Neil Gaiman — The Interview I've Waited 20 Years To Do

1. 0:00 – 6:32

   Start

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

      [upbeat music] Neil, welcome to the show.

   2. NGNeil Gaiman0:16

      Thank you. Thank you so much.

   3. TFTim Ferriss0:18

      I have been hoping to have this conversation for years, and if I flashback for, you know, 10, 15, probably 20-plus years, I've been reading your work. I can't say that about many people I've ever met.

   4. NGNeil Gaiman0:35

      And, I mean, you've been asking me-

   5. TFTim Ferriss0:37

      [laughs]

   6. NGNeil Gaiman0:37

      ... incredibly politely, um, if I could do the podcast or anything, vaguely.

   7. TFTim Ferriss0:42

      [laughs]

   8. NGNeil Gaiman0:43

      You know, sort of edging around it and giving me open invitations for a, for a good decade now.

   9. TFTim Ferriss0:48

      [laughs] This is true. This is true.

   10. NGNeil Gaiman0:49

       Um, and I, you know, and I, and I love the fact we've managed to do the occasional tiny, goofy thing.

   11. TFTim Ferriss0:57

       [laughs]

   12. NGNeil Gaiman0:57

       I got, I got to do read a page of your book.

   13. TFTim Ferriss1:00

       That's right. That's right.

   14. NGNeil Gaiman1:01

       It's-

   15. TFTim Ferriss1:01

       You read a page of the book, which was incredible, because I find your voice, as many people do, uh, rather hypnotic.

   16. NGNeil Gaiman1:07

       [laughs]

   17. TFTim Ferriss1:08

       And then we got to do a very short, uh, chapter in Tribe of Mentors, the last book.

   18. NGNeil Gaiman1:14

       Yeah.

   19. TFTim Ferriss1:14

       Thank you very 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.

   20. NGNeil Gaiman1:22

       I'm loving it.

   21. TFTim Ferriss1:23

       And I th- 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, uh, or am once bitten twice shy when it comes to audio. And then you shared one of your early days stories. What happened?

   22. NGNeil Gaiman1:50

       Oh, so, um, 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, you know, 1975, '76. Um, m- 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-

   23. TFTim Ferriss2:26

       [laughs]

   24. NGNeil Gaiman2:26

       ... was really fun, and we called it Metro, um, which was a name I came up with because it sounded like a magazine. It, 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 w- "From Metro Magazine," and people would go, "Oh, oh yeah." [laughs]

   25. TFTim Ferriss2:50

       [laughs] I've heard you.

   26. NGNeil Gaiman2:51

       Um-

   27. TFTim Ferriss2:51

       [laughs]

   28. NGNeil Gaiman2:52

       ... and, you know, our voices had broken, so over the phone nobody knew-

   29. TFTim Ferriss2:56

       [laughs]

   30. NGNeil Gaiman2:57

       ... 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 Dave Dixon, who told me recently he'd just found the tape and is, uh-
2. 6:32 – 10:53

   Home life vs work life

   1. NGNeil Gaiman6:32

      I got water, too

   2. TFTim Ferriss6:32

      ... 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've, I've found it, uh ... That is it being sitting at my kitchen table doing a lot to sometimes produce a malaise.

   3. NGNeil Gaiman6:53

      Mm-hmm.

   4. TFTim Ferriss6:53

      This, 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, uh, her writing. And, uh, then you brought up another name.

   5. NGNeil Gaiman7:10

      So, um, 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. Um, I was always fascinated by the fact that, that several of Roald Dahl's most famous short stories were plotted by Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming would-

   6. TFTim Ferriss7:47

      Really?

   7. NGNeil Gaiman7:48

      Yeah, he gave Dahl, um-

   8. TFTim Ferriss7:49

      [laughs] I had no idea

   9. NGNeil Gaiman7:50

      ... 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, uh, 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, are worth some money, so I'll, uh, I'll give you, um, 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-

   10. TFTim Ferriss8:42

       [laughs]

   11. NGNeil Gaiman8:42

       ... for him and throw the rest of it away.

   12. TFTim Ferriss8:44

       [laughs] "We'll make this easier for you."

   13. NGNeil Gaiman8:45

       And, uh, 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. Uh, 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 [laughs] weeks-

   14. TFTim Ferriss9:39

       [laughs]

   15. NGNeil Gaiman9:39

       ... 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.

