Neil Gaiman - Anansi Boys

My idea of hell is a blank sheet of paper. Or a blank screen. And me, staring at it, unable to think of a single thing worth saying, a single character that people could believe in, a single story that hasn’t been told before.

Staring at a blank sheet of paper.

Forever.

I wrote my way out of it, though. I got desperate (that’s another flip and true answer I give to the where-do-you-get-your- ideas question. “Desperation.” It’s up there with “Boredom” and “Deadlines”. All these answers are true to a point.) and took my own terror, and the core idea, and crafted a story called Calliope, which explains, I think pretty definitively, where writers get their ideas from. It’s in a book called DREAM COUNTRY . You can read it if you like. And, somewhere in the writing of that story, I stopped being scared of the ideas going away.

Where do I get my ideas from?

I make them up.

Out of my head.

© 2005 Neil Gaiman

Several years earlier Spider had actually been tremendously disappointed by a barrelful of monkeys. It had done nothing he had considered particularly entertaining, apart from emit interesting noises, and eventually, once the noises had stopped and the monkeys were no longer doing anything at all—except possibly on an organic level—had needed to be disposed of in the dead of night.

The ship had been the Sunny Archipelago until an attack of gastric flu had made international news. A cheap attempt to rebrand it without changing the ship’s initials done by the chairman of the board, who did not speak English as well as he believed he did, had left the cruise ship rejoicing in the name of the Squeak Attack .