The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.
Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 616 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, we welcome the prolific author of novels and comics including The Sandman, Stardust, American Gods, and Coraline. He’s also a writer and producer of film and television, serving as showrunner for the TV adaptation of his novel Good Omens. He has won countless awards for his work and is one of the creators of modern comics, has even played himself on The Simpsons. Welcome, Neil Gaiman.
Neil Gaiman: Thank you. It’s good to be here.
Craig: Neil Gaiman is on our show. I’m aflutter. We’ve been sort of chasing after this for years. I don’t mean chasing like Neil’s been like, “No, I don’t want to.” It’s just more that he’s a very busy person, but such a hero of mine. Normally, we talk to people that I’m either fully disdainful of, or they’re just contemporaries. You are different. You really are somebody I’ve looked up to as a writer for so long and has been very influential on me and how I think about writing and stories in particular. This is just such a delight. I promise I won’t do fanboy nonsense. This is the end of the fanboy nonsense, and we proceed.
Neil: Oh, good. But thank you. Thank you anyway, because it’s nice when you hear things like that.
Craig: It’s true. It’s all true.
John: We do want to talk about influences, because I think all writers are, to some degree, the sum of their influences. We want to get into what influenced you, and your feeling about how you’ve influenced other creators along the way. I want to talk about prose fiction versus comics versus screenwriting, mythology, adaptation, writing habits, and whatever else we get into.
In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, let’s talk about the things we never got to write or the things we never will get to write, because I know I have a long list of things that I will never realistically in my lifetime get to, and how we feel about those projects that are always out there floating. Cool?
Craig: Yes, and very dangerous for Neil, because if he mentions anything, then I’m going to say, “Oh, no, no, you have to. You have to, Neil. You must. Please.” It’ll be very annoying. I plan to be as annoying as possible throughout this entire podcast.
John: Let’s get into it. Let’s talk about early Neil Gaiman, who was probably a reader before you were a writer. What was that relationship between what you were reading and what you were fascinated to write? What were those early books you were picking up?
Neil: I guess looking back on it for me, the most interesting thing is what I loved and responded to the most was fantasy. But because authors who I thought of as science fiction authors were the people who showed themself the most in introductions, and they were visible, people like Isaac Asimov… You’d buy an Isaac Asimov short story collection, and he’d talk you through what he was doing and what was happening when all of the stories were written. Harlan Ellison – and Harlan famously hated being described as a science fiction author, but in my head Harlan was a science fiction author – would write about the process of what he did. Samuel R. Delany, again.
I definitely thought that I would probably grow up to be a science fiction writer, because they were the only people telling me how it was done. They were the only people telling me that there was a craft to this thing. Actually, it was raining that day, and the editor said, “Could you do a story about this?” They couldn’t think of a story. But then they were talking to their wife, and their wife said, “But there was that thing you always talk about.” Then they went off, and they sent in a story, and they got this fabulous cover. It just felt like that was the only time I ever felt I could be part of this group.
Craig: Because in a way, it was unromanticized by those guys. You imagine Asimov or Heinlein in an office, smoking and drinking and clacking away at a typewriter, because there were deadlines and bills to pay. It seemed like a job. It seemed attainable. I know exactly what you mean, because I remember going through this phase as a kid, and how Asimov almost seemed half publisher, half writer in that regard. It’s really interesting to hear you say, “Oh, it’s doable. It’s a job.”
Neil: Because I didn’t read Lord of the Rings and go, “I want that job.” I looked at Lord of the Rings and thought, “This is a beautiful thing.” I could no more have aspired to really, in my heart, write Lord of the Rings than I could’ve aspired to be a mountain. It was this amazing thing, and somehow it was written. But I couldn’t see the words. I couldn’t see the craft, whereas the people who just talked about the craft made it feel doable. The idea of Harlan Ellison writing short stories in the windows of bookshops, I love that. That made the craft of writing feel like something that was actually conceivable, that I could get there.
John: It feels like an approachable romanticization. You could imagine yourself doing it. There’s also this idea of a working-class kid could go off and do that kind of thing, whereas I think oftentimes we think of novelists as being a very special breed who went to the fancy schools, who came from a background that allowed them to be novelists, and whereas science fiction at that time feels very approachable, where a normal person could do it. We don’t glamorize the art and craft of science fiction in the same way we do other genres.
Neil: Absolutely. I thought I was going to be a science fiction writer, and then I wasn’t. It took me ages to realize that I was never going to be a… I always felt like, “Okay, I’m probably still a failed science fiction writer, but look, I wrote this story that I love, and it’s not really science fiction.” Furthermore, really at the end of the day, my understanding of science consists of enjoying reading new scientists, but you don’t want to say to me, “Neil, we need to get to the Moon.” That is up to you. You will never get to the Moon.
Craig: There would be a delightful story that would have a brutally sad but also weirdly wistful ending, and I would really enjoy it. I wouldn’t get to the Moon. I would enjoy the story.
I want to talk a little bit more about young Neil Gaiman, because I have this idea in my mind about what it was like. My idea could be wildly wrong. But I imagine this incredibly, intensely intelligent kid, who perhaps maybe is also a little bit lonely, because loneliness is just constantly present in everything you write, I think. An observant kid who also starts to see very early on the similarity between stories in all genres, from all cultures, because of that thing.
And then there’s this other thing. You grew up in a family that was Scientologists. I did not know that. You yourself are not, I don’t believe, currently a Scientologist. I grew up in a religious family, Jewish family. Ethnically, I am Jewish and will forever be so, but I don’t practice. Growing up in a religion also I think impacts our understanding of stories and mythologies and how some are elevated above others. This is my interesting picture of a young Neil Gaiman.
Neil: I think for me, one of the things that, looking back, may have been the biggest blessing, although I didn’t really know or understand it in that way at the time, was the fact that I was attending, as a scholarship kid, a high church, Church of England school, with parents who were Scientologists, but Jewish Scientologists who were determined that I was going to be bar mitzvahed, so who sent me up to North London every weekend and for school holidays, to have the ultra orthodox-
Craig: Oh, god.
Neil: … incredibly frum Reverend Meyer Lev come and take me through my bar mitzvah stuff.
Craig: Sorry, side note for John and most others listening. Frum is a Yiddish term for extremely religious. When you see Hasidic people, not all of them reach the level of frum. That’s what Neil is referring to.
Neil: That for me wound up being this very strange and wonderful thing in its own right, because I wound up getting this… In a lot of ways, he didn’t do what he was hired to do. What he was hired to do was teach me my bar mitzvah portions, so give me enough knowledge of Hebrew and the tunes that went with the bit to get me through it. But he discovered this kid who was incredibly fascinated by myth and by the Jewish stories. He happened to be somebody who was incredibly deeply versed in the midrash, in the commentaries, in all of this stuff. I would be getting this continuous, rather glorious parallel bible. I’m learning all of these weird stories. This is my weekends and my school holidays. Then at school, everybody except me is high church Christian. I’m the one getting the full marks on the religious studies stuff, because I’m loving all of this stuff. Then my parents are Scientologists at home.