   16. TFTim Ferriss9:48

       Mm.

   17. NGNeil Gaiman9:48

       That was the first one I ever tried. And I did the entire sort of American draft, which was a big second dra- ... 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, it, it ... or whatever. They, it was written for Brits and Londoners.

   18. TFTim Ferriss10:21

       Mm-hmm.

   19. NGNeil Gaiman10:22

       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 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.

   20. TFTim Ferriss10:52

       [laughs]

3. 10:53 – 19:50

   Neil Gaiman's biggest rule for writing

   1. TFTim Ferriss10:53

      It, it, it seems to me, and you can't believe everything you read on the internet, so I, 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, but I read, uh, that, and again, feel free to correct-

   2. NGNeil Gaiman11:16

      Yeah

   3. TFTim Ferriss11:16

      ... 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.

   4. NGNeil Gaiman11:24

      That, that was always, and still is, when I go off to write, that's my biggest rule.

   5. TFTim Ferriss11:28

      Could you speak to that?

   6. NGNeil Gaiman11:29

      Yeah, 'cause, um, 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. I'm 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. I- I-- 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.

   7. TFTim Ferriss12:34

      [laughs]

   8. NGNeil Gaiman12:34

      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. He's-- it's more fun playing with him than it is writing, which means if I'm gonna 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 a, 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.

   9. TFTim Ferriss13:28

      It reminds me of, um, another one of my favorite writers, you being the one who's sitting in front of me. Uh, John McPhee, nonfiction writer, uh, who has spent much of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, but has written some incredible, uh, Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction. And I was lucky enough to take a class with him a thousand years ago. And his, his rule was very similar, although 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 eight AM to six PM, with the exception of a break for lunch and swimming, it was the blank page or writing.

   10. NGNeil Gaiman14:09

       Yeah.

   11. TFTim Ferriss14:09

       He was disallowed from doing anything else. Are there any other rules or practices that you also hold sacred or important for your writing process?

   12. NGNeil Gaiman14:20

       Uh, some of them are just things for me. For 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 a 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, I like that thing. So I'll have a notebook, um, 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, that, I wrote that. Half a page in black. That was not a good day. Um, nine pages in blue. Cor, that was a, 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. It can-- you can change the age, gender, number of a character. Um, 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.

   13. TFTim Ferriss16:37

       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 on the computer?

   14. NGNeil Gaiman16:51

       No, I, I definitely... That's my editing process. I figure that's my second draft, is typing it into the computer. And also, I love, um... [lip smack] So backing up a bit here. Um, when I was, what was I? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight. 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, uh, enjoyed editing my own anthology, and most of the stories that came in were about three thousand words long. Move forward in time, not much, five, six, seven years, mid-'90s, everybody is now on computer, and I edited ano- another short story anthology, and the stories that were coming in tended to be somewhere between six and nine thousand words long. And they didn't really have much more story than the three thousand word 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 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 wanna add, you add it. And, and I thought, "Okay, I have to not do that," because otherwise my stuff is gonna balloon, and it will become gaseous and thin. Um, 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.

   15. TFTim Ferriss18:58

       Hmm.

   16. NGNeil Gaiman18:58

       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, 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.

4. 19:50 – 25:58

   What notebooks does Neil Gaiman prefer for writing first drafts?

   1. TFTim Ferriss19:50

      And you mentioned, uh, you mentioned distraction earlier and your, uh, dangerously adorable son, uh, which, which I certainly agree with. Uh, I had read somewhere ... Actually, uh, w- 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?

   2. NGNeil Gaiman20:19

      Um, when they came out, I really liked ... I've, I've used a whole bunch of different ones. I bought big drawing ones, which actually turned out to be a bit too big. Although 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 Moleskines, um, and I loved them when they first came out, and then they dropped their paper quality.

   3. TFTim Ferriss20:52

      Hmm.

   4. NGNeil Gaiman20:53

      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, uh, Joe Hill, the, the wonderful horror fantasy writer, um, suggested the Leuchtturm to me. And, um, so my usual notebook right now is a Leuchtturm because I really like the, the way you can paginate stuff in them and the thickness of the paper, and they're just like sort of Moleskines but, but the Porsche of Moleskines.

