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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@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
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• 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.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/the-minds-eye).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 615 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what are you seeing when you read or write or remember? We’ll talk about the importance of visualization for screenwriters, and the fact that some very successful writers can’t do it. We’ll also be answering some listener questions on choosing a medium and directors demanding writing credit. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, what’s it like getting what you always dreamed of? We’ll discuss the pros and cons of answered prayers.

**Craig:** Oh, my. Answered prayers, oh, okay. We’re into the power of prayer on the show now. I like it.

**John:** Answered Prayers was I think the famously unfinished or unwritten book by Truman Capote. I always loved that as a title.

**Craig:** Apparently, his prayers to finish were not answered.

**John:** They were not answered. A little bit of a news hook this week. An article was in the Hollywood Reporter this past week talking about Marvel changing its whole television model, moving the way that they’re doing their series from the features division to an actual television division and really treating the TV shows more like TV shows. Craig, what did you make of this?

**Craig:** It was a little bit like reading about a restaurant that said, “You know what? We’re not going to make spaghetti anymore using beef. We’re going to use pasta.” Their method was… Look, I’m sure they felt it worked for them or that it was going to work for them. I think sometimes when a company is very, very successful, it can begin to embrace the delusion that everybody else is done and their way is always better, and sometimes break things, move fast, break things.

In the case of the way they were doing their television, it wasn’t working. It wasn’t working creatively, I don’t think, for a number of those shows, by their own admission, it seems. It also wasn’t working procedurally for the people that were working on the shows, neither writers nor directors. It was kind of good to see, but also a little bit like, yes, you mean you’re going to move to the way that the rest of us do it? Yeah. It works.

**John:** Yeah. Some of these changes will be actually calling the head writer the showrunner and making it clear that they are more the person responsible for the overall creative direction of the series, which makes sense. People always talk about television is a writer-driven medium. Thinking about the series not just as limited series, special events that have to work like movies work, but also thinking about the season-to-season, ongoing longevity of a series, it just makes sense.

**Craig:** To be clear, even though some of this is about empowering showrunners to be showrunners, the prior system wasn’t particularly great for directors either. Hopefully, this turn towards the normal will reap benefits for everybody involved, and of course for the audience too. Marvel is capable of making outstanding stuff. I have every reason to believe that this will go well for them.

**John:** I hope so too. Obviously, a lot of these things happened before the strike. In the story, they talk through some of the challenges these series were having and the issues they were facing with the way they were trying to make the stuff. It’s also worth noting that some of the changes that are going to be just put in place by the new Writers Guild contract would’ve had an impact anyway. In terms of going from a mini room situation to an actual writers’ room, that transition is different now. It’s more contractually mandated than it was before. If you’re going to make changes, this feels like the right time to make changes.

**Craig:** I suspect that the pause gave them a chance to evaluate, more than anything. Just having a few months to stop and say, “How are we doing this? And why are we doing it this way again? And why aren’t we doing it the other way that other people are doing it?” must have given them a little bit of perspective that they didn’t have before. It is helpful that we have new terms that will help them as they move towards the normal. But like you, I suspect the move towards the normal predated the contract.

I’ve never worked at Marvel. We’ve had Kevin Feige on the show. He’s a terrific guest on our show and obviously an incredibly powerful guy who’s overseen one of the most successful runs in Hollywood history, period, the end. I’m only talking secondhand, but my understanding was that there was this sense that it was the executives that ran the show. I find that the most valuable television executives not only don’t run the show, they’re not interested in running the show. What they’re interested in doing is being an advocate for their audience. More than anything else, their job is to say, “We’re supposed to reflect our audience’s taste. Here’s what we think about what you’re doing. Here’s a suggestion we have, a request we have, a question we have.” That what they’re best at. I don’t understand a world where executives are running shows. That’s not what they’re supposed to do. Seems like they’ve made the correction there. Very pleased to see it.

**John:** Obviously, a challenge with what Marvel was trying to do – and I’m sure they’re going to still be trying to do it, but maybe a little less a mandate and a focus – is their movies and their series were supposed to dovetail together in very specific ways. Things would be set up in a movie that would then pay off in a series and then go back to a movie. That’s really challenging to do. Dates shift. The needs shift. You’re trying to make each individual project the best it can possibly be. That’s very hard to do when they all have to fit together in a specific, magic way. I would not also be surprised if there’s going to be less of a focus on making sure everything pays off from this series to that movie to this next thing. Just that may not be the best way to make the best individual projects.

**Craig:** I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but when has that ever stopped me?

**John:** It never has.

**Craig:** Never has. I feel like the universeness is smelling like a relic of the 2010s. I think as we are progressing into the 2020s, the whole extended something universe, it just feels kind of done. I don’t think the audience needs it. I think what they want is a good show or a good movie, really. I don’t know why everybody feels the need for everything to be interlocking that way. Yes, it helps you promote things, but nothing seemed to help the ones that didn’t work. I think just something good is good.

**John:** Good is good. Marvel was not the only entity making mistakes, apparently.

**Craig:** Segue man.

**John:** In this bit of follow-up here, we get to learn that actually, even I can make mistakes.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Drew, can you help us out with this?

**Craig:** No, no, no. Don’t do this to me.

**Drew Marquardt:** Eliza writes, “On occasion, John misuses reticence and reticent. In the recent replay of Episode 463, John says, ‘Just to get over people’s initial reticence to read this different kind of scene description.’ Although reticence can seem like a fancy way to say reluctance, it’s not. Reticence is a reluctance to speak or share of one’s self. The words sound and function like cousins, but just like cousins, they are not interchangeable. Since John is so wordily wise, I couldn’t let him continue this spread of linguistic misinformation. But no one’s perfect, not even Duo SN.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Eliza’s absolutely right. She’s right. I looked it up. I went back through the transcripts, and not only did I use it in 463, Episode 569 I said it wrong. I said, “I wonder if some people who would otherwise make shows are reticent to do so because they are just not social people and don’t want that responsibility.” I was using it as a synonym for reluctance. Instead, it is a very specific instance of reluctance. I’ve learned my lesson.

**Craig:** I want to say that I knew this and declined to say anything out of just the milk of human kindness. While I don’t think I’ve made this particular error myself, I also did not catch it when you said it. It just sort of flowed, and I didn’t notice it. By the way, if I did, here’s a question for you, John. Let’s say you do misuse a word. Do you like it when people correct you, or are you like, “Just shut up. Leave me alone.”

**John:** In a podcast situation that is fully editable, I think it’s fair for us to make those corrections. Occasionally, we will make those corrections, if a misstatement of fact. I’m glad to know that I was using this word incorrectly, and so I’m happy to have that be fixed.

