GOOD OMENS,

(or, at least, lies that have THE FACTS

becn hallowed by time)
Oce upon a time Neil
He didn't know
Gaiman wrote half a short
story. how it ended. He sent it to
Terry
Drarchett, who didn't know, either. But it festered away
Terrv's mind and he rang Neil about a year later and
said: I don't know how it ends, but I I do know
Lonnens next. The first draft took about two months. what
ecOnd draft took about six months. Quite why, we
don't know, but it did include explaining the
the American publishers. jokes to
VHAT WASIT LIKE WORKING WITH NEII.
GAIMAN/TERRY PRATCHETT?
Ah. You have to remember, you see, that in those
davs Neil Gaiman was barely Neil Gaiman and Terrv
Pratchett was only just Terry Pratchett. They'd known
one another for years, Neil having done an
with Terry in 1985, after the first interview
Discworld book came
out. Look, it wasn't a big deal, okay? At
whole thingg did either of them say to theno point in the
Ican't believe I'm working other, Wow,
with you!
HOW DID YOUWRITE
IT?
Mostly by shouting
the phone a couple ofexcitedly at one another down
and sending a disk off times aa day for two
a week, to the other
There were attempts
months,
guy several times
itng process at toward the end of the
cation vvia
machine-to-machine
300/75 baud modems,
393
but as communi
a
means of
communication this turned out to be slightly les8
efficient than underwater yodelling.
Neil was mostly nocturnal back then, so he'd get up
in the early aftern0on and see the flashing red light on
his ansaphone, which would mean there would be a
message from Terry that would usually begin 'Get up,
get up, you bastard, I've just written a good bit!" And
then the first phone call of the day would happen, when
Terry would read Neil what he'd written that morning,
and Neil would read Terry what he'd written much
earlier that morning. Then they'd talk excitedly at each
other, and it would be a race to get to the next good bit
before the other guy.
ISTHAT WHY THERE'S AN ANSAPHONE
IN THE STORY?
Probably. It was a long time ago, you know.
WHO WROTE WHAT BIT?
Ah. Another tricky one. As the official Keeper of
the
One True Copy, Terry physically wrote more of Draft
1 than Neil. But if 2,000 words are
written
after a lot of excited shouting, it's a moot point down
whose
Words they are. And, in any case, as a matter of honour
both of them rewrote and footnoted the other guy's
stuff, and both can write passably in the other one's
style. The Agnes Nutter scenes and the kids mostly
originated with Terry, the Four Horsemen and
anything that involved maggots started with Neil.
Neil had most influence on the opening, Terry on the
ending. Apart from that, they just shouted excitedly a
lot.
The point they both realized the text had wandered
into its own world was in the basement of the old
Gollancz books, where they'd got together to proofread
the final copy, and Neil congratulated Terry on a Iine
that Terry knew he hadn't written, and Neilwas certain
he hadn't written either. They both privately suspect
that at some point the book had started to generate text
394
on its own, but neither of them will actually admit this
publiclyfor fear of being thought odd.
TwHY DID YOUWRITE IT?
seemed a shame not to. Besides, not writing it would
gn that generations of readers would not have a book
rhat could be dropped regularly in the bath.
WHY ISNT THERE A SEQUEL?
We played around with ideas, but we could never work
up the enthusiasm. Besides, we wanted to do other
things (and some of those ideas probably ended up,
bent to a different shape, in the works of both of us).
Recently, though, we've both been wondering if 'never
again' is set in stone. So there might be a sequel one
day. Maybe. Perhaps. Whoknows? We don't.
DID YOUKNOW IT WOULD BE A 'CULT
CLASSIC WHEN YOU WROTE IT?
If by cult classic' you mean that all over the world
there are people with their own copies of Good Omens,
which they've read over and over and over, books
they've dropped in baths and in puddles and in bowls
of parsnip soup, books held together with duct tape
and putty and string, books that are no longer lent
out because no one in their right mind would actually
borrow something like that without having it clinically
sterilized first, then no, we didn't.
Whereas if by cult classic' you mean a book that's
sold millions and millions of copies around the world,
many of them to the same people, because they buy
them and then lend them out to their friends and
never see them again so buy more copies, then no, we
didn't.