   5. TFTim Ferriss21:47

      [laughs]

   6. NGNeil Gaiman21:47

      They're, they're just better. Um, and I also have been writing-- I wrote The Graveyard Book, and I'm writing the current novel in a, uh, these beautiful books that I bought in a stationery shop in Venice, um, built into a bridge. Somewhere in Venice, there's a, there's a little stationery s- shop on a bridge, and they have these beautiful leather-bound blank books that just look like hardback books, but they're blank pape- pages. And, uh, 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. Um, I'm not sure. And then at home in ... I say at home. Um, my house in Wisconsin, which is where my stuff is. You know, I've, 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, uh, you know, it's actually kind of fabulous having a house that is an archive. Um, 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. Um, and it's an accounts book from the mid-19th century. It's 500 pages long. Every page is, is numbered. Um, it's, um, lined with, 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've written a novel in. And I've just been waiting until I have an idea that is huge and weird and Dickensian enough.

   7. TFTim Ferriss24:16

      [laughs]

   8. NGNeil Gaiman24:16

      And, um, whether or not I actually get to write it in dip pen, I'm not sure. But I definitely wanna write it in, in a sort of, um, old- Victorian, something slightly copperplatey. 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.

   9. TFTim Ferriss24:42

      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 gonna be a good day.

   10. NGNeil Gaiman24:50

       It will, it will be either a good day or an incredibly bad day.

   11. TFTim Ferriss24:53

       [laughs]

   12. NGNeil Gaiman24:53

       'Cause I'll get to the end of the first page and it's like, "Oh, no. I had this pristine..." But it is, it, 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 s- starting out. Um, which is anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is, is the perfection of a blank page.

   13. TFTim Ferriss25:17

       Mm.

   14. NGNeil Gaiman25:17

       What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it, 'cause there's nothing there to fix.

   15. TFTim Ferriss25:28

       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?

   16. NGNeil Gaiman25:37

       Uh, L-E-I-C-H...

   17. TFTim Ferriss25:41

       T-

   18. NGNeil Gaiman25:41

       I think it's T-T-

   19. TFTim Ferriss25:43

       Mm-hmm

   20. NGNeil Gaiman25:44

       ... U-R-M.

   21. TFTim Ferriss25:45

       Ah.

   22. NGNeil Gaiman25:46

       And-

   23. TFTim Ferriss25:46

       Got it. Yeah

   24. NGNeil Gaiman25:47

       ... and then 1917, I think is their, their, uh, their Twitter handle is definitely @leichtum1917.

   25. TFTim Ferriss25:55

       Leichtum. And I'll put that in the show notes for folks so you'll be able to find

5. 25:58 – 43:59

   Fountain pens Neil Gaiman has known and loved

   1. TFTim Ferriss25:58

      it. Since you gave me, uh... And I'm not intending to turn this episode into a shopping list-

   2. NGNeil Gaiman26:04

      [laughs]

   3. TFTim Ferriss26:05

      ... but I've never used fountain pens.

   4. NGNeil Gaiman26:07

      Really?

   5. TFTim Ferriss26:07

      I have not. And my, my, uh, assistant, my dear assistant, uh, does. She loves using fountain pens. She enjoys the act. I've, I've had a, 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-

   6. NGNeil Gaiman26:28

      Um-

   7. TFTim Ferriss26:28

      ... a good pen?

   8. NGNeil Gaiman26:29

      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-

   9. TFTim Ferriss26:43

      Is that a real place?

   10. NGNeil Gaiman26:43

       It's a real place.

   11. TFTim Ferriss26:44

       [laughs]

   12. NGNeil Gaiman26:44

       They have a... 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 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 know, "I, I've never used a fountain pen. What should I do?" And I will point them at Lamy, L-A-M-Y, um, who have some fabulous starter pens, and they're not very expensive, and they're good. Uh, they do a pen called the L- the Safari. But they have a bunch of good, good starter pens, and they're just nice to, 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, um, this one here is a Pilot. Um, it's a Namiki, and it's a flexi nib ever so slightly. When you put down weight on it, the, uh, the nib will spread. Um, it's a beautiful, beautiful pen. Um, so that one's a Pilot. I think this one here is the Namiki, and it's really weird because Namiki is Pilot. I, I don't quite understand that. This is a f-

   13. TFTim Ferriss28:26

       Maybe it's a sort of Toyota/Lexus thing.

   14. NGNeil Gaiman28:28

       I think it is. It's that kind of thing. Um, 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, um, of fountain pens. Um, and I will just, you know, I'll, I'll go and play. Uh, there's a lovely Italian one. I got my a- 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, um-

   15. TFTim Ferriss29:11

       This is for books?