I wound up, on the one hand, feeling like an outsider to every kind of belief, which I think is probably a very good thing for a writer to be. On the other hand, I wound up in a huge puddle-like confluence of belief, in which I found myself perfectly capable of believing anything, including the existence of America, which I’d seen on televisions. They have these pizzas and things there. It was this weird kind of place. I could believe anything, but I was just standing in the kitchen, looking at the people at the party.
Craig: Observing.
Neil: Looking back on it, it gave me a love of myth and a love of story. I think it was probably also responsible in some ways for the loneliness. I read a lovely thing about self-insert characters. Somebody had pointed to an interview done with me about Ocean at the End of the Lane, where I talk about how I’d actually basically taken myself at the age of seven. The family in that story is not my family. The sister in that story is not my sister. The house is my house. The place is my place. The viewpoint character is me at that age. I was thinking about that. I thought, I didn’t do the thing of… People were talking in this article about how if you do a self-insert character, you can give yourself superpowers or you could give yourself magic or whatever. I’m like, “No, I didn’t do that.” Then I thought, “I kind of did, in a weird way,” which is I gave myself friends.
Craig: Wow.
Neil: I gave myself a friend, which I really didn’t have when I was seven. I wasn’t that kid.
Craig: That’s fascinating. When you describe this kid who’s in the kitchen, looking out and observing, and then you describe this notion of self-insertion, whether it’s intentional or not or subtextual, I think about, I guess, perhaps your most famous character, who is Dream from Sandman, and how that’s literally his purpose for existing is to observe the stories that people create and always be apart from them and be so powerful as to be not powerful at all, because it’s just endless. He is one of The Endless. It never ends. I don’t know if that felt like self-insertion, but hearing you talk about it, it starts to feel a little bit like that.
Neil: In my head, whenever I was writing him, I never thought of myself as Dream. But I remember a few years ago talking to Karen Berger, my editor, and she was like, “Yeah, that was always you.” I’m like, “No, I was funny. I was this. I was that.” I can point to kid in Ocean at the End of the Lane and go, “That was me,” because that was intentionally me. With something like Dream, you’re into the danger spot.
Craig: I know what you mean.
Neil: You’re into the dangerous place where people say, “Which of your characters are you?” You have to say, “All of them, even the really nasty ones, even the terrible ones.” In order to write a character who feels true, in order to write a character that you recognize, in order to write a character, you have to go and find that bit of you that can be them. Sometimes you’re blowing on an ember to get it red again. There isn’t very much of you here, but you can make that. Sometimes it’s, “If I was, in an alternate universe, a talking pumpkin with a machine gun, what would I be saying?” It’s like an act of puppetry or of ventriloquism. You are talking to your hand. I think that, as part of being a writer, is always true.
Are there bits of Dream, of The Endless that are me? Absolutely. But there are bits of all of the characters in Sandman who are me. Merv Pumpkinhead was absolutely me, because sometimes I just needed to stand there going, “Do you realize how ridiculous the story is? Can we just take a second to take a look at the fact that this is what he’s doing and that he’s an idiot? Now that needs to be said, and it’s been said. Let’s move on.”
Craig: Wonderful.
John: Neil. We were talking about you reading science fiction, and science fiction felt approachable, because those authors were talking about their process in ways that other authors hadn’t been talking about. When were you starting to actually put words together in stories, the first things that you’d say, “Okay, this is a story that actually has a beginning, middle, and end, that has characters that go through a process.” Was that in childhood? Was that later on? I know you studied journalism at a point too. When were you actually telling stories?
Neil: I remember the only thing that I loved in school. There were lots of things that I liked, and there were lots of things I was good at, but the only thing that I loved was English essays where they let you essentially write a short story if you wanted to. That for me was the best thing. I remember stories I wrote when I was 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. In my head, probably they’re a lot better than they actually were when they were written. Then I remember they all got finished, because they were proper school essays, even though they were all short stories. Then there was a period in my late teens when nothing ever got finished. I’d start short stories, and I’d start novels. Sometimes I’d write 30 pages of the novel, whatever. But nothing would get finished.
Craig: What was going on there?
Neil: Probably two things, one of which was I wasn’t very good, and the other thing ,which was probably more important, was that when I’d written those school essays, you just start somewhere and head out for somewhere and get somewhere, then you’re done, and maybe you wrote something that worked, whereas I didn’t have any understanding of the idea of actually planning a story. I think that was important.
I think probably much more important than that was the fact that I had absolutely nothing to say at that point in my life. That is probably the hardest thing for a writer. I don’t give much advice to young writers. I give the same pieces of advice over and over again. You have to write. You have to finish things or whatever.
Brian K. Vaughan came up to me once and said, “You gave me the best advice I’ve ever had.” I said, “What was it?” He said, “I came up to you at a signing, and I said, ‘Want to be a writer. Don’t know how to do it. It’s not working. What do I do? I’ve written journalism. I’ve finished things. I can do this. But nothing’s any good.’ And what you said was, ‘Good. Go and live. Stop trying to write. Go out into the world. Get a job. Get your heart broken. Go and see things. Get stranded a long way from home. Have things go wrong. Have stuff happen. You don’t have anything to write about yet. What you’re saying is you’ve got the chops. You just don’t have anything to say.'”
There’s another truth to that, which is that we are, all of us I think who write, in a lot of ways, probably all of the stuff that made us writers and all of the big important stuff that happened to us probably happened before we were 15 anyway, but we’re much too close to it when we’re 18. We’re much too close to it when we’re 21. We may get back there when we’re 45. On the way, you just need things to happen. You need things to say. You need to figure shit out on your own.
Craig: That’s absolutely true. Particularly in Hollywood, when you arrive here, and your aspiration is to write in television or movies, everyone is put on a clock instantly. If you’re not succeeding rapidly, you’re failing. If you’re not succeeding continuously, you’re failing. Everything is defined in terms of what just happened, never the now, never the present, never learning, and never preparing for anything. I think a lot of people that listen to our show, who are trying to figure out the same questions that you get asked all the time at signings, what am I doing wrong, or how can I do it more correctly, a lot of them are feeling that pressure of, why isn’t this working right now? I think it’s so valuable to hear that from you, that it takes time to figure shit out.
Neil: Let me also throw in here, there is nothing that I’ve ever done and got right and probably got awards for that I haven’t also done first and got badly wrong and got lousy reviews for. You have to do those too. It’s the Chuck Jones line about you have a million lousy drawings in your pencil, so draw them all, so that the good ones can come out. It’s okay to do the thing that doesn’t work. It’s okay to write the story that fails. You go, “That was weird,” because three years later, everything that you learned, but you didn’t know that you were learning when you were writing that story or writing that TV series or whatever, is going to be there for you when you need it, to write the good one.
Craig: I love that.
John: Neil, when do you first think you can identify yourself a consistent voice, where what the stories are about, the words on the page, where you can identify, “This feels like my fingerprints. This feels like my work.” What was an early example of that?