Actually it doesn't really matter what definition of cult
classic you use, We didn't think we were writing one. We
were writing a book we thought was funny and we were
trying to make each other laugh. We weren't even sure
that anyone would actually want to publish it.
395
OH, COME ON, YOURE NEIL GAIMAN AND
TERRY PRATCHETT.
Yes, but we weren't then (see What was it like work
ing with Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett? above). We were
these two blokes with an idea, who were telling each
other a story.
WILL THERE BE AMOVIE,THEN?
Neil likes to think that one day maybe there will, and
Terry is certain that it will never happen. In either case,
neither of them will believe it untilthey're actually eat
ing popcorn at the premiere. And even then, probably
not.
 NEIL GAIMAN ON TERRY PRATCHETT
Right.
So it'sFebruary of 1985, and it's a Chinese restaurant
in London, and it's the author's first interview., His
publicist had been pleasantly surprised that anyone
would want to talk to him (the author has. just written
a funny fantasy book called The Colour of Magic), but
she's set up thhis
lunch with a young journalist anyway.
former journalist, has a hat, but it's a
Theauthor, cap, not a Proper Author Hat. Not
Small, black leathery
The journalist has a hat too. It's a greyish thing,
yet.
the ones Humphrey Bogart wears in movies.
onrt oflike he doesn't look like
only when the journalist wears it someone wearing a
Humphrey Bogart: he lookS like slowly
The journalist is
grown-up's hat. how
discovering
matter hard he tries, he cannot become
that, no that it itches, or blows off
person: it's not just
ahat
inconvenient momentsS, it's that he forgets, and
at
restaurants, and 1S now getting very used to
leaves it in
the doors of restaurants about l1:00 a.m.
knocking on
asking if they found a hat. One day, very soon now,
and bothering with hats, and decide
the journalist will stop
black leather jacket instead.
to buy a printed
So they have lunch, and the interview gets
Voyager magazine, along with a photo of the
in Space and
author browsing the shelves in Forbidden Planet,
timportant, they make each other laugh, and like
the way the other one thinks.
And the author is Terry Pratchett, and the journalist
IS me, and it's been two decades since I left a hat in
arestaurant, and one and a half decades since Terry
scOveredhis inner Bestselling-Author-with-a-Proper
Author-Hat.
397
 days, what with
We don't see each other much these we're on each
when
living on different continents, and,
signing books
other's continent, spending all our timetogether was at
for other people. The last time we ate
signing. It was
asushi counter in Minneapolis, after a your sushi on
put
an all-you-can-eat night, where they
little boats and floated it over to you. After a while,
of
obviously feeling we were taking unfair advantagegave
chef
the whole all-you-can-eat thing, the sushi produced
up on the putting sushi on little boats,
something that looked like the Leaning Tower of
Yellowtail, handed it to us, and announced that he was
going home.
Nothing much had changed, except everything.
These are the things I realized back in 1985:
Terry knew a lot. He had the kind of head that people
get when they're interested in things, and go and ask
questions and listen and read. He knew genre, enough
to know the territory, and he knew enough outside
genre to be interesting.
He was ferociously intelligent.
He was having fun. Then again, Terry is that rarity,
the kind of author who likes Writing, not Having
Written, or Being a Writer, but the actual sitting there
and making things up in front of a screen. At the time
we met, he was still working as a press officer for
the South Western Electricity board. He wrote four
hundred words a night, every night: it was the only way
for him to keep a real job and still write books. One
night, a year later, he finished a novel, with a hundred
words still to go, so he put apiece of paper into his
typewriter, and wrote a hundred words of the next
novel.
(The day he retired to become a full-time writer,
he phoned me up. It's only been half an hour since
Iretired, and already Ihate those bastards," he said
cheerfully.)
There was something else that was obvious in 1985:
Terry was a science fiction writer. It was the way his
398
 mind worked: the urge to
back together in take it all apart, and put it
together. It was thedifferent ways, to see how it all fit
engine that drove
not a what if. or an if only . . .' or Discworld
even an
it's
goes on. ..; it was the far more if this
subtle and
If there was really a , what would that dangerous
would it work?? mean? How
In the Nicholls-Clute
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,
there was an ancient woodcut of a man pushing his
head through the back of the world, past the sky, and
seeing the cogs and the wheels and the engines that
drove the universe machine. That's what people do in
Terry Pratchett books, even if the people doing it are
sometimes rats and sometimes small girls. People learn
things. They open their heads.