A thing I’ve noticed about podcasts, listening to a lot of podcasts, is a lot of time you hear people use a word that they’ve never actually spoken aloud, like a word they’ve typed a lot but they’ve never actually spoken aloud, and they will mispronounce it. I find that fascinating. Sometimes I will look it up. It’s like, “Oh, that is an alternate pronunciation, so maybe it’s valid they did it that way.” But in many cases, they clearly just-

**Craig:** They didn’t know.

**John:** … didn’t know how to use the word in practice.

**Craig:** I’m not going to say I like it when people correct me, but I appreciate when they correct me. What I’ve noticed is, when people do correct me, I remember that correction much more vividly and reliably than I would if I, say, read it in an email. I still remember the screenwriter Stephen Schiff telling me that I was using comprise incorrectly. It’s very common to say, “This is comprised of blankety blank blank blank. This sandwich is comprised of peanut butter and jelly.” But in fact, comprise is a transitive verb. “This peanut butter sandwich comprises peanut butter and jelly.”

**John:** Comprises.

**Craig:** It contains peanut butter and jelly. I didn’t know that. He corrected me. I was like, “What?” He is correct. I’ve never forgotten it. I use comprise correctly all the time now.

**John:** I hear that, and also, I do wonder if it’s comprises and is comprised of. I bet if you actually were to look it up, “it is comprised of” is such a common usage that it’s become almost default usage. While I agree with Stephen Schiff that this is the actual, correct way to use it, in modern usage it’s not that. You and I, we haven’t fully given up on, but we’ve softened over the course of our 10 years of doing the podcast… You and I, over the course of the last 10 years, have argued about begging the question, and I’ve just sort of given up trying to point out when people are using it incorrectly.

**Craig:** It’s just me and Peter Sagal left now on that mountain, fighting hand to hand. I will never. Never! But yes, these little-

**John:** It’s always fun when you get a chance to use begging the question properly. It’s just delightful.

**Craig:** It is, and then no one knows what you’re talking about. There are certain orthodoxies that I think are just enjoyable unto themselves. Certainly, I guess this is unlike Stephen Schiff, if I hear somebody say, “It’s comprised of blankedy blank,” I don’t say anything, because I don’t know them. Stephen knows me, so he knows I’m going to enjoy it. But a lot of people are like, “Just shut up.”

**John:** I think what you’re pointing out though is, it’s pedantic if you don’t know the person. If you don’t have a relationship, then pointing it out is pedantic. If it’s Craig or Drew, you talking to me, saying, “Oh, John, you’re actually using the word incorrectly,” that’s not pedantic, that’s actually delightful and helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Great.

**John:** Craig, back in Episode 612, you talked through your diabetes diagnosis, and we have some follow-up on that.

**Drew:** James writes, “My mother was diagnosed with diabetes later in life than you, and no one thought to check out the state of her pancreas. Unfortunately, her doctors assumed it was type 2, and consequently, they missed discovering its underlying cause, which, unfortunately again, was pancreatic cancer. It might be worth listeners being aware of this. The people are getting fat and lazy narrative is too often relied upon.”

**Craig:** I am so glad that James wrote in about this. I am kicking myself, because when we talked about my diagnosis, which is this adult-onset type 1 diabetes, one of the things I failed to mention and should’ve mentioned is that there are two typical causes of certain elevated antibodies. One is type 1 diabetes, and the other is pancreatic cancer. In fact, we had to check that out for me to make sure that that’s not what it was. I don’t know why it slipped my mind, but it is absolutely true that it’s going to be one or the other, typically, when you have these certain elevated enzymes. Pancreatic cancer is brutal. It’s just a killer.

James has put forth one of the best arguments for antibody testing when dealing with evidence of diabetic pathology. I don’t care what age you are. If they tell you that you are prediabetic even or diabetic, you have to talk to them about testing these antibodies to see if indeed you are type 2 diabetic or if you are either type 1, which is a different treatment, or if you have hopefully what would be a very early stage of pancreatic cancer. Sorry to hear about what happened to James’s mother. I am terrified to imagine how many people this has happened to, but I suspect a lot. A lot.

**John:** One more bit of follow-up here.

**Drew:** Christopher writes, “I appreciated your openness in sharing your story about diabetes. It resonated with me, as I was also diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder as an adult, and similarly, only after a thoughtful doctor ordered proper testing. The diagnosis changed a great many things, but many months after life leveled out and I started feeling like myself again, I realized I was now one of around 27% of Americans who have a disability. And I mention this only because I didn’t hear you use that particular D-word during the conversation.

“I realize that being a straight white man with an invisible disability is complicated, but still, that shouldn’t be a reason to deny or minimize your experience. In my case, I initially dismissed the idea of being part of the disabled community, because I had always considered myself perfectly able-bodied and physically fit, and it felt incongruous with my identity to change that as an adult. I took great inspiration, however, from your episode with Jack Thorne. His advocacy motivated me to make some overtures to other disabled individuals to see if it was a place in which I fit. What I found was perhaps the most accepting group of people who I have ever encountered. None of them ever questioned my place among them or seemed dismissive of one’s struggles relative to another’s. We were all in it together.

“Publicly being willing to identify as disabled is a big step, and I’m not sure if you fully realized that when you volunteered the information about diabetes, that this is part of what you are doing. Going forward, it might feel a little ridiculous to say things like, ‘I am a disabled person,’ or check the accompanying box on standardized employment forms, but I encourage you to do so whenever possible. Put simply, when you identify as disabled, you naturally encounter more disabled people. You share stories together, and everyone’s experience is better off for it. We learn from and support each other most when we directly engage. You have already always demonstrated empathy in your work and a desire to be inclusive, so you should allow others the courtesy and opportunity to extend the same to you as well. Thanks for being so brave and sharing your experience with the Scriptnotes audience.”

**Craig:** Christopher, fascinating. I must admit, when I saw this statement here, the first thing I thought was, is it a disability? Obviously, we know diabetes is a disease, but is it also a disability? I went to the Googles, and the Googles sent me to the American Diabetes Association. And they have a page that says the following. “Is diabetes a disability? The short answer is yes. Under most laws, diabetes is protected as a disability. Both type 1 and type 2 diabetes are protected as disabilities. People with diabetes can do any type of job, sport, or life goal.”

That got me thinking about what Christopher was saying, because there are some bioethics here. Disability we can look at as a binary question, which I think is sort of the way Christopher is approaching it. Either you are disabled or you’re not. I’m saying all this to explain why I didn’t use the word disability. It wasn’t even a choice. It just wasn’t something that seemed in my brain to align with what was going on. It may be because I don’t necessarily see it as a binary, but more as a continuum. There are places you get to where, yeah, it’s a thing. Look, if I’m walking around with an insulin pump and I need time at work to go and change the pump or replace a tube, yeah, then I’m a disabled person who needs an accommodation to do my job. People around me need to be aware of that.

The question is, right now, given where I’m at, should I be checking that box, as he says, or not? The balance here is, am I going to be taking resources or opportunities from someone else who has a more impactful disability than mine, because there are some disabilities that are more impactful than others.

My instinct is, currently, Christopher – and I appreciate what you’re saying, and I thank you for it – but I don’t think that I’m comfortable checking that box yet, because I don’t need to. I don’t think I need any accommodations right now, and I’m very wary about taking them from somebody else who does. If anyone says, “Look, I have a disability. I want to check the box,” check the box. I have zero problem with that. But I guess this is mostly me explaining why I didn’t say it, because I don’t necessarily think I’m there yet. What do you think? This is a tricky one, John. What do you think?