Neil: When I think I was just 22, I wrote my first book, which was a children’s book called My Great Aunt Ermintrude. I wrote it, and I sent it out to a publisher, and they sent it back. Because I didn’t understand if things come back, you keep sending them out, I put it in the attic, and I did other things. About 20 years later, Coraline came out, was incredibly successful. I thought, “I have a children’s book in my attic. I should pull it out, that book I wrote when I was 22. I’ll read it to my daughter and find out if it’s any good.” Went and found the manuscript. Actually, the original manuscript had vanished, but I found a carbon copy.
Craig: Oh, wow.
Neil: You remember those.
Craig: Oh my god, yeah.
John: That’s right.
Neil: I read the carbon copy. What was most interesting is, A, I had nothing to say, but I said it anyway. B, you could look at it on a page-by-page basis and go, “Okay, this is me doing a fairly competent Roald Dahl. This is me doing a fairly competent Hugh Lofting. This is me doing a now-forgotten writer named Noel Langley,” most famous for actually being one of the writers of the Wizard of Oz movie. “Look, I can do a fairly good Noel Langley here.” Then I remember around about page 100, there was a page that was pure Neil Gaiman. Looking at it now, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, look at that. That page, that’s all me. The logic of the thing.” I go back to that. Years later, I come back and I steal from that page. I do things, and I’d completely forgotten about it. “Look, there I sound like me.”
The thing about voice is everybody who starts out wants to start out with a unique voice. It’s absolutely possible that there are people out there who just have a unique voice. When they write, they write in their unique voice and they get there. I think for most of us, what we do is we start out sounding like other people, and we find our voice during the process of writing an awful lot.
There’s a lovely line that I’ve been quoting for decades now, which I was told was said by Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, except that I’ve tried to Google to find the original, and the only thing that I can ever find is me quoting that and attributing it to him. For all I know, I made it up. It’s that style is the stuff you get wrong. If you were a perfect writer, if you were a perfect guitar player, it would be pristine. There would be nothing there. It would just be the sound of a guitar being played perfectly. But it’s the stuff you’re getting a bit wrong that actually gives you the style that makes people go… That’s what people are actually responding to. Again, I think you only get there by… Write 100,000 words. Write 500,000 words. Write a million words. Pretty soon, you’re going to sound like you.
The first comic I wrote, first important one was a thing called Violent Cases. I sound like me in that. Then I go and write Black Orchid. I look at that now, and I go, “It’s pretty good,” but it’s me halfway between Alan Moore, whose work I loved, and me trying to find the voice that isn’t mine, which these days looks more like Quentin Tarantino than it does like anything that’s Neil Gaiman. Quentin wouldn’t be writing for another… I wouldn’t run into his work for another five or six years. It’s a fun sort of voice. Then Sandman starts.
In the beginning of Sandman, I’m just doing all of these genres that I loved as a kid. The first one is Dennis Wheatley-ish, British haunted house horror. Then the second one is EC Comics and DC Comics anthology titles. The third is what Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell were doing at that time. The fourth is really unknown worlds, back when people like Robert Heinlein in the 1940s were writing fantasy stuff, and doing one of those in the Hell one. Then I go all weird, and I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing.
Then suddenly in eight, the death one, I don’t have a model. I don’t have anything that I can do that anyone else has done, but I think I have a story. I’m not even sure if it’s a story, because stories are meant to have conflict, and in this story, you’ve just got a brother runs into his sister, and they walk around New York a bit until he cheers up, and on the way some people die. Yet that’s the one that I point at and I go, “That’s my voice.” From that point on, I become me, in my own kind of weird way. I’ve written enough, and I’m not trying to try on anybody else’s hat.
Craig: From a reader’s perspective, I don’t know if this is interesting to you or not, but I do remember getting to that issue and thinking – I don’t think in terms of the author; I just think in terms of the story – the story is relaxing. It’s relaxing, because you’re right, the first seven are throwing so many things at you. It’s dense, and it’s, in moments, extreme. Certainly, the John Dee story is extreme. It’s exciting, and it’s wild, and it’s wonderful, and it’s funny, but there’s so much. Then you get to that issue, and it breathes.
Then what I think is really interesting – and I don’t know if you felt this at the time when you were writing it – everything that comes after seems to move at the correct speed. When it wants to be fast, it’s fast. When it wants to be slow, it’s slow. It’s like you gave yourself permission to relax. What ensues is some of the most remarkable writing in any medium, I think.
Neil: I look back on it now, and I’m amazed at the incredible good fortune I had of doing what I was doing at the time that I was doing it. I was doing it at a time when you could do comics and exist under the radar, which was really important. I got to change the way that comics were told, and the idea of comics as a commercial thing changed. Nobody had ever done a comic at the time, in the mainstream, where they would anthologize what you were doing as you did it. That gave me an ability to tell much more complex stories that weren’t reliant on can you remember what you wrote a month ago. I knew that I was going to end the story.
I remember saying to Jenette Kahn, who at that time was the president of DC Comics, I said, “I will need to end Sandman when it’s done.” She said, “Neil, you know that isn’t going to happen. It didn’t happen with Batman. It didn’t happen with Superman. It’s an incredibly successful comics title. When you retire, somebody else will come in, and they will take over Sandman. That’s how it happens.” I thought, “Shall I argue?” Then I thought, “No, I’m not going to argue at all.” What I did from that point on was, every time anybody would ask me in interviews, “What’s going to happen with Sandman when you’re finished?” I would say, “One of two things will happen. Either DC will end the comic, and I will continue to work with DC, or somebody else will take over, and that will be the end of my relationship with DC Comics. One of these two things will happen.”
By the time that Sandman was wrapping up, I just remember getting a phone call, again, from Karen Berger, saying, “We can’t really keep this going after you’re done, can we?” I said, “No, you can’t.” She said, “Could we do something like a comic called The Dreaming, and just spin off some of these characters?” I said, “Sure, we’ll do any of those things. We can do a Lucifer comic or whatever. We can do all that stuff, but Sandman ends.” She’s like, “Okay.”
Craig: I would’ve been terrified to be the person taking over if they had continued it. That would’ve been the most terrifying thing to imagine. One of the reasons I would be terrified, because back to something you just said, which is, okay, this is anthologized, and you don’t have to remember what happened in last month’s issue, but sometimes you have to remember what happened three years ago in the issues, because your grasp of intertextuality is kind of unfathomable to me.
When you read the full length of The Sandman, there are things that happen, and it makes me think, “Either this man’s mind works on levels inaccessible to my own, or this was all preplanned in some insane room, which I doubt, or Neil Gaiman has a very good way of surprising himself with a connection and then making it work.” I’m curious as to which of those or what unmentioned alternative there is to explain how good you are at that.
Neil: Back then in Sandman days, I remember reading some Dickens and getting very excited reading Dickens, because I found myself recognizing what he was doing on a level of, “Oh, you are writing a serialized story.” There are things that you know, there are things that you have planned out, and there are places you’re absolutely going. There are things that you are doing because you have two pages to fill. There are things that you’re doing because you have two pages to fill where you’ve just brought something on that you don’t know is important, but it’s going to be a thing that you will use. Here’s a thing where you’re throwing a ball in the air that you know you will catch. You know the ball is important, but you don’t need to know right now why it’s important. You just need to know that it’s important while you’re writing the rest of the thing. It will be there for you when you need it.