   16. NGNeil Gaiman29:12

       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, and 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 loved 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, uh, the New York Fountain Pen Hospital with her and did the thing of showing her pens and going, "What do you like?"

   17. TFTim Ferriss30:06

       [laughs]

   18. NGNeil Gaiman30:06

       And then, and I got her a Visconti, um, which are just these lovely Italian pens. Um, 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, they, they really, they pretend to be interested- in what pen you like. But they don't care because they've found their own pens that they love. And they say, "What do you use?" And I, you know, I use Pilot 823s for signing pe- and, and I actually now I bought a Pilot 823, um, 'cause 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. [laughs] And-

   19. TFTim Ferriss31:11

       I have seen footage of you icing your hand after-

   20. NGNeil Gaiman31:14

       I-

   21. TFTim Ferriss31:14

       ... some signings

   22. NGNeil Gaiman31:14

       ... 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, 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, uh, in our house in Woodstock where if you just insert your father's Pilot 823 pen-

   23. TFTim Ferriss32:00

       [laughs]

   24. NGNeil Gaiman32:01

       ... which you have found on the table just to see if it would go in there-

   25. TFTim Ferriss32:05

       [laughs]

   26. NGNeil Gaiman32:06

       ... you can actually guarantee that nobody w- without disassembling the house-

   27. TFTim Ferriss32:10

       [laughs]

   28. NGNeil Gaiman32:10

       ... I mean, we actually have to take the entire house apart, um, to uninstall a cast iron fireplace from 1913 to get at the pen. So I've got-- And that is, that pen now has been given as a sacrifice to the house gods, and I need to get a new one.

   29. TFTim Ferriss32:25

       [laughs] It, it strikes me, uh, at least it, 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, and to sort of enhance the act of writing to make it something that is enjoyable. I don't, I don't know if that's true.

   30. NGNeil Gaiman32:51

       That's, that is true, um, 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.
6. 43:59 – 50:12

   Does Neil Gaiman tend to work on multiple projects at once?

   1. TFTim Ferriss43:59

      Do you tend to work on multiple projects at once? Is that-

   2. NGNeil Gaiman44:03

      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. Um-

   3. TFTim Ferriss44:22

      What does that mean?

   4. NGNeil Gaiman44:24

      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. Um, 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. And ... But these days, I don't think I'm as good at that anymore. I, I think I am. Um, I think it's great to have three or four things going on, but there is that point when 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 head space 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.

   5. TFTim Ferriss45:42

      [laughs]

   6. NGNeil Gaiman45:42

      You know, one of those, "Oh," kind of noises. And I go off and make a cup of tea and-

   7. TFTim Ferriss45:47

      [laughs]

   8. NGNeil Gaiman45:48

      ... 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."

   9. TFTim Ferriss46:01

      You also-

   10. NGNeil Gaiman46:02

       Which also means I am- I'm gonna have to say no to more introductions and things.

   11. TFTim Ferriss46:08

       Yeah.

   12. NGNeil Gaiman46:08

       'Cause ... And I love doing introductions. I, I, I, I ... I-

   13. TFTim Ferriss46:13

       Introductions, you mean writing introductions?

   14. NGNeil Gaiman46:14

       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 wanna ... 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, uh, you know, James Thurber, um, I was told I could bring, you know, that, that they would bring the, The Thirteen 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, um, over the years who've said, "You know, I, 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, that's what it's for. That's why you do this."

   15. TFTim Ferriss47:27

       You mentioned, uh, writing right before bed. So, 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, uh, you said that for, 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, 1:00 and 6:00 PM 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 it's, it differs person to person, but tend to write either very late or very early because they-

   16. NGNeil Gaiman48:11

       I-

   17. TFTim Ferriss48:11

       ... feel like they avoid distraction

   18. NGNeil Gaiman48:12

       ... 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, um, you know, all, all through there I was a late, late, late night writer. Um, nothing really happened until the kids were in bed, 9:00. I might have faffed around a little bit during the day, but now- It's all done, and now I'm getting down to work. And, um, at 2:00 or 3:00 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.