So we discovered we shared a similar sense of
humour, and a similar set of cultural referents; we'd
read the same obscure books, took pleasure in pointing
each other to weird Victorian reference books.
Afew years after we met, in 1988, Terry and Iwrote
abook together. It began as a parody of Richmal
Crompton's William books, which we called William the
Antichrist, but rapidly outgrew that conceit and became
about a number of other things instead, and we called
it Good Omens. It was a funny novel about the end of
thà world and how we're all going to die. Working
with Terry, Ifelt like a journeyman alongside a master
craftsman in some medieval guild. He constructs
novels like a guildmaster might build a cathedral arch.
There is art, of course, but that's the result of building
it well. What there is more of is the pleasure taken in
constructing something that does what it's meant to
do - to make people read the story, and laugh, and
possibly even think.
(This is how we wrote a novel together. I'd write
late at night. Terry wrote early in the morning. In the
atternoon we'd have very long phone conversations
Where we'd read each other the best bits we'd written,
and talk about stuff that could happen neNt. The main
399
 laugh. We posted
objective was to make the other one
this was before
floppy disks back and forth, because tried using
e-mail. There was one night when we
300/75
modem to send some text across the country, at
if
speeds, directly from computer to computer becauseus
e-mail had been invented back then nobody had told
about it. We managed it too. But the post was faster.)
Terry has been writing professionally for a very
long time, honing his craft, getting quietly better and
better. The biggest problem he faces is the problem
of excellence: he makes it look easy. This can be a
problem. The public doesn't know where the craft lies.
It's wiser to make it look harder than it is, a lesson all
jugglers learn.
In the early days the reviewers compared him to the
late Douglas Adams, but then Terry went on to write
books as enthusiastically as Douglas avoided writing
them, and now, if there is any comparison to be made
of anything from the formal rules of a Pratchett novel
to the sheer prolific fecundity of the man, it might
be to P. G. Wodehouse. But mostly newspapers,
magazines, and critics do not compare him to anyone.
He exists in a blind spot, with two strikes against him:
he writes funny books, in a world in which funny is
synonymous with trivial, and they are fantasies Or
more precisely, they are set on the Discworld, aflat
world, which rests on the back of four elephants, who
in turn stand on the back of a turtle, heading off
through space. It's a location in which Terry Pratchett
can write anything, from hard-bitten crime dramas to
vampiric political parodies, to children's books. And
those children's books have changed things. Terry
won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for his pied piper
tale The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents,
awarded by the librarians of the UK, and the Carnegie
1s an award that even newspapers have to respect.
(Even s0, the newspapers had their revenge, cheerfully
misunderstanding Terry's acceptance speech and
accusing him of bashing J. K. Rowling and J. R. R.
400
 in a speech about the real magic
Tolkien and fantasy,
of fantastic fiction.)
most recent books have shown Terry in a new
The
mode - books like Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment
are darker, deeper, more outraged at what people can
do to people, while prouder of what people can do for
each other. And yes, the books are still funny, but they
no longer follow the jokes: now the books follow the
story and the people. Satire is a word that is often used
to mean that there aren't any people in the fiction,
and for that reason I'm uncomfortable calling Terry
a satirist. What he is, is A Writer, and there are few
enough of those around. There are lots of people who
call themselves writers, mind you. But it's not the same
thing at all.
In person, Terry is genial, driven, funny.
He likes writing, and he likes writing Practical.
became a bestselling author is a good fiction. That he
thing: it allows
him to write as much as he
about the Banana Daiquiris,wishes. He wasn't joking
saw him we drank ice wine although the last time I
while we set the world to together in his hotel room,
rights.
 TERRY PRATCHETT ON NEIL GAIMAN
What can I say about Neil Gaiman that has not
already been said in The Morbid Imagination: Five Case
Studies?
Well, he's no genius. He's better than that.
He's not a wizard, in other words, but a conjurer.
Wizards don't have to work. They wave their hands,
and the magic happens. But conjurers, now
conjurers work very hard. They spend a lot of time in
their youth watching, very carefully, the best conjurers
of their day. They seek out old books of trickery and,
being natural conjurers, read everything else as well,
because history itself is just amagic show. They observe
the way people think, and the many ways in which they
don't. They learn the subtle use of springs, and how to
open mighty temple doors at a touch, and how to make
the trumpets sound.