I’m definitely not one of the people who sits down and does what I think of as proper plotting, where you do the architectural diagram of everything before you begin. In George R.R. Martin’s analogy, I’m much more of a gardener. I will plant things. It helped that until I got meningitis in 2003, I had the most amazing memory. I kind of lost that. After meningitis, I went back to having a normal human being memory.
Craig: Welcome back.
Neil: Exactly. It was like, “Okay.”
Craig: It took meningitis literally to make you mortal. All right.
Neil: It took meningitis. Before then, I had an amazing memory. I remember the entirety of Sandman was sitting there in RAM.
Craig: Wow.
Neil: There’s 3,000 pages of it by the end. It’s all there. I’m making all of the connections that I need to while I’m writing. There are things that I’m like, “Okay, I’ll do this, but I’ll put this down here.” I did them, but I also trusted future me, which I think is something that as a writer you have to learn to do sometimes. Future you is there. Future you will sometimes sort this thing out. You just need to know this thing happens.
The only time that future me completely let me down was in American Gods. I’d done this thing early in the book where Chernobog, this big, Slavic guard with a hammer, has said to Shadow, our hero, at some point, “I will do this thing, but you in turn have to come back here, and I’m going to smash your skull with a hammer.” I’m writing the book. Everything else is falling. Balls are tossed into the air, being caught. Everything’s working. I’m so proud of myself. That one, it’s just like, “Hey, future me, have we solved this one yet?” Each morning I’d wake up and go, “I’m still past me, apparently.”
I remember that one, I wound up in Gothenburg book festival. Terry Pratchett and I went over for the Swedish publication of Good Omens. We’re on a train back to Stockholm. I said, “Terry, I cannot work this one out.” I talked it through with him. I just said, “This is what’s happening in the plot.” He thought about it for a minute. He said, “What if he just taps his forehead with the hammer and lets him go? He could’ve done it, but thing happens.” I’m like, “Yeah, [inaudible 00:35:05].”
John: Neil, talking about the difference between American Gods, which was written as a full book, so you could’ve gone back and changed anything – you weren’t locked into decisions you’d made, compared to Dickens or Sandman were serialized and they were coming out every month and there was a responsibility to pay off those things before – all this reminds me so much of what the TV showrunner is doing. The TV showrunner approaches a season with a plan for how things are going to start, and then oftentimes in our favorite shows, it’s a few episodes in where it finally finds its voice, its footing, and it keeps going. That showrunner still has to trust future showrunner to keep things going, keep things running in the air. Can you talk to us about the process of delivering each new installment of something like Sandman? What was your timeline? Do you have, responsible every month for delivering the script for this and then seeing what was going to happen next?
Neil: Yeah. That was how it worked. You start out about six months ahead, but you burn that as you go, over the next year. Pretty soon, you’re only three months ahead. You don’t have that fabulous stash of time and stuff. You have to deliver. Much like TV, if I didn’t deliver Sandman on time, then the artist didn’t have anything to draw. Then the colorist didn’t have anything to color. The letterist wasn’t getting paid for lettering. They all had rent to make. There was an obligation there that I couldn’t really be late. I had to come through. Most of the time, I could do it.
I remember once having to finish a Sandman story before I went to a convention, and just finishing it and sending the script off, going to the convention, spending the entire convention being miserable, going, “I got the end wrong. I got the end completely wrong,” and getting home and just rewriting, doing a completely different last six pages and sending it in.
What I love about that is, on the one hand I had a great memory, and on the other hand, the day after I’d sent in the new script, I had forgotten what the old last six pages was. I’d tell people, “No, that issue had a completely different last six pages.” They were like, “What happened?” I’m like, “I don’t know. Something that wasn’t the story.”
Craig: Your body rejects it. I guess we’ve got some questions from other people that we might want to dig into here. But if there’s one thing that I think is essential for good writers to cultivate, it is that sense of knowing what is wrong, feeling it like a thorn in your skin, to the extent that it bothers you all weekend. If you’re not bothered all weekend at some point by something you’ve written, this might not be for you, and to then reject it like that. You’re absolutely right. When it’s wrong, the RAM flushes that. That’s gone. There’s no space for it. That’s why it was a thorn. It didn’t belong. Fascinating to hear. Look at this. We’ve got a big thing.
John: We’ve got a big thing here. We are a podcast about screenwriting and writing. It’s always so good when we can actually take a look at the words on the page and what they actually look like and what they were. This is from Sandman 24. This is just a look at what your script is like. With your permission, I’d love to be able to put a link in this to the show notes.
Neil: Of course.
John: We’re used to screenplay format. Most of what we talk about on the podcast is a very standard screenplay format. There is not one standard comics format. If you’ll look through, there’s similar things. They’re always talking about pages and panels, but the actual layout of stuff on the page is so different.
Looking at your thing here, it very much feels like kind of an email starting. You’re talking to Kelley, Malcolm, Todd, Steve, Tom, Karen. “Here we are at the third part of Season of Mists. We last saw the Sandman watching Lucifer walking away into the mists, having been given the key to Hell. This episode begins a few hours later.” It’s really chatty. It very much feels like you’re having a conversation with somebody about, this is what’s going to happen.
Then as you get into descriptions of what’s happening in the panels, it’s much more verbose than what we’re used to in screenwriting. There’s not this page-per-minute kind of assumption. It’s very full. You’re really trying to paint the picture for the artists and for everyone reading the script.
Neil: Bear in mind that in TV production terms, I’m the writer, but I’m also the editor. I’m also probably working very closely with people we’d think of like the production designer.
Craig: Going to say, yeah.
Neil: The artist becomes the camera crew.
Craig: Cinematographer, yeah.
Neil: The cinematographer and is also kind of all of the actors. They are also the production designer. You’re working with them, trying to get them every piece of information they need in order to do their job. What does this look like? What does it feel like? What emotions are happening here? What are people thinking? It’s stuff where if you were doing it in script form, you might be having conversations with people. You’re going to spend half a day with your production designer.
John: That’s what we talk about as a tone meeting, where you’re really sitting down, both a production and a tone meeting. You’re talking with all the different people about what you need to have done. But in talking with that director in the tone meeting, you’re really talking about, “This is what the intention is here. Let’s really think through what this is.” It feels like a tone meeting on the page here.
Neil: That’s exactly what it is. It’s an informal letter to the artist and to everybody else who might be involved. I write in order to try and get them complicit. I want to draw them into my madness so that we have a team, and we’re all making the same thing. I remember the first time I ever wrote a TV series. It was a TV series for the BBC called Neverwhere.
John: I loved it.