   19. TFTim Ferriss49:08

       [laughs]

   20. NGNeil Gaiman49:09

       You know, you... Um, but so that's what I did. And, um, and I was a smoker and a coffee drinker, and it was great. I moved to America in '92, gave up smoking s- '93, um, stopped drinking coffee, went over to tea, um, and tried being a late-night writer, tried carrying on being a late-night writer, and gradually realized that I wasn't really anymore. What tended to happen was somewhere around 1:00 in the morning, I'd be writing away, and then I would lift my head from the keyboard at 4:00 in the morning and have 3,000 pages of the letter M-

   21. TFTim Ferriss49:58

       [laughs]

   22. NGNeil Gaiman49:58

       ... and, um, just go, "Okay, that, this doesn't really work anymore for me." And then I started rescheduling, um, trying different things out.

7. 50:12 – 54:47

   Advice to aspiring novelists

   1. NGNeil Gaiman50:12

      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.

   2. TFTim Ferriss50:27

      Hmm.

   3. NGNeil Gaiman50:28

      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' 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. Um, and I went down there, and I would get up in the morning. I would go for a jog, come back, um, do my yoga, uh, get dressed, uh, and, and get in the car, drive down to a little café 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 cup of, large cup of green tea, sit in the corner, and just start writing. And I would do that day over and over and over and over. And, you know, 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 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. Um, my friend Gene Wolfe, who is, um, now in his late 80s and is one of, um, you know, the finest writers that America has, um, for years was a, an editor of a magazine about factories. I think it was called Plant Engineering. And so he'd get up at 4:00 in the morning and write for an hour, um, 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. Um, 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. Um, but I can absolutely imagine that one day I'll, 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-

   4. TFTim Ferriss53:47

      [laughs]

   5. NGNeil Gaiman53:48

      ... a morning writer.

   6. TFTim Ferriss53:50

      In your dotage. Uh, I think that's gonna 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, uh, uh, and this, of course, I think I'm getting it right because it comes from a reliable source, which is your blog.

   7. NGNeil Gaiman54:06

      [laughs]

   8. TFTim Ferriss54:07

      And-

   9. NGNeil Gaiman54:07

      My blog is a pretty reliable source, I think

   10. TFTim Ferriss54:09

       I think it's very reliable. And, uh, for those, those who know your work outside of the blog, I'd really encourage to, to read some of your work on the blog. Uh, there's some really touching personal work, uh, one in particular about, uh, your gorgeous white dog, whose name I'm, I'm currently... Just an e- such a beautiful piece, uh, that i- in fact, um, I owe you thanks for because it led in, in part, there were many factors, but to me getting my first dog, uh, as an adult, Molly, which I put off for decades. So thank you for that. But this question, beautiful piece, is, is related to Holly.

8. 54:47 – 1:10:49

   Genesis story of The Graveyard Book

   1. TFTim Ferriss54:47

      So and I'm gonna use this as a very sneaky way to ask you a question that you'd probably dislike being asked. [laughs] 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, uh, what I, what I noted here, I'm not gonna ask it that way, but the, the line that stuck out was, "You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions." Right? "What if... What if you woke up with wings? If only. If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. I wonder... 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..." Uh, and, and the, the question I'm gonna ask as a follow-up doesn't have to map perfectly to this, but, uh, 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, my absolute favorite, uh, fiction audiobook of all time. And it is, it is-- I remember the exact moment when I finished The Graveyard Book in audio, and there are multiple versions. People do ask me. I have not listened to the ensemble version. And so I'm sure it's spectacular, but not, not to sound creepy, I do find your voice very soothing. Um, and I finished it as my plane was, um, not my plane, let me rephrase. As a plane was, uh, landing, and I had a few minutes before we landed, and I thought about restarting the book. So it's, it's, it's had a, a wonderful place in my heart and my mind. Where did that book come from?

   2. NGNeil Gaiman56:33

      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, uh, which gave me an insight into stuff on it. So I was twenty-five years old. Um, it would've been nineteen eighty-four, eighty-five, maybe even into eighty-six. Um, I was living in Sussex in a little town in a very tall house. Um, my dad owned the house. Uh, actually, what he owned was a shop underneath, but the house sort of came, came with it. And because little old English towns go back for a long time, the house was at least three hundred years old. Um, 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.