**John:** I think you’re right that it’s tricky and that it’s hard to have blanket advice here. Looking back at Episode 530, we had Jack Thorne, and he was talking about how as somebody with an invisible disability, he’s had it hard to speak up for himself and advocate for himself. Then he’s really talking about the importance of having a disability advisor as part of a production, just to make sure that anybody who’s involved in production, be it cast or crew, feels like they have a person who they can go to, to talk about the accommodations they may need or to help them think ahead for a production going forward, which is great and smart. In the UK, they’ve been able to enact some of those rules, which is great.

I hear you, Craig, in terms of, I think the choice of how you identify is a personal choice. It applies to disability, but it also applies to many other issues. The fact that you have a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily, to me, mean that you have a responsibility or a requirement to identify as that diagnosis. I just want to make sure that we always leave space for people to say what they want to say about their situation.

**Craig:** Look, I have no doubt I’ll get there. Clearly, I don’t have any shame about it, because I talk about it on the show, nor do I think anyone who has diabetes, type 1 or type 2, none of them should have any shame. On that front, I agree. If Christopher’s point is you shouldn’t be ashamed, shame shouldn’t keep you from identifying as disabled, I completely agree, 100%. There may be other things, but shame is not a good reason. You do not need to feel shame about having any disease or disability.

**John:** Pulling back a little bit, I think your ability to publicly identify as what you want to identify as feels like a fundamental right. I just want to make sure that whether we’re talking about disability or someone’s gender, sexuality, or ethnic background, you are going to present yourself in the world a certain way, but you also should have some measure of autonomy in what you are saying about yourself. I just want to make sure we always leave space for people to be themselves and to speak up how they want to speak up. I honestly hear you, Craig, too, in terms of you don’t want to pull resources away from folks who may need more accommodation than you. It’s tough.

**Craig:** I certainly want to do my part to protect the workplace for people who need accommodations, but we do live in a world with limited resources and limited opportunities. I think we all understand if there is special consideration or opportunity for people of a certain class, I think we all understand that that protected class, that’s about helping people who really do need the help. It’s not simply about helping people who satisfy some superficial criteria. Steve Wynn, the guy who owns Encore, did he die?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t remember. I think he died. But he was blind.

**John:** He was blind.

**Craig:** Did he need special financial accommodations? Probably. He was a billionaire. Yeah, I’m sure he did. Should he be getting grant money and such? I don’t think so. I think it’s reasonable to do a needs analysis, especially when we’re dealing with limited resources for a lot of people.

**John:** Agreed. Our last bit of follow-up is related to Episode 610, where we talked about what do studios actually do.

**Drew:** Mallory writes, “How do successes like Sound of Freedom and the Taylor Swift movie figure into the major studios being the only route to successful distribution?”

**John:** These are two examples of movies that were made outside of the traditional studio system. I guess Sound of Freedom was actually made inside the studio system, but then that got released outside of the studio system. Of course, the Taylor Swift movie is making a bazillion dollars. It was just self-financed and put together. I think there have always been those oddities of things that were just done outside the system, but when we’re talking about alternatives to the studio system, it’s really about an ongoing basis, not just one-off projects.

**Craig:** First of all, Sound of Freedom, the success is in dispute, because-

**John:** It’s a real question of how many people were actually in the theaters watching that versus buying tickets.

**Craig:** That’s right. Hard to say exactly. But yeah, there have always been these strange things. In the case of Taylor Swift, she really is an independent film studio. She has enough money to finance… I think it was $20 million budget. What that means is that she can finance anything and then release it however she wants. She’s also her own studio, because she can advertise and promote her own material. She goes on tour, and that’s how that works. Taylor Swift is her own business empire. That makes sense that she can compete with movie studios.

The major studios are not the only route to successful distribution. I don’t think we’ve ever said that. There are independent studios that do it. There are one-offs. We find them notable for a good reason, because they’re rare. Really, I guess the position that I’ve had, that I’ll maintain, is that major studios are, generally speaking, the most effective and most prominent way to distribute a film.

**John:** Yeah. In that episode, we talked about how, obviously, the studio is bankrolling things, but they’re also providing the marketing function. They’re providing the collection of funds function. Sound of Freedom, it made a lot of money. Did it actually pull that money back out of theaters? That’s going to be a little bit more challenging for them, because they don’t have the next movie coming down the pipe to say, “Okay, we’re not giving you the next thing until you pay up what you owe us.” Same with Taylor Swift. Apparently, it’s a deal with AMC Theaters, which was probably the bulk of the incoming money. But shaking that money back and bringing it home will be more challenging for her company than it would be for Sony, because she has no next thing coming out.

Obviously, the Sound of Freedom marketing function and the viral way they were able to make that happen was exactly perfect for their movie. Taylor Swift is her own marketing machine, so she didn’t need that function of the studio.

**Craig:** Correct. And she was smart, because what Taylor Swift, who is overtly, apparently a savvy businessperson, understood was that distributing the movie through a studio was going to cost way more than it would earn her. Way more. The studio’s cut is massive. Why do you need to go have a bank finance the purchase of your car if you are a billionaire and you want to buy a car? Don’t. Just buy it.

**John:** Just buy the car.

**Craig:** Just buy the damn car.

**John:** Our marquee topic this week stems from a series of tweets that John Green, the bestselling author, put out at the start of the month. He’s the author of The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska. Some of these books have become movies and series. His tweets read, “It’s baffling to me that some of y’all see stuff in your mind. You see it? The way your eyes see? I always thought visualize meant thinks of the words, ideas, feelings associated with the thing, not actual visuals. This may be why I’m so often wrong about what’s behind a particular cabinet in our kitchen, even though I’ve lived in this house for a decade. I also cannot tell you the layout of a room unless I’m in that room and looking at the layout. And I have no sense of direction. None.”

Somebody writes in the Twitter thread, “So when you’re reading, does it turn into a movie? Can you see the characters?” He says, “No, it’s just text. Very occasionally – I count the number of times it’s happened on one hand – I will suddenly feel as if I can glimpse something visually that’s in a story, but 99.99% of the time, it’s just text. Is that unusual?” And it is unusual, but it’s not actually unprecedented. It’s actually more common than I thought.

We’re not a science podcast, so aphantasia as a condition is not a thing we’re going to go into much detail about. But it’s hard for me as a writer to envision myself being able to do my work without being able to visualize. I thought we’d spend a few minutes talking about visualization as part of our process.

**Craig:** It’s an incredibly important part of my process. I can see how if you were aphantasic, being a novelist wouldn’t necessarily be problematic. The reason we who write for screen I think really do rely on our ability to visualize is because somebody’s going to have to actually make it.

Also, we are writing things for people to portray and act in three-dimensional space. Where are they standing? This is the great Lindsay Doran question that she would ask all the time when I wrote a script with her. Where is he standing? Where are they standing? How big is the room? How do they get from here to here? Describe the space, because there are going to be a thousand meetings where someone is going to have to figure out how to build that thing. The more you can see…

You may not be able to put every detail down on page. First of all, it’s not advisable to do so. Second of all, you just won’t have the room. The more you know, the more you can answer the question, and also the more internally consistent the work will be, because a scene is written in a space, and the scene follows the rules of that space. It doesn’t just change in the middle of the scene. For me, not only is it important, but it’s kind of essential. If I can’t see the space, I can’t start to write the scene.