Neil: Thank you. I was the writer, but I didn’t have control. I didn’t have power. I remember the very first time I felt like the ground beneath my feet was slipping a bit was wandering into costume and talking to the costume designer. I’d specified very specific clothes for the characters in the script. She showed me something that one of the characters was wearing. I said, “Oh, but in the script she’s wearing a giant old-fashioned flying jacket, a big, old, leather flying jacket.” She says, “There’s too much leather already in this.” I said, “There isn’t anybody else that I’ve written any leather for.” I realized, okay, she’s doing her own stuff, and she’s showing it to the director, and the director is signing off on it. Nobody’s showing the costumes to the writer. Nobody’s actually looking at what it says in the script and going, “Oh, this is what we do.” They’re just looking at the script and going, “Okay, the writer is just saying stuff about what these characters are wearing, but we know much better.”
Craig: Welcome to the movie business. That’s what it is. I’ve worked in features. John has worked in features for so many years. You have just summed up precisely what it means to be a feature writer in the United States.
Looking at this and seeing the specificity of what you’re asking, first of all the level of specificity is glorious. You are absolutely doing the job of the showrunner here. This ties into our topic from, I think it was last week. You’re clearly seeing the page visually in your mind. You can see it. You are telling the artists and the layout people, “Left column. This panel above this panel. Right column. Full page.” You can literally see how everything is working, which I think is the hallmark of somebody that can do it all. You have done it all for both television and film but also so beautifully in this medium as well.
John: Neil, question for you, because on last week’s episode, we were talking about the way that Craig and I tend to write scenes is that we visualize the place, we put ourselves in that place, and then we write what we’re seeing, write what we’re experiencing around us. Writing something about this panel that we’re looking at for Sandman, are you placing yourself inside a space, or are you really just thinking about, “This is the page, and this is what I’m seeing on the page.” Because those are not the same things. Talk to us about what you’re seeing.
Neil: They aren’t the same things. When I write a movie script or a TV script, I’m definitely thinking of the experience on the screen, but also I’m there with the actors while I’m writing. I’m both. I’m trying to write, “This is what we’re seeing,” but I’m also trying to write the words and the action in a way that make me feel like I’m there and hopefully will make come alive for the actors.
For comics, the most important thing for me when I would do Sandman would be I would take eight sheets of typing paper, I would fold them over, and I would draw a little cover on the front cover, even though it wouldn’t look anything ever like anything that Dave McKean was actually going to do. Then I would go through and mark where the ads would be, because it was important to me to know where I could have double-page spreads.
John: The equivalent of the commercial breaks in television, basically, the structure.
Neil: Exactly. You’re working out, “Okay, I’m going to have a break here, so structurally it’ll be eight pages, and then there’s four pages, and then the left-hand page is going to be on even-numbered pages here. It’ll be odd-numbered pages for four pages. Then it’s going to go back to even numbers.” I needed to know that to know when people are turning the page, because one of the things that is incredibly important in any form of writing is to know what the unit of communication is and how you’re giving information to people. For me, I rapidly came to the conclusion that in comics you think the unit of information is the panel, but it’s not. It’s the page.
Craig: The page.
Neil: The action of turning the page is a physical action. That allows you to change scenes if you need to. That allows you to surprise the reader. I can surprise the reader. If I’m going to surprise the reader, it has to be on a left-hand page that you’re going to turn a right-hand page to, to go, “Oh my god, I didn’t see that coming.” You don’t want to try and surprise the reader on something that’s going to be on a right-hand page, that they will have turned over to and they may have glanced at, whatever. I think in a novel or a short story, it’s probably the paragraph, but it’s certainly not the page in the same way, because the page is mutable. The pages can change, just depending on how the thing is laid out and the typescript.
For me, the visual feeling of what am I trying to do on this page, what am I trying to do here, in Sandman I probably did, over the course of however many – there were 75 issues of the main comic and then, I don’t know, let’s say another 10 all together of various things – I would always be very aware of when I was going to use a double-page spread. I used them very, very rarely, but every time I did, they were important. You’d turn the page, and now you’ve got something that covers two whole pages. I had to use up two pages on that. I had to be willing to sacrifice two pages. I only had 24 pages to sell my story in. I now have 23, because I gave one up to have a double-page spread.
Craig: Needs to earn that.
Neil: It really has to earn that.
John: I’ve written three books, and I’ve written obviously a zillion screenplays, but I’m doing my first graphic novel right now. I’m loving it, but I’m also finding it strange, because I assumed I knew what it was going to be like, and it’s different than that. Your description that the page is a unit of information is so true.
A scene I was writing yesterday had an earthquake in it, so I had to really think about, “Okay, how am I showing an earthquake? I know how I’d do that in a book. I know how I would do that in a screenplay. But what am I actually showing here? What are the tools I can use that are specific to a drawn format that’s going to carry this off? How is the earthquake affecting the type? What all is happening in there?”
It’s really liberating, but it’s also very different, because so much of it can look like a movie script. There’s characters, there’s dialogue, and there are scenes, and yet you’re always thinking about what is the experience of the reader. That experience is just so different than it would be in a screenplay.
Neil: It’s so interesting when you look at it as control. A novel in a way is like telepathy. At its best, you’re doing something magical. You’re getting something out of your head. You’re putting it into some kind of code. Then somebody at the other end is reading it and decoding it and building something up, building pictures, building people in their head. You don’t really have control over what the people look like. You don’t have control over what the people sound like. There’s a lot of stuff you don’t have. But you do have this weird magic telepathy. With a movie or with TV, you have a awful lot of control over the actual thing that is being experienced. It is happening in real time. If you’re building it right, you know where you can get people to smile. You know where you can get people to cry.
With Season 1 of Good Omens, I would talk to the director. We’d be sitting in the editing room. He would say, “Nobody’s going to get that.” I would say, “No, they won’t get it on the first viewing, but they’ll get it the third or fourth time they watch it.” He’s like, “Neil, people don’t watch TV three or four times.” I’m like, “I think they’ll watch this. I think it’ll work.” He’s like, “You’re being an idiot.” For the second season working together, he’s like, “Okay, so they won’t get this the first time. I figure about time number four or time number five when they go through, they’ll certainly realize that this is also that,” because he’d realized that that was very much how it worked.
You have absolute control. The thing is happening in real time. There are real people in front of you. They are saying things. You can hear it. You can control the music. You can control an awful lot of things happening. In comics, you’re in a mid-zone. You have control over some of this stuff. You rapidly realize that you don’t have a soundtrack, so you start trying to compensate as a writer. You’re like, “I’ve got the picture track. I’ve got this thing.” I can give you information in ways that I wouldn’t want to give you information in a film, because you can’t just stop the film watching the film for the first time and nip back 10 pages and go, “Hang on. Was that the guy who came in?” You have to go, “I think,” whereas in a comic, you’d just go, “Oh yeah, that was the guy. Ah, clever,” and you can keep going.
You can also control things like turning a page. You can control the ways information comes. You can think of ways of doing things, like here with your earthquake, where you go, “Nobody’s ever actually done this before that I’ve seen. I need to come up with a way that’s completely cool and original,” which you don’t have to do in film. You know you’ve got an incredibly experienced crew, and they’ve already all done four or five different earthquakes in four or five different shows anyway, so they all know that you just get this heavy bloke over here to jump up and down while you shake the camera a little bit over here, and somebody back there is going to push the books off the shelves, and yay, we’ve got an earthquake. For a comic, you may be the first person writing this particular earthquake in this particular way, and you’re going to have to make it up.
