Tim Ferriss: It seems to me, and you can’t believe everything you read on the internet, so I want you to certainly fact check me as needed. But you also have or have had some internal rules, so you can use your external environment to assist, but I read that, and again, feel free to correct, but making rules, the importance of making rules like, you can sit here and write or you can sit here and do nothing, but you can’t sit here and do anything else.
Neil Gaiman: That was always, and still is when I go off to write, that’s my biggest rule.
Tim Ferriss: Could you speak to that?
Neil Gaiman: Yeah, ’cause I would go down to my lovely little gazebo at the bottom of the garden, sit down, and I’m absolutely allowed not to do anything. I’m allowed to sit at my desk, I’m allowed to stare out at the world, I’m allowed to do anything I like, as long as it isn’t anything. Not allowed to do a crossword, not allowed to read a book, not allowed to phone a friend, not allowed to make a clay model of something. All I’m allowed to do is absolutely nothing, or write.
What I love about that is I’m giving myself permission to write or not write, but writing is actually more interesting than doing nothing after a while. You sit there and you’ve been staring out the window now for five minutes, and it kind of loses its charm. You’re going, “Well, actually, let’s all write something.” It’s hard. As a writer, I’m more easily — I’m distractable. I have a three-year-old son. He is the epitome of cuteness and charm. It’s more fun playing with him than it is writing, which means if I’m going to be writing, I need to do it somewhere where I don’t have a three-year-old son singing to me, asking me to read to him, demanding my attention.
I think it’s really just a solid rule for writers. You don’t have to write. You have permission to not write, but you don’t have permission to do anything else.
Tim Ferriss: That reminds me of another one of my favorite writers, you being the one who’s sitting in front of me, John McPhee, a nonfiction writer who has spent much of his life in Princeton, New Jersey, but has written some incredible Pulitzer Prize winning nonfiction, and I was lucky enough to take a class with him a thousand years ago. His rule was very similar, although he didn’t state it explicitly. He would sit in front of his first, as a young man, typewriter. He could sit in front of the blank page and from eight a.m. to six p.m., and with the exception of a break for lunch and swimming, it was the blank page or writing. He was disallowed from doing anything else.