:45 This is the 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

Starting point is 00:15:30 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

Starting point is 00:15:57 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 uh i'll give you a you know 20 quid for the legs um and is about to take away this million pound uh antique thing and the farmers helpfully rip off the legs and throw the rest of it away it makes it easier for you and uh and those plots were both ian flannings and you start 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.

Starting point is 00:16:54 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.

Starting point is 00:17:38 I did it with the American draft of Neverwhere. That was the first one I ever tried. And I did the entire set 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, that oxford street was a big street with lots of shops on it you know or whatever they it was written for brits and londoners and she wanted something expanded so i expanded it um and i was in a room with as far as i remember no windows in the i think it was a

Starting point is 00:18:33 marriott in the world trade center and um which is no longer there but writing in that hotel room you just wanted to be out it's 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 you also have or have had some internal rules so you can 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.

Starting point is 00:19:16 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, allowed to phone a friend, allowed to, you know, make a clay model of something.

Starting point is 00:20:02 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 um and it's hard i'm as a writer i'm more easily you know i'm distractible um I have a three-year-old son. He is the epitome of cuteness and charm. 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,

Starting point is 00:21:02 asking me to read to him, demanding my attention. 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 a thousand years ago. And his,

Starting point is 00:21:45 his rule was very similar. It 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 8am to 6pm, with the exception of a break for lunch and swimming, it was the blank page or writing.

Starting point is 00:22:01 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. example um most of the time not always i will do my first draft in fountain pen um because i actually enjoy the process of writing with the fountain pen i like the um 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.

Starting point is 00:22:55 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.

Starting point is 00:23:22 That was not a good day. Nine pages in blue. not a good day um nine pages in blue that was what a great day and i i you can just sort of get a sense of okay are you are you working are you making forward progress um 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.

Starting point is 00:24:10 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. 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, I definitely, that's my editing process.

Starting point is 00:24:45 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.

Starting point is 00:25:38 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 word ones. And I realized that what was happening is, 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 work. Choosing is work. So it sort of expands a bit like a guess. If you have two things you could say, you say both of them. If you have the stuff you want

Starting point is 00:26:26 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 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 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

Starting point is 00:27:37 they they should matter they should mean something it's always important to me and you mentioned uh you mentioned distraction earlier and your a dangerously adorable son uh which which i certainly agree with uh i had read somewhere actually uh before i get to that this 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...

Starting point is 00:28:15 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 uh those were the ones I wrote Stardust and um and American Gods in sort of you know big size but they weren't terribly portable I went over to the Moleskins um 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,

Starting point is 00:28:52 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. And Joe Hill, about 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 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

Starting point is 00:29:36 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, built into a bridge. Somewhere in Venice, 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.

Starting point is 00:30:34 And then at home, my house in Wisconsin, which is where my stuff is you know i've got my we live in woodstock um but i have an entire life's worth of stuff still sitting in my house in in wisconsin and it it's become archives it's you know 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 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

Starting point is 00:32:08 enough and whether or not I actually get to write it in dip pen I'm not sure but I definitely want to write it in 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 um 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 it will be either a good day or an incredibly bad day so i'll get to the end of the first page oh no i have this pristine but it is it is the 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 um which is anything you do can be fixed what you cannot fix is 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

Starting point is 00:33:17 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 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? L-E-I-C-H, I think it's T-T-U-R-M. Ah, I got it. And then 1917, I think is their Twitter handle is definitely Leichtorm1917. Leichtorm, and I'll put that in the show notes for folks, so you'll be able to find it. Since you gave me,

Starting point is 00:33:54 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 assistant, my dear assistant, 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 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 they look after pens for you um and try them out

Starting point is 00:34:47 because the lovely thing about fountain pens is they are personal you you you go no no no and then you find the one um i tend to suggest to people who are um just nervously you 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, good starter pens. And they're just nice to,

Starting point is 00:35:27 to get into the idea of, do I like doing this? Um, the, um, let's see, what am I using right now? Um, 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 um this one here is called a falcon and again

Starting point is 00:36:27 you put a little bit of weight on it and the line will just spread and thicken which is part of the fun um of fountain pens um and i will just you know i'll i'll go and play. There's a lovely Italian one. I got my agent. I did a thing some years ago 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 you know for stories or for things being reprinted around the world and the contracts would come in and there would be

Starting point is 00:37:17 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 sign a lot. You have to do a lot of initialing. 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 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 uh the New York Fountain Pen Hospital with her and did the thing of showing her pens and going what do you like and then and Visconti, which are just these lovely Italian pens.

Starting point is 00:38:14 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.