John: It’s been fun to do.
Neil: That’s so much fun.
John: We could make up things all day here, but we do need to wrap up the show. We wrap up with One Cool Things. Craig, do you want to start with yours?
Craig: Sure. My One Cool Thing this week is the game Starfield. As everyone knows, I pretty much play all the big ones. This is going to be a weird One Cool Thing for me, because mostly, I’m going to complain about it. Normally, One Cool Things are just all positive.
Starfield is the latest game from Bethesda, the team that does the Elder Scrolls series and Fallout. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful game. Visually, it’s beautiful. The sound is fantastic. There’s this sound that spaceships make, our own rockets make when they take off. It’s that as they’re really getting up there, there’s this wonderful rippling of the air, this violent rippling of the air, this really specific noise that they just nailed. Every time it happens, I’m so excited to hear it. It really is awesome. They’ve gotten so much right. The planets you visit are beautiful.
But here’s the thing. This formula that they have, that they use for Elder Scrolls in a fantasy setting, and Fallout in a science fiction setting on a nuclear-ravaged earth, and now Starfield investigating, it’s beyond old. It is now fully a rut. There are multiple factions that you join. They all invite you to join. They all give you missions. Eventually, they will all conflict with each other, and you will have to make a choice that is based on some, I call it, quote unquote, morals, because you’re forced to eventually do something bad that just feels terrible. They do this thing where everyone, when they speak to you, they look right into the camera, which is really unnerving. Even when we’re talking to each other, we’re not drilling into each other’s eyes like this. It’s just this clunky method of doing things. It’s addictive.
It is addictive, because the game is built around giving you tasks that you can complete, which I think for writers is just pure crack cocaine, because we are so often just like, “I can do anything. How do I even define success?” This is like, “Great. Go here. Do this. You win. Good.” In ways, beautiful. But Bethesda, it’s enough. You’ve got to stop. You need to do something else. This is getting silly. That’s my One sort of Cool Thing.
John: Craig, you’ve saved Hollywood, because you have perhaps liberated a bunch of screenwriters, including myself, from feeling the need to buy the game and play the game. With the hundreds of hours that we now have, we can make film and television better.
Craig: Sure, or conversely-
John: Or…
Craig: … I’ve doomed legions of us to adapt video games that probably shouldn’t be adapted. Let’s just say that I’ve affected Hollywood. We will withhold all moral judgments until we see how it turns out, but probably poorly.
John: My One Cool Thing is an article I read this week by K.K. Rebecca Lai and Jennifer Medina. It’s the New York Times. It’s about how Census categories for race and ethnicity have shaped how the nation sees itself. It’s charting over the last 230 years how US Census data on race and ethnicity, the labels keep changing. The way the labels keep changing is actually really interesting. The way we group people is often contentious and sometimes transformational, because when you put people in a group together, it’s like, oh, we are this group or we’re not this group.
One of the most recent changes is a new category called Middle Eastern and North African, putting all those people from that area together. Over the years, we’ve kept wrestling with how to deal with Latino and Hispanic, whether it is a characteristic you apply in addition to something else or if it’s its own separate category. I think the bigger issue is really we’ve gone from race being a thing that a Census taker applies, they look at you and they say, “This is what your race is,” to something that people self-identify what their race is. That’s a pretty foundationally different thing.
It’s also interesting how as terms themselves change, things that used to be just descriptors become pejorative. We’ve seen that in other things too, like disabilities for example. Just a really good overview of where we’ve been over the last 230 years, talking about race in America, which of course, a complicated subject, and why we’re at this place now and how this is not the end of the story. We’re going to keep thinking differently about race and ethnicity in the decades to come.
Craig: This is a really well-done… I’m just looking at this. The New York Times has gotten very good at this sort of thing.
John: Really the infographic-y stuff that actually lets you explore.
Craig: It’s quite good.
John: So smartly done.
Craig: I will say this for the person that was filling the ledger for the first Census in 1790, penmanship, outstanding. Neil, I know that you are a big fountain pen guy. This guy I assume is feather. Is it quill? I don’t know what he’s using.
John: Perhaps a quill. Who knows?
Craig: Man, he’s good. He’s good and consistent, and particularly the capital D’s.
Neil: I love my pens.
Craig: Fantastic. Love it.
John: Neil Gaiman, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?
Neil: I do. I have One Cool Thing. I thought, “What should my One Cool Thing be? Because this is all about writing.” I thought, “I should pick One Cool Thing that is inspirational, because it’ll get people writing.” I thought, “Who is the writer who for me is the most inspirational who people won’t know about, and I can inspire people with them?” I thought, “Of course, it is Harry Stephen Keeler.”
Craig: Go on.
Neil: Harry Stephen Keeler is, depending on which way you look at it, either the worst good writer that America ever came up with or the greatest bad writer that America ever produced. Wrote from the ’20s until at least the ’50s. By the ’60s, he may have still been writing, but he was only published in Spain, in Spanish, for reasons that nobody ever understands.
Craig: Wow.
Neil: Harry Stephen Keeler plotted worse than any of us. Harry Stephen Keeler did dialogue worse than any of us. Harry Stephen Keeler was terrible in so many ways. This wonderful Chicago writer who you know that whatever he does is going to be awful. He used to write his novels by writing… He had 75,000 words to fill. By the time he’d finished his novels, he’d normally write 80,000 words, so he’d just cut 10,000 to 15,000 words out, and that will be the beginning of the next novel.
Craig: Wow.
Neil: Which often meant that the novels have the same kind of plot-
Craig: Oh, god.
Neil: … very often involving skulls in bags. I thought I’d just read a tiny bit-
Craig: Oh, please.
Neil: … for you.
Craig: We need to know.
Neil: This is from a book called The Riddle of the Traveling Skull.
Craig: Wow.
John: I love that. It sounds like a Three Investigators title. I love it.
Craig: The thought that a skull travels, it’s just wrong already.
Neil: And has a riddle-
Craig: And has a riddle.
Neil: … associated with it. He liked skulls. The Skull of the Traveling Clown is another.
Craig: More traveling.
Neil: Was it Traveling Clown, or was it the Laughing Clown? Anyway, “He irritated me, strangely,” says our narrator. “And in the hope of getting a line on the source of his abnormal interest in me, I began to review the events – such as they were – which followed my exit from the big new Union Passenger Station at Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue. For it must be remembered that at that time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter’s ‘Barr-Bag’ which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wiener-wurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of– in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel – or Suing Sophie!”
Craig: Wow. Wow. What an amazing list of things-
John: That’s amazing.
Craig: … he didn’t know. That’s awesome. That’s amazing. Here’s a list of things I didn’t know, all of which sound terrible. Now I guess I’m doomed to find to all of them, including Legga.
Neil: You will find out about Legga the Human Spider-
Craig: Legga.
Neil: … and everything else. This is a glorious joy to me.
Craig: Wow.