   3. TFTim Ferriss58:09

      [laughs]

   4. NGNeil Gaiman58:10

      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, 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, uh, it would be like, you know, a kid in a graveyard getting brought up by dead people. And then I thought, "Well, 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, but 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, um, an entire first chapter, I discovered. 'Cause about a year ago, looking for something else, I found it. And, uh, 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 on it, quite good pen portrait of my son, Mike, who is now a thir-

   5. TFTim Ferriss1:00:18

      That you did, that you did.

   6. NGNeil Gaiman1:00:19

      That, you know, I'm describing the baby, and I only knew one, so, so it's-

   7. TFTim Ferriss1:00:23

      Mm-hmm

   8. NGNeil Gaiman1:00:23

      ... it's Mike. Um, and that was really interesting. But story doesn't work, and I think-- I, I forget. I think I've got a, um... There's this, there's a demon in it I don't have, um, who I think is the person who winds up being the person who, who kind of accepts him into the graveyard. Um, you know, nothing's quite right, but the, uh, 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."

   9. TFTim Ferriss1:01:31

      May I pause for one second?

   10. NGNeil Gaiman1:01:32

       Yeah.

   11. TFTim Ferriss1:01:33

       You must have ideas for potential stories all the time.

   12. NGNeil Gaiman1:01:39

       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 been-- we'd had our photos taken in a graveyard, and it would-- we were talking about graveyards and kids. And I said, "Well, there's this book that I was gonna write, and this is what I was gonna do in it." And what is lovely is Terry didn't do any of that exactly, but he took-- 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. Um, but what was great is I, 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, um, in about two thousand and three, I finished writing, I think it was Anansi Boys. And I-

   13. TFTim Ferriss1:02:56

       Which I also listened to on, on audio.

   14. NGNeil Gaiman1:02:58

       Ah, Lenny Henry. Isn't he brilliant?

   15. TFTim Ferriss1:03:00

       Incredible. Incredible.

   16. NGNeil Gaiman1:03:01

       It's such a great read. Um, and I got to the end of Anansi Boys, and I thought, "You know what? I, 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 gonna 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 gonna start right in the middle. And I wrote the first two pages of, um, of, of The Witch's Headstone, chapter four, and did emotionally exactly the same thing I always do. I, I had always done at that point with The Graveyard Book, which is go, "Ah, it's just not good enough. It's not good enough." My daughter, Maddie, because at this point we're on-- 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, 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-- 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 all of that stuff-

   17. TFTim Ferriss1:04:54

       What a great character, by the way

   18. NGNeil Gaiman1:04:56

       ... was, was right. He's so lovely.

   19. TFTim Ferriss1:04:57

       Silas.

   20. NGNeil Gaiman1:04:58

       And then I started at the beginning, and I-- and the, the, 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."

   21. TFTim Ferriss1:05:33

       Mm.

   22. NGNeil Gaiman1:05:33

       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, "Well, on the whole, this story is gonna be very loving. It's gonna be very tender. It's gonna be about growth. It's gonna be about families. It's gonna be about villages. It's gonna be about people." But the first few pages are gonna be absolutely terrifying. And that was the first line.

   23. TFTim Ferriss1:06:05

       Well, yeah. Yeah, I think you d- you've certainly delivered on the first few pages being very, very terrifying. Uh, I'm gonna go back and listen to that again. Maybe I'll try ensemble this time around.

   24. NGNeil Gaiman1:06:18

       The ensemble is real-- I mean, you know, I, um... And I'm not just saying this because for me, you know, listening to one of my own audiobooks is a lot like-

   25. TFTim Ferriss1:06:31

       [laughs]

   26. NGNeil Gaiman1:06:31

       -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 Jacobi, who is one of England's greatest actors, as the narrator. You-- The cast of people like Miriam Margolyes, Reece Shearsmith, uh, just this fabulous cast, so.

   27. TFTim Ferriss1:07:00

       You mentioned a name that I was planning on bringing up anyway, and that is Terry Pratchett.

   28. NGNeil Gaiman1:07:05

       Yeah.

   29. TFTim Ferriss1:07:07

       And I think many people who, uh, at least in the United States, are less familiar with Terry than perhaps they, they should be. Uh, could you tell us who Terry is and how you first met?