Starting point is 00:39:04 I have seen footage of you icing your hand after some signings that was the signing tour that i really got into icing my hand because and wrist and arm um and you know i 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 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,

Starting point is 00:39:53 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 gone, that pen now has been given as a sacrifice to the house gods, and I need to get a new one.

Starting point is 00:40:18 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 uh 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,

Starting point is 00:40:58 because that paralyzes me. When I started writing, I had a type typewriter it's 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 belief book of science fiction and fantasy quotations i did with kim newman or whether i did it whether it was um for 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

Starting point is 00:41:54 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 and 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

Starting point is 00:42:27 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, 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 my theory about this is that one reason why you get this is because you're using dip pens. And if you pause, they dry up so you

Starting point is 00:43:27 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 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,

Starting point is 00:44:02 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 slow up a bit. You're thinking the sentence through to the end. And then you start writing. You write that, and then you pause, and then you write the next one. At least that was the way that I hypothesized I might be writing. And I wanted

Starting point is 00:44:35 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 and that so that was how I started writing that and again what I loved was suddenly feeling liberated was like ah I'm not actually making words are not going down in phosphor on a computer screen this trivializing is um i think very very important uh and i'd love to to dig into it a little bit because this is um something that's come up quite a bit initially very unexpectedly with with people i interview on the podcast i remember having conversation with sean white you know 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

Starting point is 00:45:39 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 writers, of musicians who have 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.

Starting point is 00:46:47 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. Did you work on,

Starting point is 00:47:34 so you worked on that before anyone knew you, in other words, you hadn't set expectations. Caroline was written. I thought Caroline was unpublishable. In fact, I was told it was initially. Um,

Starting point is 00:47:47 and, uh, I, I started it for my kids, my daughter in particular, Holly. Um, I showed it to an English editor who told me it was completely unpublishable.

Starting point is 00:48:03 Uh, we moved to America. The idea was that I was writing 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 Coraline 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 that I now had another daughter. I now had Maddie and she was a baby and she was getting bigger. And

Starting point is 00:48:57 if I didn't finish that book, you know, 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 uh at trying to remember were we at Harper Collins at the time or was it still Avon I think it was still Avon it hadn't yet been avon got bought by harper collins which is how i became a harper collins author um 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 a notebook by the side of my bed.

Starting point is 00:50:06 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 Coraline, which doesn't seem much. Right before bed. Right before bed. So I wasn't reading before bed. I was 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 i

Starting point is 00:50:32 would do you know five or six lines of caroline um but if you do it that way you know you've written a page a week and so it 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 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.

Starting point is 00:51:46 And they're like, that's great. But we'll, we'll wait for American guys. 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.

Starting point is 00:52:11 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 do one of the coming to America stories. And then I go back to shadow again. And 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

Starting point is 00:53:06 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 point where i have project a b c and d all waiting for me what i do is look at them make a noise like lurch from the adams family you know 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 means i'm gonna have to say no to more introductions and things yeah because and i love doing introductions

Starting point is 00:54:02 i i i 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. And then sometimes, you know, James Thurber, I was told I could bring, you know, that they would bring 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

Starting point is 00:55:01 assume are representatives of thousands of people over the years who've 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. That's why you do this. You mentioned writing right before bed. So I'd love to talk about the, maybe not the scheduling, but the timing of writing. So I 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 uh i'd love to chat about that because uh many of the writers i've spoken to and i'm sure

Starting point is 00:55:58 it's it differs person to person but tend to write either very late or very early because they feel like they avoid distractions when i started out um from 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.

Starting point is 00:56:37 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 um at two or three o'clock in the morning and 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 you know you um but 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 in 93, stopped drinking coffee, went over to tea. And tried being a late night writer,

Starting point is 00:57:30 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 3,000 pages of the letter M and just go, okay, 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.

Starting point is 00:58:21 The closer you can come to just Groundhog Day. You just repeat that day. You set up a day that works for yourself. You know, the last novel that I actually wrote, 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 uh get dressed uh and and get in the car drive down to a little cafe

Starting point is 00:59:17 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 I had The Ocean at the End 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. And 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 biggest problem we run into is going,

Starting point is 01:00:10 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:01:13 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 middle age, in my dotage, I could absolutely become a morning writer. In your dotage. I think that's going to take a while. I do want to ask you a question

Starting point is 01:01:48 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.

Starting point is 01:02:03 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. In fact, I owe you thanks for it because it 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.

Starting point is 01:02:33 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're 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?

Starting point is 01:03:10 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. If this goes on, telephones are going to start talking to each other and cut out the middleman. Wouldn't it be interesting if... 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.