And they take centre stage and amaze you with flags
of all nations and smoke and mirrors, and you cry:
Amazing! How does he do it? What happened to the
elephant? Where's the rabbit? Did he really smash my
watch??
And in the back row we, the other conjurers, say
quietly: Well done. Isn't that a variant of the Prague
Levitating Sock? Wasn't that Pasqual's Spirit Mirror,
where the girl isn't really there? But where the hell did
that flaming sword come from?"
And we wonder if there may be such a thing as
wizardry, after all .
Imet Neil in 1985, when The Colour of Magic had just
Come out. It was my first ever interview as an author.
Neil was making a living as a freelance journalist and
had the pale features of someone who had sat through
402
 the review
in order to showings
of
live off the altogether too many bad movies
servedat the receptions freebie cold chicken lcgs they
Contacts book, which is afterwards (and to
now the size of thebuild up his
Contains rather more interesting Bible and
journalism in order to eat, whichpeople). He was doing
is a very good way
learning journalism. Probably the only real
of
to think of it. way, come
He also had avery bad hat. It
He was not a hat person. 1 was a grey homburg.
here was no natural
hetween hat and man. Ihat was the first andunity last
e I saw the hat. As if
subconsciously aware of the
ad hatitude, he used to forget it and leave it behind
in restaurants. One day, he never went back for it. I
put this in for the serious fans out there: If you search
glly. really hard, yOu may find a small restaurant
somewhere in London with a dusty grey homburg at
the back of asshelf. Who knows what will happen if you
tryiton?
Anyway, we got on fine. Hard to say why, but at
bottom was a shared delight and amazement at the
of the universe, in stories, in obscure
cheer strangenesS bookshops.
details, in strange old books in unregarded
We stayed in contact. you
(SEX: pages being ripped offa calendar. You know,
any more
just don't get that in moves big in
And one thing led to another, and he became dav
and one
graphic novels, and Discworld took off, and said
short story
he sent me about six pages of a
didn't either,
he didn't know how it continued, and I
drawer and
and about ayear later I took it out of the
see
did see what happened next, even if I couldn't
how it all ended yet, and we wrote it together and
that was Good Omens. It was done by twO guys who
didn't have anything to lose by having fun. We didn't
do it for the money. But, as it turned out, we got a lot
of money.
.. Hey, let me tell you about the weirdness, like
when he was staying with us for the editing and we
403
 and two of our
heard a noise and went into his room
they were
white doves had got in and couldn't get out;
panicking around theroom and Neil was wakingwhichup in
saying Wstfgl?,
a storm of snowy white feathersvocabulary. Or the time
is his normal ante-meridiem Women
when we were in a bar and he met the Spider
hotel
Or the time on tour when we checked into our
and in the morning it turned out that his TV had been
showing him strange late-night seminaked bondage
bisexual chat shows, and mine had picked up nothing
but reruns of Mr. Ed. And the moment, live on air.
when we realized that an under-informed New York
radio interviewer with ten minutes of chat still to go
thought Good Omens was not a work of fiction
[cut toa train, pounding along the tracks. That's another
scene they never showin movies these days..]
And there we were, ten years on, travelling across
Sweden and talking about the plot of American Gods
(him) and The Amazing Maurice (me). Probably both
of us at the same time. It was just like the old days. One
of us says, Idon't know how to deal with this tricky
bit of plot'; the other one listens and says, The solu
tion, Grasshopper, is in the way you state the problem.
Fancy a coffee?'
A lot had happened in those ten years. He'd left
the comics world shaken, and it'll never be quite the
same. The effect was akin to that of Tolkien on the
fantasy novel - everything afterwards is in some way
influenced. Iremember on one US Good Omens tour
walking round a comics shop. We'd been signing for a
lot of comics fans, some of whom were clearly puzzled
at the concept of 'dis story wid no pitchers in it', and I
wandered around the shelves looking at the opposition.
That's when Irealized he was good. There's a delicacy
of touch, a subtle scalpel, which is the hallmark of his
work.
And when Iheard the premise of American Gods 1
wanted to write it so much Icould taste it
When I read Coraline, I saw it as an exquiSitely
404
how Nobook
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