Neil: It’s very liberating just reading Harry Stephen Keeler, because I’m like, “Oh, everything about this is terrible. You are doing accents and race in the manner of somebody in the 1920s in Chicago in a way that probably would’ve been embarrassing even back then. The ways that you get through a sentence are not ways that normally people who get published get through sentences. It’s okay. I want to read you, because you’re going to leave me going either, ‘Somebody took so much joy in story,’ or you’re just going to leave me going, ‘At least whatever I write next is not going to be as bad as that.'”
Craig: That is valuable.
Neil: It’s so valuable.
Craig: Thank you for that gift, the gift of Harry Stephen Keeler. We’ll put a link in our show notes to make sure that people can read about him and his many skull-related stories. Oh, yeah, look at this list of skull-related stories. God, these are terrible titles. The Case of the Crazy Corpse. I would argue that that adjective cannot apply to a corpse. This is really, really bad. The Case of the Flying Hands.
Neil: The Mystery of the Wooden Spectacles.
Craig: Oh yes, of course. Oh my god, look. Wow. Also, very much about Asians. He’s really into Asians. That much is clear. A lot of Asian stuff. Okay, Harry Stephen Keeler. We see you. Thank you. Thank you, Neil Gaiman, for that. That was a lovely gift.
John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@dev.johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on the projects we never get around to writing. Neil Gaiman, an absolute pleasure finally having you on the show. Thank you so much.
Neil: That was wonderful, guys. Thank you so much for having me.
Craig: It was a joy, and special. Special. You were a very special guest, at least to me. I don’t know about these other guys, but to me, special.
[Bonus Segment]
John: We’re back in the Bonus Segment. Not a surprise to anybody that I’m very organized. I have this database called Notion, which has lots of links to things that I’m working on, the active projects, but I also have a category called Ruminating Projects. Right now, there are 25 different titles that are in my Ruminating Projects, which is things that are not written but that are occupying some of my brain space. Every once in a while, they’ll take up a brain cycle, and I’ll think about that thing I never got around to writing.
I have a weird relationship with them, because some of them I will probably write, but most of them I will never write at all. They’re in this weird half state. I know enough about them. I know the characters. I know the setting. I know what is interesting to me about them. I also know I’m probably never going to write them. I thought we might spend a few minutes talking about the other stuff that’s in our heads that’s not ever going to be finished. Neil, what’s your take on that?
Neil: For me, there are two different kinds of things. There’s the one where you go, “Okay, it’s an idea, and it has legs. I don’t know how long I’m going to have to live, but if I live long enough, it’s a plane that I will probably eventually bring in to land.” Those ones, there are a few of them I’ve already managed. The Graveyard Book took me 25 years, mostly of not writing it, but going, “I wonder if I’m going to write that book one day. Oh, I think I am. No, I don’t think I am. Yeah, I think I will,” and eventually figuring out the voice of the book and getting there.
Right now, I’m writing – I started during the strike – a children’s book that was one of those projects, a very silly book about frogs in Central Park, that have been in the back of my head for a long time. It’s like, “How much longer can the strike go? I may as well write this, and it’ll be done.” Of course, the moment I seriously committed to it, the strike was over.
Craig: Naturally.
Neil: Then there are the ones that are really good ideas, but you realize you don’t really need to write, because obviously, whoever is in charge of sending ideas out into the world just sent the wrong idea to the wrong person.
I remember somewhere in the late ’90s getting incredibly excited for half a day. I think the movie Independence Day had just come out, and I thought, Presidents Day. You could make a film, and it would be a high-action adventure. It starts out in a futuristic Disney World where they’ve got a hall of presidents. Only all of these presidents are actually… What’s so exciting is that they’ve all clonally been built up from the actual DNA of the president in question. They’re actually all about 26, 27 years old, but to come on and say their bit in the hall of presidents, they’re made up to look like they’re in their 60s. They are wholly owned by Disney World. Because they are clonally built, they aren’t really even humans. This is about how Abraham Lincoln frees the presidents and how they have to get across America, going from Florida to Canada, where they’ll be free.
Craig: Yes, of course.
Neil: Three quarters of the way along, they’re going to be betrayed by Richard Nixon. Harrison, because he died so quickly and could’ve been anyone, he’ll be one of our leads. I remember just plotting this thing. It had explosions. It was big.
John: There’s a Bruckheimer quality to it. There’s a Con Air quality. I like it.
Neil: You get to the end, and you go-
Craig: They made it.
Neil: I’ll never. I have zero interest in ever making this thing. I never want to see it. Somewhere out there, there was a writer who got up that morning going, “God, just give me inspiration. What is the actual adventure movie that I should be writing?” They just sent the idea to the wrong person [crosstalk 01:08:47].
Craig: They sent it through the wrong tube. The other tragic thing that sometimes happens is you have an idea, and it gets you very excited. For me, I have ideas all the time, and if they don’t hit the level of, “I am compelled to do this,” then they’re just flushed. I don’t walk around with a list. Basically, I just keep hitting delete on everything as it comes in, like emails from people you don’t want. If I don’t get excited, I just hit delete, sometimes I suppose too quickly.
There was this idea that I had for a novel in the early 20-teens. I’d never written a novel before, but it seemed like it had to be a novel. It was the story of a man who could see how and when people would die. When his daughter was born and he held her for the first time, he realized at that moment he had seven years, and then she would die. There was nothing. He became obsessed with trying to stop it, and couldn’t, and has become now just basically the most fatalistic human in the world. Then he gets an opportunity maybe to intervene somehow in some other way and save someone. I became very, very obsessed with this.
I can’t remember who I was talking to, but I mentioned that I was doing this. They’re like, “Oh, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” I’m like, “What?” They’re like, “Yeah, there’s an episode of X-Files.” It was an episode of X-Files in 1995, which was about, I don’t know, 20 years before I was thinking about this. It was great. I was like, “Ah, shit.” I didn’t watch X-Files back in the day. I watched it, and it was awesome. It was such a good episode. The late, great Peter Boyle plays Clyde Bruckman. It’s beautiful. The tone of it was beautiful. It was exactly what I was going for, this notion of just regret but also peace and acceptance and the confrontation of death. It was 45 minutes long.
I watched it and went, “All right. Well.” I had four chapters done. I was like, “Well, no,” because there are some things where it’s just too concepty to survive the thought that it’s just going to be out there in the world. People are like, “Have you read this vaguely fancy prose-ish version of Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose?” Alas.
John: I’ve had that experience where I felt liberated that I don’t need to write that anymore, because it’s already out there in the world, which is nice.
Neil: I’ve definitely had the, “What a relief. I don’t have to be the one who writes that.” I’ve also had, a few times now in my life, the feeling of, “Oh shit, that idea is a really good idea, and other people are going to have it too, so I need to get this thing out. I’m on a clock now. Now that I’ve had this idea, it is properly ticking.” The Serial Killers Convention in Sandman was that. I had the idea. I went, “Somebody else is going to be doing this if I don’t. I have to do it. I have to get it out. I can’t get it into Sandman for another 12 months. I don’t get to write it for a year from now.” I had to just hope nobody writes it in that intervening time.