**John:** 100%. I think one of the reasons why people may not immediately click to that in terms of screenwriting is because we’re not describing the whole space. Sometimes we are more, but sometimes it’ll be a slug line. It’ll say interior house, this, and it may give a little painting of what the space is like. But even if I’ve not put out all that scene description there, I have to, in my head, know where this scene is.

The first step of writing a scene for me is literally creating the space in which the scene happens, figuring out roughly the layout of the room, wherever this is, putting people in that space, figuring out their general blocking, and only then do I start being able to observe what are they doing, what are they saying, what is the movement, how does it all work. I call this looping in my head. I’m just seeing the scene play out. I can’t imagine writing a scene without that. If I’m doing a surgical rewrite on someone else’s script, I do need to build that space out in my head, or else I can’t do it.

It may have been Aline who said it first on our podcast, the joke that the screenwriter’s the only person who’s already seen the movie. Yeah, I’ve definitely already seen the whole thing before I’ve put it down on paper.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I’ve seen it. This is this thing that’s happened to me a thousand times. When I get to a set or a place, everything’s always the other way. I don’t know why.

**John:** 100%, yeah.

**Craig:** It’s always the other way.

**John:** The phone is on the wrong side of the bed. How could you not know that?

**Craig:** It is so routine that I just laugh, and everyone’s like, “Wrong side?” I’m like, “Yeah.” Obviously, it’s not relevant. If it were relevant, I would make a point of it. The episode with Bill and Frank, I had their house in my head. This was the entrance. That’s where the dining room. That’s where the kitchen is. When you walked in the front door, the dining room was on the right, and then the kitchen was through the door, past there. And when I got their plan, they had put it on the left. They put it on the left for a reason. I couldn’t remember what it was. It had to do with something and building and blah blah blah. Every time without fail. Without fail, every single time. I think I’m very good at visualizing things, but I visualize them in the opposite direction from everybody else. The chirality is off.

But yeah, it’s essential. It’s just essential. Also, visualizing spaces allows you to write beyond the limitations of dialog. It gives you what are actors looking for, how to use the space, how to move through the space, picking objects up, what does it smell like, what is the humidity in the air, what do they lean against, can they tap their fingers on something that makes a sound, all of these things that you could do. None of them are there and accessible to you as you’re writing a scene if you can’t see the space. For what we do, I think it’s essential.

**John:** You said at the start that as screenwriters, obviously that visual thing is so important, but in writing the three Arlo Finch books, I would say that visualization was just as crucial to me, the ability to not only see what Arlo’s house was like and what the layout was and know where everything was in that place, but also what it sounded like, how the floorboards squeaked, and in the book, what did things smell like, what was the texture of stuff, how did things taste. In my head, I can do all those things. I can create tastes that I’m not experiencing. I can create smells that I’m not smelling. That was really important for me in writing those books, to just really ground you in what those spaces were, which in books have more than just what you see and what you hear. John Green is a very successful novelist who’s done all this without the ability to do that.

He’s not the only very successful person who has this condition. Ed Catmull, who’s a big Pixar director and animator, he has that same kind of mind blindness. Some very successful architects have it too. That doesn’t seem possible to me. Just me thinking about how my brain works is that these very, very visual people can’t see things in their head. They actually have to do it on paper to see the thing. That’s true. Clearly, the condition is a spectrum. They have a rating here from one to five. We’ll include it in the show notes. It’s not a disorder. It’s just a situation, like left-handedness. It’s not anything is necessarily wrong. It’s just that most people can visualize, and some people can’t.

**Craig:** Oh, I think there’s something wrong with lefthanded people.

**John:** Yeah, disaster.

**Craig:** Something needs to be done. We gotta get our country back, John.

**John:** This is just a wild theory I’m going to throw out there, and maybe somebody has tested this. I don’t feel a particularly compelling need to rewatch movies. Given a choice between rewatching a movie and watching a new movie, I’ll always watch a new movie. I wonder if some people who compulsively rewatch movies, it’s because they actually can’t see the movie in their head, and so the only way they can experience the movie is actually watching the movie, versus me, I can pull up any scene in one of my favorite movies and I can see the picture. I can tell you exactly what it is. I remember what direction characters are facing. A person who doesn’t have this visualization ability, it’s not just they can’t imagine new things. They can’t pull up memories of old spaces and times.

**Craig:** That may be true. If The Godfather comes on, I’m watching it, most Tarantino movies, and I can remember them. I can play them back. I can play back the entire scene where Samuel L. Jackson is yelling at Frank Whaley. I know where everyone is. But I still like watching it, because it’s fun.

**John:** I do wonder if down the road, algorithms will be able to figure out who is aphantasic, because it seems like the word choices we’re using and how we’re describing things ultimately may reveal… The same way they could figure out that Robert Galbraith was actually JK Rowling. I do wonder if there are certain patterns in people’s usages that will point to what’s actually happening inside their heads.

**Craig:** This is the next frontier, interfacing directly between our brains and the hardware that our brains have devised and created. I don’t know if I want to stick around for it or if I want to check out. I don’t know. The next few years are going to be nuts.

**John:** Ryan Knighton, a friend of the show – he’s been on a couple times – is a blind writer. He once had vision, but he lost his vision in his early 20s. I do notice that in talking with him and emailing with him, he uses visual words all the time. He was like, “I see what you’re saying. I’ll have a look.” He’s still using those things. I haven’t talked to him about this recently, whether in his writing he’s still seeing things in his mind, or if it is just all metaphorically seeing things rather than actually visualizing stuff.

**Craig:** I’m sure we have blind listeners. I’m curious. If we do have blind listeners who have been blind from birth, so they’ve never seen, I suspect they are doing some kind of internal visualization. Not all of them. Maybe some of them are also aphantasic. But what is happening for blind folks when they visualize things? Are they visualizing them based on the heard description or the read description? Curious. I’d love to know.

**John:** It’s good to see. Related, also there’s the phenomenon that some people don’t have internal monologues. They don’t hear things in their head. Sure. Again, there’s nothing wrong, but it’s just really unusual. I can’t imagine not being able to preview a conversation, not being able to have some ongoing chatter in your head.

**Craig:** I don’t actually hear it, hear it, but it’s there.

**John:** For sure. Let’s get on to some listener questions. Drew, help us out.

**Drew:** Oh, I feel the umbrage clouds on the horizon on this first one.

**Craig:** Here we go.

**Drew:** Greenhorn writes, “I’m a repped screenwriter but rather in limbo at the moment, since I’m switching reps, and I don’t have the appropriate person to speak to right now. A few years ago, I was introduced to a second unit director who has worked on some big movies. He’s looking to make his directing debut, so I pitched him a few ideas. One of them he loved, so I worked up a four-page outline and was in touch with him through that process. Indeed, he gave some feedback along the way, but to be frank, his contributions were minimal. The idea, title, characters, story, and set pieces are all mine. And indeed, every word on the existing document was written by me. As far as I understand, I am therefore the writer. All this writing I did pre-strike, by the way.