Starting point is 01:03:57 I have not listened to the ensemble version. And 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 had a wonderful place in my heart and 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 uh recently um which was which gave me an insight into stuff on it so

Starting point is 01:04:46 i was 25 years old um 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.

Starting point is 01:05:40 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 um so every day i would take him and his little tricycle over the road to this little churchyard and he would pedal happily round and round the paths um through the gravestones. And I remember just the thought process.

Starting point is 01:06:33 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

Starting point is 01:07:11 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 uh 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 on it 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 um and that was really interesting but story doesn't work. And I think I forget, I think I've got a, there's a demon in it.

Starting point is 01:08:37 I don't have, who I think is the person who winds up being the person who kind of accepts him into the graveyard. 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.

Starting point is 01:09:23 May I pause for one second 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. And in fact, you know, it was interesting. There was a point where I thought I wasn't going to 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

Starting point is 01:10:06 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. wasn't close enough that I couldn't then still do my story. Um, but what was great is I knew that this was still important and I still wanted to tell the story.

Starting point is 01:10:31 And over the years I would just let it accumulate. And finally, um, in about 2003, I finished writing, I think it was Anansi Boys. Which I also listened to on audio. Ah, Lenny Henry.

Starting point is 01:10:52 Isn't he brilliant? Incredible. Incredible. Such a great read. And I got to the end of Anansi Boys. I thought, you know, I don't think I'm getting any better. I think this is now,

Starting point is 01:11:15 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 it didn't work, I started with chapter one. I'm going to start right in the middle. And I wrote the first two 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 just not good enough.

Starting point is 01:11:57 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?

Starting point is 01:12:23 So I kept going. And I think I would 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 the voice. I had Silas. I had all of that stuff. What a great character, by the way.

Starting point is 01:12:49 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

Starting point is 01:13:22 was just the line there was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife and 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 know, having very mixed feelings about that because going 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 very tender. It's going to be about growth. It's going to be about families.

Starting point is 01:13:46 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.

Starting point is 01:14:11 The Ensemble is really, I mean, you know, I, 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. The cast of people like Miriam Margolis, Rhys Shearsmith, just this fabulous cast. You mentioned a name that I was planning on bringing up anyway, and that is Terry Pratchett.

Starting point is 01:14:59 Yeah. And I think many people who, at least in the United States, are less familiar with Terry than perhaps 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. Terry and I met when his first book, first Discworld book, The Color of Magic, was due to come out in paperback.

Starting point is 01:16:03 And we met for years and years we would tell everybody that we met in a chinese restaurant and uh 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 Meeting in February 1985. I wonder which Chinese restaurant it was. It turned out we actually met on like the 28th of January and it was Bertarelli's Italian restaurant in, was it Gouge Street? I think it was Gouge Street. Proving that memory is gloriously fallible.

Starting point is 01:16:44 Embarrassingly so since i'd actually filmed a piece to camera in a chinese 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 Central Electricity Board in the UK. And we hit it off in a way that'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.

Starting point is 01:17:50 And I said, that's really weird. I've just come up with one called the Lever 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

Starting point is 01:18:39 i had written um a book called don't panic the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy companion uh 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 Hitchhikers 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 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

Starting point is 01:19:58 number two has done lots of evil and even 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 and kind of like the omen but it all goes wrong and it becomes a nice kid so i wrote 5 000 words of 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

Starting point is 01:20:38 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 Booksmagic.

Starting point is 01:20:55 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, 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,

Starting point is 01:21:28 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

Starting point is 01:22:22 until about 2.30. And I would write Good Omens from 2.30 until about 6 a.m. 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 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 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.

Starting point is 01:22:57 And, you know, that was, so that was the process of writing. It was very fast, very mad. That was the first draft. Second draft took us much longer. But, you know, we had good because you're like, it can't be that bad. 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.

Starting point is 01:23:47 Then we were going to do it as a TV series, and we couldn't really find somebody to adapt it. And eventually, 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

Starting point is 01:24:23 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, 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,

Starting point is 01:24:52 a lot of what makes it good, a lot of what, because I was the showrunner, I wrote it and I show ran 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 have it's the 1640s and you've got a giant

Starting point is 01:25:48 bonfire and an explosion and all of this kind of stuff and and um 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 going to 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 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,

Starting point is 01:26:48 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, you know, and we showed some clips and hearing audiences laugh.

Starting point is 01:27:21 Um, it was kind of amazing. It was like, Oh, this, it does work. It is. They're liking it. They're loving it. It was like, oh, it does work. They're liking it. They're loving it. It does work.

Starting point is 01:27:32 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 polybagged 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, it was always very stressful for me because I had so much invested in many different characters.