Craig: There is a hundredth monkey syndrome thing that happens, where the moment something occurs to you, you do feel like it’s in the air now, clearly.
Neil: You know that the things that are out there add up to that. Terry Pratchett and I, after Good Omens, the thing that we actually plotted next, that was going to be our next novel, that then we decided we didn’t want to do, and then I was incredibly relieved, had that fabulous feeling of relief when I realized we didn’t need to do it any longer some years later, was the idea of a serial killer who hunts serial killers. We went, “Nobody’s done that. We need to have this kind of background. He has this, but he’s going after this… “ You knew that it was going to happen. You knew somebody was going to write it. Then there was a point where Terry was like, “I want to go and do another Discworld novel.” I’m like, “I’m busy with Sandman. Let’s let that one go.”
Craig: Then Thomas Harris comes along.
Neil: And Dexter.
Craig: Dexter, yeah. I guess that’s the thing.
John: [Crosstalk 01:13:25] that show.
Craig: See, this is actually an important lesson, because prior to Dexter, you have Hannibal Lecter. In my mind, as you’re talking, I’m thinking, oh, Hannibal Lecter’s a serial killer-
John: [Crosstalk 01:13:35]
Craig: … who helps them hunt serial killers. See, we’re probably too hard on ourselves, because the adage there aren’t new ideas is a thing. Maybe it’s possible that if I went back and started writing this novel, it would be so vastly different of an experience than Clyde Bruckman’s that nobody would give a shit.
Neil: Let me just say on that that I had plotted a Sandman story which wound up being called Game of You, and then I read Jonathan Carroll’s novel Bones of the Moon and went, “Fuck. That was my story. It’s the same thing, and you’ve just done that.” I love Jonathan Carroll. This is brilliant. I wrote to Jonathan Carroll, who I knew vaguely. I think we’ve met once. I just said, “I just want you to know I’m not doing this story because Bones of the Moon.” He wrote back, and he said, “Write your story. Write it. Tell it.” He said, “The job of a novelist, the job of a writer is to tell it new. Whatever it is, tell it new.”
Craig: Tell it new.
Neil: I thought, “Okay.” I wrote Game of You. By the end of it, Game of You wasn’t Bones of the Moon. It was its own thing. I was really pleased that Jonathan had said, “Go write it.
Craig: I don’t like where this is going. I don’t like where this is going at all.
John: Now Craig’s going to have to write a book, and we know writing books is terrible.
Craig: You’re sticking me back on some sort of hook for a thing I had merrily let myself free on. How dare all of you. This is very upsetting.
John: Craig, getting back to your notion of, if an idea doesn’t continue to excite me, then you just need to let it go, a thing I have found in my brain is that sometimes ideas will recognize, “Oh, John’s not paying enough attention to us by ourselves, but if we gang up together, we all come together, John will have to pay attention to us.” My movie The Nines is really three ideas that ganged up together like, “No, no, no, we can all be the same movie.” That became the thing. Part of why I actually write down the list and keep my little notes on stuff is so I can get those brain cycles not happening, because if you don’t write stuff down, your brain is responsible for remembering it. If you write stuff down, it gets it out of your head in a way that could be-
Craig: I haven’t had meningitis yet, so I feel like I’m going to be fine. Yet.
Neil: American Gods for me was one of those. American Gods was, I had this thing over here, and I don’t know what it is. I had these two characters, and they meet on a plane, and I don’t know who they are. I’ve got this thing here. Then one day, I just asked myself one weird little question about whether these Scandinavian explorers brought their gods with them when they came to America, and they left them behind when they left. Suddenly, all of these other things lined up behind. It was, “Oh, I have a story. I have a thing. It has legs. It’s moved from being a notion to being an idea to being a story.”
Craig: I love that. I love that at the heart of all of this is something that is common among – I’m not going to say writers, because I think that’s just too broad of a category – people who consistently write. How about this? We’ll call them people who consistently write. That is this constant desire. There’s a wanting, there is a need to tell a story. If you are currently in the middle of telling the wrong story, you may feel like, “I don’t like telling stories.” No, just don’t like telling this one. Go ahead and take a year off and see how that goes. It’s not going to go well. You will start again. We are defined by this hunger to tell a story. Inevitably, our brains do organize around something.
I think as I’ve gotten older, and I am running out of time – we’re all running out of time, rapidly probably – what I try to remember is the feeling of delight when I’m telling the story I’m supposed to be telling. If I don’t quite have that feeling of delight, then go ahead and sit on that egg a bit more. It’s not time.
Neil: The moment where you suddenly feel like you are the first reader, you’re typing even faster so that the words can get out, because you want to read them, and the magic is happening.
John: Maybe wrap this up on, I’m not sure how I feel about this, but this last week it was announced that James Patterson has finished a Michael Crichton novel that was not finished. It was not even clear how much of Michael Crichton’s novel was finished. Now they’re shopping the rights to this new James Patterson, Michael Crichton novel. In some ways, it makes me feel good, like, okay, maybe those things that I don’t actually finished, someone else can pick up and finish. I won’t feel like I’m abandoning these children. At the same time, I’m not going to be around to see it, so does it matter at all?
Neil: Bless him. I think James Patterson is a very sweet man, but I do not want him finishing anything that I’ve left unfinished, please. I go backwards and forwards on the Terry Pratchett thing of I want a steamroller to run over my laptop with everything, crush my hard disk, let everything be done. Then there’s part of me that goes, I don’t know, if I was three quarters of the way through a novel, and I had a heart attack, and it was a good book, there are definitely two or three of my friends I would happily say… I won’t say anything, because I’ll be dead, but I would not actually mind if my agent was to reach out to one of them and say, “Hey, do you want to finish this thing of Neil’s?”
Craig: That’s quite nice. It’s an interesting thing for writers to consider as they update their wills and trusts. Kafka lit quite a few of his manuscripts on fire. This is this self-destructive… It is an extension of some of the narcissistic aspect of what we do, which is, “I am God. I create a world. The world is designed by me, to my specifications. No other gods before me.”
In television or movies, you write something, and then other people are helping. There is a moment where somebody will show you something. “Here, I read what you wrote, and this is what I think it should look like.” It’s wrong, and it hurts. They didn’t try and hurt you. They’re trying to help you. They’re doing their job. They’re probably excellent at their job. But it’s wrong. It’s that thorn in the skin problem. It hurts. One thing that will deliver you from that pain is death, of course. I’d like the idea of maybe, in my will, going, “Okay, this one can go to that one. This one can go to that one.” But maybe also, I’ll try and finish things real fast before I croak. That’s probably the best method.
John: That’s all of our goals. Neil Gaiman, thank you so much for joining us on this Bonus Segment.
Craig: Thank you, Neil.
John: You’re the best.
Neil: Gentlemen, that was enjoyable as all hell. Thank you so much.
Links:
- Neil Gaiman on Instagram and Twitter
- Read Neil’s script for The Sandman #24
- Starfield
- An American Puzzle: Fitting Race in a Box
- The Riddle of the Traveling Skull by Harry Stephen Keeler
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- Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
- John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
- John on Mastodon
- Outro by Owen Danoff (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
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