“He called me last week to say he just pitched the idea verbally to a major studio who love it and who want to see the outline. But he’s saying that he’ll only pass it on if I say he co-wrote it. This doesn’t feel fair, let alone true. From the conversation we had on the phone, I know that he’s doing this out of fear of the studio buying it from me and then just hiring a more experienced director to replace him.

“I’ve told him that the solution to this is for him to just option the project from me. I also told him that it isn’t fair for him to try to claim co-writer credit. He has responded petulantly and with a hostile tone, doubling down on his claim to being co-writer. And more worryingly, he said he’s now pitched the idea to another studio. But even though I’ve asked him, he won’t say which. I’m now concerned to protect my idea, since it’s the kind of high-concepty, laugh-out-loud kind of idea which you can imagine suspiciously resurfacing at a studio a little later down the line. And there’s no paper trail if he’s pitching verbally and indeed refusing to tell me where he’s pitching. So my questions: am I right to deny his claim to co-writer credit? And short of getting a lawyer on the case, how best do you reckon I respond to him while I don’t have a new rep yet?”

**John:** Greenhorn, a couple things to do right away, and then we can also probably back up to more general advice. I thought Greenhorn’s suggestion of, “You could option it from me, and that’s a way to attach yourself more fully to it,” that makes sense. He should’ve said yes to that. But he didn’t say yes to that. Now you’re concerned that he’s going to, having gone out to pitch this to different places, he’s going to try to set up this idea without you. That seems kind of like a thing he might try to do. This is a time where you actually need to make sure your outline, your four-page thing is actually… I would say actually register it with the Copyright Office, which we don’t often say. But you do need to protect yourself here and make sure that it’s clear that this really was your idea. You also have all the emails back and forth between the two of you. It sounds like there’s emails. That’ll also be in your defense. But you don’t want to be going into this planning for a lawsuit down the road. You want to stop this now if you possibly can. Craig, I’m curious what you think he should be doing right now.

**Craig:** Right now, we’re dealing with crisis management. Let’s jump in our time machine first and talk about what should Greenhorn have done. You pitched this idea that you had, and then you wrote an outline. Now, by the way, we’re not talking about an idea. Now we’re talking about a unique expression in fixed form. Now we have-

**John:** Literary material.

**Craig:** … literary material. “He just pitched the idea verbally to a major studio who love it.” I don’t believe him, by the way. Don’t believe him. I’m just going to say that right away, Greenhorn. Do not believe that.

**John:** He’s lying to you in other ways, so he’s probably lying about this.

**Craig:** “Verbally to a major studio who love it and want to see the outline.” They love it? Really? “But he’ll only pass it on if I say he co-wrote it.” Now, at that point, Greenhorn, I would have lawyered up, right then and there. I wouldn’t have offered options or anything. I’m like, “That’s it. You’re out. You’re done. Bye,” because he didn’t co-write it at all. That’s not what he did, nor do I understand why he needs to.

Greenhorn, your theory is that he wants to do this so that they can’t kick him off the project. They kick writers off of projects way easier than they kick directors off. They kick writers off of features on a daily basis. They hate kicking directors off of features. So, no, that’s not going to help him at all. At all. This is just lame. It’s not even a discussion, by the way. It’s literally not even a discussion. I’m sure he is petulant and hostile. Don’t care.

He’s a second unit director, so what do I know? I know then that he does not have experience necessarily developing material with writers as a first unit director. Second unit directors, by the way, are incredibly important, and the best ones are remarkably skilled, so in no way am I undermining what they do. They are necessary and amazing, but they do what they do.

**John:** We should say for our listeners who may not know, second unit directors generally, particularly on bigger action movies, they are filming a lot of this stunt work. They’re doing a lot of stuff that doesn’t involve the principal actors doing the main scenes. Every action movie you’ve seen has had an amazing second unit director doing that stuff. In television, they’re also doing a lot of pickup stuff for things that aren’t being hit by the main unit, so they’re crucial to things, but these are not people who are generally doing big storytelling scene work kind of things.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you go to a movie and you see a big car chase, all the shots where they’re cars, so not inside the car… Mark Wahlberg’s inside the car. The director, the first unit director is directing Mark Wahlberg inside the car. He’s going, “Whoa. Huh.” All the other stuff, zoom, ram, rah, crash, smash, that usually is the second unit director. Second unit directors sometimes are also stunt coordinators, because they are shooting fight sequences and things like that. The guys that went on to make John Wick were stunt coordinators who operated second units and then moved up to make John Wayne. It can happen, but it sounds like this particular second unit director does not have experience working with writers developing things, because if he did, he wouldn’t have said any of this.

Now, John is right, you should submit your work to the Copyright Office, and then you should call a lawyer. Now I know you say, “In short of getting a lawyer in the case,” but this is the frustrating part, Greenhorn. Sometimes I feel like John and I have a medical show, and people write in and say, “I’m bleeding out of my butt. Short of going to a doctor, what do you reckon I do with this?” You’re like, “I think you need to go to the doctor. You’re bleeding out of your butt.” You’re sort of bleeding out of your butt here. You need to go to a lawyer. It is going to cost money, but do you care or not?

The bottom line is, look, if you read about this thing happening in a newspaper, you can call a lawyer then and say, “Look, I’ve got this thing.” Then the lawyer will be like, “Great. Okay. I’m taking this on contingency, because it’s going to work, and we’re going to get money.” Or you can do it now. Personally, I would do it now. If that guy happens to be listening to this, if Greenhorn’s account is accurate, dude, act like you’ve been there before. This is ridiculous.

**John:** I would suspect Greenhorn’s lawyer will send a letter to this second unit director saying, “Stop misrepresenting your involvement in this project. To clarify, you did not write any of this project, and do not represent yourself as a writer on this project, and maybe don’t contact my client again.” There’s no salvaging this relationship. Greenhorn, I wouldn’t worry about trying to make good with the second unit director. You’re not going to end up in a happy place with this guy.

**Craig:** No. Also, to be clear, this guy is trying to sell property he doesn’t own. Once you start thinking about this like property, you can realize how offensive this is. He was like, “Hey, I want to be a car racer,” and you’re like, “Great. I like building cars. Here’s my plan to build a car.” Then he’s just going around going, to car companies, “I have a car that I made.” No. No. It’s not yours.

**John:** There are producers who are pitching projects they don’t own, but they are producers pitching projects they don’t own, and they’re not trying to claim that they are the co-writer on the project. That’s where they overstepped.

**Craig:** Correct. Also, producers that are pitching projects that they don’t write, generally speaking, have the consent of the writer. I’m not aware of any producer that’s going around there pitching IP that they have no association with. That’s just scumbag stuff.

**John:** There are a lot of scumbag producers who do that.

**Craig:** I guess that’s true. They’re scumbags.

**John:** Here’s the thing. They’re scumbags. This is a scummy thing to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, so lawyer up.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** Sorry, Greenhorn. Lawyer up.

