Good Omens

“Gaiman is a trickster in the best sense of the word.”

—Houston Chronicle

“He is a treasure house of story and we are lucky to have him.”

—Stephen King

“When you take the free-fall plunge into a Neil Gaiman book, anything can happen and anything invariably does.”

—Entertainment Weekly

Facts

GOOD OMENS, THE FACTS

(or, at least, lies that have been hallowed by time)

Once upon a time Neil Gaiman wrote half a short story. He didn’t know how it ended. He sent it to Terry Pratchett, who didn’t know, either. But it festered away in Terry’s mind and he rang Neil about a year later and said: “I don’t know how it ends, but I do know what happens next.” The first draft took about two months, the second draft took about six months. Quite why, we don’t know, but it did include explaining the jokes to the American publishers.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE WORKING WITH NEIL GAIMAN/TERRY PRATCHETT?

Ah. You have to remember, you see, that in those days Neil Gaiman was barely Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett was only just Terry Pratchett. They’d known one another for years, Neil having done an interview with Terry in 1985, after the first Discworld book came out. Look, it wasn’t a big deal, okay? At no point in the whole thing did either of them say to the other, “Wow, I can’t believe I’m working with you!”

HOW DID YOU WRITE IT?

Mostly by shouting excitedly at one another down the phone a couple of times a day for two months, and sending a disk off to the other guy several times a week. There were attempts toward the end of the writing process at machine-to-machine communication via 300 / 75 baud modems, but as a means of communication this turned out to be slightly less efficient than underwater yodeling.

Neil was mostly nocturnal back then, so he’d get up in the early afternoon 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.

IS THAT 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 down after a lot of excited shouting, it’s a moot point whose words they are. And, in any case, as a matter of honor 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 line that Terry knew he hadn’t written, and Neil was certain he hadn’t written either. They both privately suspect that at some point the book had started to generate text on its own, but neither of them will actually admit this publicly for fear of being thought odd.

WHY DID YOU WRITE IT?

It seemed a shame not to. Besides, not writing it would mean that generations of readers would not have a book that could be dropped regularly in the bath.

WHY ISN’T 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. Who knows? We don’t.

DID YOU KNOW 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.

OH, COME ON, YOU’RE NEIL GAIMAN AND TERRY PRATCHETT.

Yes, but we weren’t then (see What was it like working with Neil Gaiman / Terry Pratchett? above). We were these two blokes with an idea, who were telling each other a story.