   30. NGNeil Gaiman1:07:23

       Terry Pratchett, um, later Sir Terry Pratchett, was an English writer, um, who died in March 2015. Um, he was a humorist, a satirist, best known for the Discworld novels set on a flat Earth, which is on the back of, uh, four elephants on the back of an enormous turtle swimming through space. And, uh, 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, uh, 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." And it turned out we actually met on, like, the twenty-eighth of January, and it was Bertorelli's Italian restaurant in, was it Goodge Street? I think it was Goodge Street. Um, proving that memory is gloriously fallible. Um, embarrassingly so since I'd actually filmed a piece to camera in a Chinese restaurant-
9. 1:10:49 – 1:32:40

   Good Omens

   1. NGNeil Gaiman1:10:49

      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' filing cabinets and obscurity stuff. I'd, I'd written a whole book of, 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, it was something I could do. And I had an idea for a book inspired really by, um, reading The Jew of Malta.

   2. TFTim Ferriss1:11:39

      Hmm.

   3. NGNeil Gaiman1:11:40

      I'd been reading, uh, Marlowe'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 who's done lots of evil, and ev- demon number three who just hasn't really," you know?

   4. TFTim Ferriss1:12:12

      [laughs]

   5. NGNeil Gaiman1:12:13

      And that was the start. Uh, so I wrote... And I had this idea about a baby swap, um, kind of like The Omen, but it all goes wrong, and it becomes a nice kid. So I wrote five thousand words of, um, 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.

   6. TFTim Ferriss1:12:50

      How much later was this?

   7. NGNeil Gaiman1:12:52

      Maybe eight months, nine months.

   8. TFTim Ferriss1:12:55

      Mm-hmm.

   9. NGNeil Gaiman1:12:55

      And he says, "Yeah, that, 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, 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, "Hey, do you wanna paint a ceiling together this weekend?"

   10. TFTim Ferriss1:13:22

       [laughs]

   11. NGNeil Gaiman1:13:22

       You know, you going-- I, I loved Terry's craft. Uh-

   12. TFTim Ferriss1:13:28

       Oh.

   13. NGNeil Gaiman1:13:28

       Terry became, somewhere in there, before the arrival of J.K. Rowling, the best-selling novelist in the UK. He was-

   14. TFTim Ferriss1:13:36

       I mean, tens of millions of copies.

   15. NGNeil Gaiman1:13:38

       Millions upon millions of copies. Um, this was before that. This was, you know, he just retired from, um, the, 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 twenty-seven, twenty-eight 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 two thirty, and I would write Good Omens from two thirty until about six AM. And then I would get up at one o'clock in the afternoon, and my answer ma- 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."

   16. TFTim Ferriss1:14:56

       [laughs]

   17. NGNeil Gaiman1:15:00

       And, you know, that was, uh... So that was, that was the process of writing. It 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." And it's like, "No, it really is that bad."

   18. TFTim Ferriss1:15:40

       [laughs]

   19. NGNeil Gaiman1:15:40

       "And it really was that bad." Um, and then over the years, Terry Gilliam tried to make it into a film, which we, we loved the idea of. Uh, then we were gonna 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-

   20. TFTim Ferriss1:16:12

       Hmm

   21. NGNeil Gaiman1:16:12

       ...on Good Omens. It had to be together or not at all. And then one day, he emailed me and, uh, 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 wanna 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 Omens series is good, which I believe it is, a lot of what makes it good, a lot of what... 'Cause 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 wanna 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, 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, 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, um, 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've been proud of, and using, using stuff that we came up with, um, in the book, using stuff that we'd come up with talking after the book, stuff that we would've put into the next book if there ever had been one. Um, and just making it all, all something that Terry would've been proud of. Um, and it's been really wonderful. Uh, uh, 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, um, was kind of amazing. It was like, "Oh, this-- it does work. It is-- They're liking it. They're loving it."

   22. TFTim Ferriss1:19:35

       It does work. You showed me, uh, only a very short clip, but I know the book, and I'm familiar with it. And with, with the work you've done or any work or characters I deeply care about, I collected comics for my entire, uh, childhood. I still have probably ten thousand 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, uh, very stressful for me because I had so much invested, uh, in many different characters. And, um, just I'll give a, a thank you to Hugh Jackman for getting, uh, Logan and Wolverine right, which was a huge relief. And seeing this clip, it, it really gave me the feeling that you'd pulled it off, that it, that it, that it lived up to my experience as a reader and a listener with the book.

   23. NGNeil Gaiman1:20:38

       I think mostly we have. Um, and I think that is... A lot of that is casting. Um, Michael Sheen and David Tennant were perfect, and they've never really been anyth- in anything before, um, because they go up for the same parts.