Starting point is 01:28:12 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.

Starting point is 01:28:58 Because they are very similar actors. And people were like, why would you cast them? Why don't you go, you know, it's like casting the same person and 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,

Starting point is 01:29:29 well, first I should say, 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, where can people learn more about Gromit? Uh,

Starting point is 01:29:41 that's a really good question. Well, you know, one thing that I would recommend you do is read the book. Good Omens, the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. It, and it won't spoil anything for you with the TV show.

Starting point is 01:30:01 There's enough stuff in there that I put in for people who knew the book. I kind of, 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've read the book will not be expecting so that's that's the first thing um youtube or any amazon prime ads have the ad for good omens up the trailer you can go and watch that um 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. You know, if it were me, I would,

Starting point is 01:30:46 my trailer would have just been sort of like, you know, three minutes of two characters talking. It's like, here you go. Here's the trailer. If you like this, you'll like the show.

Starting point is 01:30:56 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 after that. But it's okay because you're a grown-up and you will figure it out. You know, there's lots of metaphors for writing a novel.

Starting point is 01:31:59 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.

Starting point is 01:32:55 Because if I could make Terry laugh, I knew that it's like hitting that bell and hitting the thing in the circus with the hammer. If you bing that bell in, in, you know, hitting the thing in the circus with the hammer. If you, you bring the bell at the top and that's what I did when I could make Terry laugh. He is no longer with us.

Starting point is 01:33:18 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 how did he approach his own his own mortality terry made an astonishingly Astonishingly powerful. I mean, he faced it head on and he made two or three incredibly powerful documentaries.

Starting point is 01:33:52 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,

Starting point is 01:34:25 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, and he turned off the cameras while he did. And it was incredibly moving. Terry, 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.

Starting point is 01:35:19 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.

Starting point is 01:35:49 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're here you're here to the end and indeed a few months later he fell into unconsciousness and

Starting point is 01:36:34 a few months after that he stopped completely but it was inspiring it was inspiring it was inspiring watching Terry talk about Alzheimer's bringing Alzheimer's

Starting point is 01:36:51 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.

Starting point is 01:37:15 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 mom for the money, they wouldn't right now they've got her in a home, but you know, they, 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 um the right not to be alive the right to end it all the right to go okay I've I've come as far as I can in this and and it's okay to stop before I become something that is a shallow shadow of who I once was. That has to be able to share this work that you created together? Weird. Really, really weird. Mostly it's wonderful and then sometimes it isn't. Um, Saturday night, Amazon had taken over a, you know, 19,000 square foot lot, turned it into the Garden of Earthly Delights. Um, 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, or maybe it was a Snapchat filter, will make the wings start to flap.

Starting point is 01:39:27 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 John Hamm and David Tennant and Michael Sheen and all my guys from my lovely American Gods cast come over and they're hanging out and 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.

Starting point is 01:40:00 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, you know, deciding which colour wings he liked having best.

Starting point is 01:40:43 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,

Starting point is 01:41:17 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 any one of a dozen places where

Starting point is 01:42:00 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 and getting 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 a giant interwoven panoply of strange emotions,

Starting point is 01:42:48 absolute joy in having made it. Joy in having made it for Terry, because nothing else would have stopped me writing novels for three and a half, four years. But that did. I think, I have to imagine he'd be thrilled to see you in this amazing circus just before this piece of work is released

Starting point is 01:43:16 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 disquell 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,

Starting point is 01:43:46 that, that flew. It did. It did. And I, I certainly hope it's not the last time we have a chance to have to do it again. I would love to start. I would really love to.

Starting point is 01:43:56 And, uh, 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

Starting point is 01:44:12 through some very tough times. It 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 you and do you have any closing comments thoughts remarks anything you'd like to say before we wrap up no not really I you. I genuinely enjoyed... One of the great things about having you as a fan is the books arrive from you

Starting point is 01:44:54 and they actually get read. And I learn from them because you go off and explore parts of things that i'm never going to 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.

Starting point is 01:45:39 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.

Starting point is 01:45:52 Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five

Starting point is 01:46:10 Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

Starting point is 01:46:50 If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. Thanks for listening. If you're just busy, you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your basis. I've recommended it since the 4-Hour Body, which was gone eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very,

Starting point is 01:47:52 very comprehensive. And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient dense proper meals. But sometimes you're busy. Sometimes you're traveling. Sometimes you just want to make sure that you're getting what you need. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. It's also NSF certified for sport, making it safe for competitive athletes as what's on the label is in the powder. It's the ultimate all-in-one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy scoop. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true

Starting point is 01:48:37 myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #575: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years to Do (Repost)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.