**John:** What else we got, Drew?

**Drew:** Ripley writes, “One struggle I continually have is what medium to write in. I feel with any idea I have, I can see how it would work as a cartoon or a horror feature or a comedy series. I’ve so far written a sci-fi comedy feature, an animated pilot, and a scattering of mostly drama shorts. I’m currently working on an idea that I’m on page 20 of and am still not sure what it is or should or will be. I suffer from ADHD and am often paralyzed with decision. I can see how a hundred different ways could work and never know how to narrow it down. Do you have any specific advice for this dumb issue?”

**John:** It’s not a dumb issue. I think a lot of people struggle with… I’m re-framing your question. It’s like, I don’t know what project I should write. Really, what it comes down to is you have a general story area, but you’re not sure what specific version of it you should write. That’s a really common situation. I think you just need to let yourself sit for a second, really think about what do you want to write. Is there a genre that particularly speaks to you, that you really enjoy writing, that you actually feel connection to? Is there something you’ve always wanted to try that you’ve not had a chance yet to do, that you want to experiment with? The things you write for yourself can truly be experiments. They’re a chance to take a flyer and see what works. Don’t be afraid to do that. Just try to be deliberate in your choices.

**Craig:** I think that’s excellent advice. I would only add this. Sometimes we struggle with the quantity of possible decisions, because we’re making the decisions kind of backwards. You have an idea, and then you say now, could be a cartoon, could be a horror, could be a comedy, could be animated, could be live, could be drama. Okay, sure, it could be a thousand things. We all have the same thousand things, so what’s the difference between people who are migrating firmly towards one thing, as opposed to you, Ripley, who are just like someone at Cheesecake Factory going through that massive menu, is that you are trying to stick that on top of what you’re doing. But it really shouldn’t be a decision. It should be a therefore.

You think about your idea, and you think about what the point of that idea is and what you’re trying to say with it and who you’re trying to reach, who you’re trying to talk to, and how you want them to feel. You think about all those things. As you think about them, it should begin to emerge that it would be best as blank. Anything that you and I have done could be a cartoon or a live action. Literally, Chernobyl could be a cartoon if you want it to. It wouldn’t be good, but you can do it. We make our choices for reasons. I think that’s the key is you need to figure out what it wants to be by asking what it is.

Sometimes the decision paralysis, and I’m not discounting the fact that you have an additional challenge because you have ADHD, but beyond that additional challenge, the reason you’re asking us is because you feel like, “Hey, I can get there.” I believe you can too, if you dig a little bit deeper into what exactly the thing is about. Then I think maybe you’ll have more clarity. I hope you will.

**John:** I agree. Looks like we have time for another question here.

**Drew:** Taylor from Arkansas writes, “I wrote an eight-page script that is part of an anthology feature film. The film is in post, and the producers are in talks with multiple streamers to buy it. I am not part of the WGA yet, and I cannot find on the WGA website how I should receive credit or maybe points. Any insight would be appreciated. To clarify, I wrote this script specifically for this film. These are not preexisting short scripts or films pieced together.”

**Craig:** Just to be clear, Taylor, at least this is how I’m reading your question, the project itself is a WGA-covered project. It’s just that you’re not in the WGA yet, I think.

**John:** Possibly. It’s not entirely clear from Taylor’s question. Let’s take that as the premise, and then we can modify at the end if we need to.

**Craig:** Taylor, you’re trying to figure out essentially how to qualify for full WGA membership, and indeed it works on a points system where certain kinds of work earn certain amounts of credits, like tokens, kind of, towards membership. And once you hit, I think it’s 24 of those, boom, you become a current member in good standing for, I think, seven years.

There is a manual that you can find on the WGA website, and we can, I’m sure, find a link for that that does show that. But you can also call the Membership Department at the WGA. They are there to help, because what you’re writing is a quirky little thing. It’s part of an anthology feature. Okay, so does this qualify as a short? Are you credited instead for the time you are employed? You need to call the WGA Membership Department and ask them this question, and they will give you the full answer.

**John:** Yes. Thinking about this project, whether it’s a WGA project or not a WGA project, your question of how you’re credited on the film is going to be relevant. I’ve seen anthology films where in the end, they list the different segments and then the writer and director of that segment and what the crew is, and they treat it like this was a bunch of shorts all put together. They may be an appropriate way of crediting writers in this project. Alternately, they could choose list all the writers together.

If it’s a WGA project, what’s going to happen is it’s going to be a list of participating writers, so you’ll be one of the participating writers in this, and then figure out how to assign credit. It’s tough in an anthology. Even having been on that committee, I’m not quite sure what the consensus decision would be, how they’re going to assign that credit. My guess is this is ultimately not going to be a WGA project, but we’ll see where it shakes out.

**Craig:** If it’s not a WGA project, then it doesn’t matter, Taylor, how much work you do. It’s not going to earn you towards membership. If it is a WGA project, the good news is, your credit credit, meaning written by or not, is actually irrelevant.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s just employment. The question is, were you employed under a WGA contract? Even if you’re not in the WGA, if it is a WGA project, you have to be employed under a WGA contract. Let’s say that’s a yes. Then the next question is, what was the structure of that deal? Were you paid for time? Were you paid for a draft? Were you paid for a polish? What were you paid for? And then lastly, how long did that run for? Did you do two polishes? Did you do three rewrites? All of that stuff ultimately gets processed by the Membership Department.

Since we’re missing a whole bunch of details here, easiest thing would be for you to call the WGA. But don’t call them if this project is not covered by the WGA, because then it’s sort of like calling… You might as well call the US Post Office. We will have no more information or relevance to you if the production company is not signatory to the Writers Guild.

**John:** I would ask the producer or whoever it is who’s making the film whether it’s a WGA project. Also, take a look around as to who the other writers are. If none of the writers involved in the project are WGA writers, I think it’s a good guess that it’s not being done under WGA contract.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a series of, I think they’re originally TikToks, but I saw them on Instagram reels, by this comedian named Bonnie. I don’t know her last name. Her handle is Boobie Klapper, which is-

**Craig:** That was my handle.

**John:** That was your handle. The premise of these videos, it’s a class in teaching product packaging. It’s in that form where she’s talking to camera, but then she’s also playing the other two characters in this class. They’re really good. I’m going to play one little clip here so you get a sense of what this feels like.

**Bonnie:** Next on the list we have chips. They come in large bags, so most people aren’t going to eat the whole bag at once, and any exposure to moisture in the air will cause them to go stale. What are we going to package this in, you guys? Dylan?

**Bonnie as Dylan:** A resealable bag?

**Bonnie:** Good guess, Dylan, but no. Ruth?

**Bonnie as Ruth:** A non-resealable bag so that everybody has to buy other tools specifically designed to seal off the big gaping hole at the top?

**Bonnie:** That’s exactly right, Ruth. We want to create a headache so universal that an entire market of products emerges to try to address it. Well done.

**John:** She’s done this as a series, as an ongoing series of things. I just like the form of it. It reminds me of the Ikea cashier kind of thing. It’s just creating a premise and a situation, and the little three-man sketches are just the perfect way to manifest them. Loved it.