   24. TFTim Ferriss1:21:02

       [laughs]

   25. NGNeil Gaiman1:21:03

       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 think, "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.

   26. TFTim Ferriss1:21:29

       [laughs] 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, uh, people have already heard in the introduction, but where, where can people learn more about Good Omens?

   27. NGNeil Gaiman1:21:47

       Uh, [exhales] that's a really good question. Well, the, you know, one thing that I would recommend you do is read the book. Um, uh, Good Omens, the novel by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Uh, it-- And, 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. I, I kind of-- There are, 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, 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.

   28. TFTim Ferriss1:22:50

       [laughs]

   29. NGNeil Gaiman1:22:51

       Um, you know, if it were me, I would-- my trailer would've just been sort of like, you know, three minutes of two characters talking. And it's like, "Here you go. Here's the trailer. If you like this, you'll like the show." Um, but I think very wisely, they put in, you know, giant walls of fire and heaven and hell and hellhounds and, and all of the glorious stuff.

   30. TFTim Ferriss1:23:17

       You mentioned a, a word, uh, apprenticeship. Uh, what are the types of things that you learned from Terry or picked up?
10. 1:32:40 – 1:37:57

    Apprenticeship with Terry Pratchett

    1. NGNeil Gaiman1:32:40

       or taking enormous pleasure in tiny details and, you know, having-- deciding which color wings he liked having best or whatever. He would've loved it. And he's not around. And then by the same token, I know Terry well enough to also know that 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, you know, 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.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:34:00

       [laughs]

    3. NGNeil Gaiman1:34:01

       You know, at the point where things... Any, any one of a dozen places where all we would have to have done is just keep on going, and, you know, Terry would've been making the, the phone calls to the head of the BBC or the head of Amazon or, you know, uh, you know, telling Jeff Bezos exactly what he thought of him or whatever. Just like, no, that-that-- just the wrong thing to do right now.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:34:27

       [laughs]

    5. NGNeil Gaiman1:34:28

       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 sa- You know, so, so a, a giant interwoven panoply of, of strange emotions. Absolute joy in having made it. Joy in having made it for Terry because, um, nothing else would've stopped me writing novels for three and a half, four years. Um, but that did.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:35:12

       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.

    7. NGNeil Gaiman1:35:26

       I think... And I think he would've loved, I think he would've loved so much of this. And also being Terry, he would've 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.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:35:42

       [laughs] Neil, this has been so much fun.

    9. NGNeil Gaiman1:35:48

       It can't be ninety minutes already.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:35:50

        Ninety minutes.

    11. NGNeil Gaiman1:35:51

        That just... That, that flew.

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:35:53

        It did. It did. And I, I certainly hope it's not the last time we have a chance to-

    13. NGNeil Gaiman1:35:58

        We'll have to do it again

    14. TFTim Ferriss1:35:58

        ... have a conversation.

    15. NGNeil Gaiman1:35:59

        We, we, we only just got started.

    16. TFTim Ferriss1:36:00

        I would love to. I would really love to. 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 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 know I had access to. So I wanna thank you for making good art and sharing it with the world. You've done a great job.

    17. NGNeil Gaiman1:36:34

        You are so ridiculously welcome. Thank you.

    18. TFTim Ferriss1:36:38

        And, uh, do you have any closing comments, thoughts, remarks, anything you'd like to say before we wrap up?

    19. NGNeil Gaiman1:36:46

        No, not really. I, I, I'm, you know, I genuinely enjoyed... One, one of the great things about having you as a fan, um, is the books arrive from you, and they actually get read.

    20. TFTim Ferriss1:37:01

        [laughs]

    21. NGNeil Gaiman1:37:02

        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.

    22. TFTim Ferriss1:37:13

        [laughs]

    23. NGNeil Gaiman1:37:14

        Um, and, and so I appreciate that too enormously.

    24. TFTim Ferriss1:37:18

        Thank you so much. And, uh, for everybody listening, we will include links to everything we've discussed.

    25. NGNeil Gaiman1:37:25

        Including fountain pens.

    26. TFTim Ferriss1:37:26

        Including fountain pens. [laughs] This might be the time to buy some stock. [laughs] And, uh, everything that came up will be in the show notes as always at tim.blog/podcast. You can just search Neil or Gaiman, and it will pop right up. And, uh, 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.

Episode duration: 1:37:59