**Craig:** Excellent. My One Cool Thing is the most mundane One Cool Thing I’ve ever had. But John.

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** I bought a whole bunch of socks.

**John:** You deserve socks.

**Craig:** I deserve them. I’ve always been just like, buy the white socks. I’m trying to spiff myself up. I want some colored socks. Dress socks are too thin. I don’t like the way they feel. They go too high on your leg. I like a comfy sock, but I also want a splash of color, John, so what do I do? I go to Uniqlo,Uniqlo in the Beverly Center, but they’re all over, of course.

**John:** They’re everywhere.

**Craig:** In the Beverly Center, they have a wall of socks, 5,000 different colors. The specific kind of sock, it’s called Uniqlo Colorful 50 Socks. I don’t know what the 50 stands for. Gotta be honest. Maybe they have 50 colors. I don’t know. Don’t care. They’re cheap. They’re comfy. They come in every possible color you can imagine. I bought a big mess of them. Secondary One Cool Thing. I get all these socks. I’ve never been to Uniqlo. By the way, I haven’t been to the Beverly Center in like 20 years.

**John:** Now that you’ve moved to our neighborhood, you’re closer to the Beverly Center.

**Craig:** There you go. I’m in there with Melissa. We bought our socks. She got something. I got a hoodie. All right. Great. So we have all of our stuff. Where do we go check out? Oh, no. All they have is self-checkout. That’s all they have. I’m like, “Ugh.”

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** I have all these socks, because there was a deal where if you buy four pairs of socks, it cost $8, something stupid, which is great. We’ve got to scan all this. There’s a guy waiting there, and he goes, “Oh hey, have you used these before?” I’m like, “No.” He goes, “Okay. You just dump all your crap into this huge white bucket that’s connected to the machine, and that’s it.” John.

**John:** Amazing.

**Craig:** I am still freaked out by this.

**John:** Does everything have an RFID tag, which is how they know what it is?

**Craig:** No. They’re fricking socks. Here’s how the socks are packaged. There’s a sticker on them that you can peel off. Then there are these two little metal brackets to hold the socks together. That’s it. There’s nothing.

**John:** Does the sticker have an RFID [crosstalk 00:55:42]?

**Craig:** No. It’s a fricking sticker.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Sometimes you could see inside, oh, there’s some sort of… No. I don’t understand what this machine is doing. We dumped in 20 pairs of socks, a hoodie, and a bra, and it somehow knew exactly what was in that bin instantly.

**John:** That’s incredible.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** I’m terrified.

**John:** When I was in Boston a couple weeks ago, I did buy something at Uniqlo, and the checkout was a hassle and a pain. I’m happy that they found some way to do it.

**Craig:** Get thee to the Uniqlo in Beverly Hills and try out this technology. It’s pretty remarkable. My One Cool Thing mostly is the socks, but secondarily-

**John:** Mostly the socks.

**Craig:** … the magic bin that knows what you bought.

**John:** I’m debating on how I think about this, because we mostly have white socks. We mostly wear white socks, and so we don’t have to match them. As we do laundry, any two socks are their pair. With colored socks, you do have to match the pairs. It’s not a huge hassle.

**Craig:** It’s really not. It’s really not.

**John:** I’m excited for your socks. You deserve colorful socks.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Han Lundberg. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for the weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. Someone actually wrote in specifically about the new Scriptnotes University hoodie and how much they love it. I’m so happy people love the hoodie. You’ll 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 getting the things you always dreamed of. Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Great. This had a prompt. Drew, somebody wrote in with a question for us.

**Drew:** Yeah, a photojournalist wrote in. She wrote, “Craig talks about his career and how he knew he could do something like The Last of Us but didn’t know or imagine he would ever be given the opportunity. I think about myself in a different industry. I spent years, jealously, I hate to admit, watching other people do what I wanted to do. I looked at their work and thought, ‘Just put me in, coach. I can do it.’ Then one day, while I was standing in the middle of a river, photographing migrants as they crossed into Mexico on their journey north, I had a realization that after 10 years of hard work, I’d made it to the opportunity I’d always hope I’d be given. And for a moment, it was like getting a case of vertigo, like glancing down while you’re extraordinarily high on a very dangerous mountain climb and suddenly realizing where you are. Can y’all talk about if you ever had that moment and how you emotionally reassured yourself so that you didn’t suddenly lose your footing and tumble back down from where you came?”

**John:** Oof.

**Craig:** Heavy.

**John:** I have a lot of stories, anecdotes, and related feelings about that. I became successful pretty early on in my career. I got my first movie made. I definitely remember walking up to set for the first day of Go! and thinking, “Wow, there’s all these trucks around. Oh, these trucks are for my movie. Oh, crap, I’m making a movie.” I felt like I wasn’t worthy to be there, and overwhelmed that I was going to be found out. There’s definitely a lot of imposter syndrome, and then realizing, “Oh, no, actually, I do know how to do this. This is going to be fine. This is going to be okay,” and a series of those sort of steps, like being on set for my first TV show and all those issues, being around famous people and being in those rooms and realizing, “Oh, this is sort of the dream. This is what I’ve always wanted. It’s kind of what I thought it would be, but also just a lot of hard work.” Craig?

**Craig:** It’s an incredibly common thing, and I think if you don’t experience it, you might be a sociopath. It’s pretty normal to think, “Wait, I’m the thing that I was dreaming of being. If I was dreaming of it, then I shouldn’t be it. That’s why it was a dream. Now what do I do?”

There’s a couple of things that hopefully will help. One is, at some point you begin to realize, I haven’t changed at all. The key is, like you said, “Okay, I had made it to the opportunity I had always hoped I would be given.” That’s a great way of putting it. What you didn’t say, and I’m glad for it, photojournalist, is, “I became a success.” You’re the same person. The circumstances around you are changing.

But one thing that’s happening is a re-balancing of the karmic scales. You’re being evaluated in a different way. Sometimes it’s not fair. Particularly early on in our careers, we can be discounted. Later on, we may be over-counted. There’s this thing that happens where suddenly you can do no wrong, until of course you do. Then it’s important to remember again, I haven’t changed; the circumstances have. The way the world evaluates you is not necessarily your worth. It almost always isn’t. It’s important to remember you’re the same person. That’s good news. What it means is what you were doing then, which they might have looked down on, came from the same brain as what you’re doing now. Keep that continuity in mind.

I run into this all the time when I’m doing interviews for press for our show. I can’t tell you how many times, a million, someone has said, “You used to make comedies, and now you do this. What? How? What? How?” I’m like, “Okay, here we go again.” See, have you never met anyone? You never met anyone who was a funny person who also felt sad sometimes or got angry or about something or had moments of seriousness? Do you think that Jim Carrey walks around all day like he’s in Liar, Liar? What? What do you mean? We hold multitudes with ourselves. But it’s hard for people. I understand why they ask me this question, because they evaluate us by what we do and then imagine that we had to change to do this thing. We did not. They did. They had to change.

Just reconnect with the consistency of who you are, and the fact that when you were doing the things that you were like, “I’m doing this for money. I wish I could have better opportunities,” that you did that work well enough to get you into this place, where people are now giving you the opportunity to do this. Just keep doing the work. Keep growing. Always be humble. Always remember you can get better, always. Study the people that do what you do, and do it so beautifully that you love it.

And never lose that excitement for other people’s good work. That’s so important. You see somebody else crushing it. Okay. You said you used to be jealous. Fine. But now you are where you are. Stop being jealous. Start appreciating it, because it makes you better when you see these things. It makes you better. You learn. It inspires you to up your game, which is fantastic.

Then don’t worry too much about the fact that you are, like you said, on a very dangerous mountain climb. You’re not. There is no mountain. There is just this long walk that we begin when we’re born, and we end it when we die. The walk is going well for you. Keep walking. Keep looking at it.

**John:** In the initial setup for this, I said answered prayers, that sense of, oh, you had this wish, this hope, this dream. You were a protagonist in the story. You had this vision of what you wanted to achieve. In that vision of what you want to achieve, you probably had markers and milestones and, “Oh, if I’ve done this thing, then I will have made it.” In the case of you as a photojournalist, if you’re being hired and sent off on these assignments to do these things, that’s great. In the case of people who want to make movies and TV shows, you’re on set, you’re at the premiere, where you have those pinch me moments.

The same way Craig was saying you’re still the same person, I think one of the dangers is that in that vision, in that prayer you put out there, you were going to achieve these things, and in achieving these things, you were going to be happy. You were going to feel good about yourself. You were going to feel like you were worthy, that life would be good. I think one of the things you notice over time is that the most successful people you end up meeting in their fields aren’t necessarily the happiest. In many cases, they are not happy. We know many very successful people who are kind of miserable.

There’s a certain thing that happens when you’ve achieved that success and, “Wait, I should be happy, but why am I not happy?” I can point to all these things that I have achieved, and yet I still feel like a miserable failure.” I think you’ve got to make sure that you are aware that some success, financial success, career success, the accolades of others, they feel good. They’re useful, but they are not going to fundamentally affect your own self-perception or your ability to feel good about yourself, and in some cases, that kind of success can only emphasize and magnify those feelings until you become kind of monstrous. Just be aware of that too. Success is not going to make you happy. That’s a crucial thing to remember.

**Craig:** It’s not going to change you fundamentally. It’s not going to cure your shame issues. They will still be there. Everything that John just said is really important to understand. We, especially in American culture, imagine that there is a win. It’s not really that way. Here’s the best news, I guess, is that when you become a success at the thing that you are compelled to do, because I assume, photojournalist, there are days where you’re like, “Oh my god, it’s hot, and I don’t want to go out there,” but also, “Oh, if I see that, I got to get my camera.” Okay, there’s the compulsion. That’s the way I am with writing. That’s the way John is. You’re compelled to do this thing. When you achieve a certain amount of success, it becomes easier to pursue your compulsion. It doesn’t become happier. It doesn’t become simple. You will still have moments where it hurts. You’re going to be doing it anyway, and now it’s gotten easier to do, because you can focus more on it. You don’t have to worry as much about other things, like paying the bills, being kicked out of a house, food, medicine, health care. Those things get solved by success, so that you can concentrate on the work you do.

With success also comes opportunities to work with better people. Working with better people is the instant Hamburger Helper to doing better work. Let’s say I get a call from Martin Scorsese. I haven’t, by the way, and I’m stunned. But let’s say he did, and he’s like, “Craig, I want to make a movie with you,” in his fun, fast-talking way. I would get better as a writer working with Martin Scorsese. How could I not? That’s exciting. There are all these benefits to success, but none of them include happy. That’s not the end result here.

**John:** Looking at this last paragraph here, she writes, “For a moment, it was like getting a case of vertigo, like glancing down while extraordinarily high on a very dangerous mountain climb and suddenly realizing where you are.” What I hear in that is also fear of loss, loss aversion, like, “I made it to this place, and now it’s all perilous, because I could fall from this high of place. I worry about losing it all.” I definitely see that happening among some of our peers. They’re really worried about, “If I don’t maintain this pace, if I don’t maintain this level of success, it’s all going to come crashing down.”

I think over the course of our 10 years, we’ve tried to be consistent about saying, “Listen, be ready to be successful. Here’s some things to be thinking about when you actually achieve some financial success, when you achieve some career success, but you can’t let that paralyze you, and you can’t get stuck or trapped in this way of thinking.”

Craig, that’s one thing I want to commend you for is that you were a successful comedy writer, you weren’t happy doing it, and you said, “Listen, I’m not going to worry about losing my status as a comedy writer. I’m going to do some other stuff here and scratch the itches I actually really have.” I would say the same to Photojournalist. Don’t worry too much about losing what you have. Keep thinking about the kind of work you did to get to this place, how do you keep that work going.

**Craig:** All true. I guess I’ll finish with my one last bit of, I don’t know if it’s advice, but commiseration, one human being to another. When you arrive at this place that you’ve imagined arriving at for so long, you can also get depressed, because there is no cake. The cake is a lie. If you have something to dream about, that is warm and comforting and exciting. If you get there and, as John suggests correctly, it doesn’t make you instantly happy, it doesn’t change who you are, transform you from inside, you can get depressed, because suddenly you start to wonder, what’s the point of all of this? We are trained to have a destination. There is no destination. If you think that you have, quote unquote, arrived, and then you look around and go, “Wait, is this it? It’s a lot like when I hadn’t arrived, just better hotel rooms,” that’s normal. You have to mourn the loss of that childlike hope.

Then on the other side of that hopefully brief spell, there is something better, which is an acceptance of the way things are and that the work itself is, he said cliché-ably, the work itself is the reward. That’s the reward. There is no other reward. Hopefully, we have helped a little bit there, photojournalist. We’re certainly very proud of you. Keep walking your walk.

**John:** Indeed. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [‘Daredevil’ Hits Reset Button as Marvel Overhauls Its TV Business](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/daredevil-marvel-disney-1235614518/) by Borys Kit for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-episode-530-the-one-with-jack-thorne-transcript)
* [John Green Tweet](https://x.com/johngreen/status/1708515024275189884?s=20)
* [Discovering aphantasia](https://austinkleon.com/2023/10/03/discovering-aphantasia/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) by Austin Kelon
* [Aphantasia – A Different Kind of Blindness](https://leelefever.com/aphantasia-blindness/) by Lee LeFever
* [Here’s What It’s Like To Not Have An Internal Monologue](https://www.bustle.com/wellness/does-everyone-have-an-internal-monologue) by Caroline Steber for Bustle
* [WGA Membership Department](https://www.wga.org/the-guild/about-us/contact-us/departments/membership)
* [Boobie_Klapper](https://www.instagram.com/p/Cwv-uusPR5D/) on Instagram
* [Uniqlo Colorful 50 Socks](https://www.uniqlo.com/us/en/products/E434187-000/00?colorDisplayCode=62&sizeDisplayCode=027)
* [Uniqlo RFID Automated Checkout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqPfYnVKwGI)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Han Lundberg ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/615standard.mp3).