Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

by Neil Gaiman

(When I have children I’ll do as much to encourage them to read as possible. You know, like hit them if they don’t.)

His writing career was not always that successful.

“I used to spend a lot of time in front of a typewriter wondering what to write, tearing up pieces of paper and never actually writing anything.” This not-writing quality was to become a hallmark of Douglas’s later work.

Even as an undergraduate, Douglas was perpetually missing deadlines: in three years he only managed to complete three essays.

This however may have had less to do with his fabled lateness than with the fact that his studies came in a poor third to his other interests—performing and pubs.

Douglas Adams’s introduction to the radio scripts book gives an impression of this time, a period that he described as “six months of baths and peanut-butter sandwiches”. Six months spent at his mother’s house in Dorset filling waste-paper baskets with sheets of half-typed paper, of relentless self-editing, of depression. He would leave notes around for himself to find with messages such as: If you ever get the chance to do a proper, regular job… take it. This is not an occupation for a healthy, growing lad. and underneath those notes, other notes, reminding him: This is not written after a bad day. This is written after an average day.

“I wanted to—I say this in the introduction to the script book—I felt you could do a great deal more with sound than I had heard being done of late. The people who were exploring and exploiting where you could go with sound were people in the rock world—the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and so on. “I had the idea of scenes of sound. That there would never be a moment at which the alien world would let up, that you would be in it for half an hour. I’m not saying we necessarily achieved that, but I think that what we achieved came about as a result of striving after that.

I started off in the early programmes asking what we should cut, and he’d come back with a list of odd words here and there (‘the’s and ‘and’s and ‘but’s and things) and we couldn’t do that. He’d say, ‘But there’s nothing else I want to cut!’ In the end I stopped asking him. So I can come across as the vandal of the programme.”

This speaks to every writer who is married to their draft.

“So we sat in the garage I was using for a study at that time, and wrote the fifth episode together more or less line by line. Things like the ‘three phases of civilisation’ and the Haggunenon Death Flotilla, who evolved into different creatures, we sat down and worked it out word by word. It was actually incredibly quick, although very painstaking. Then I was busy on production for Episode Six, so although he used stuff I wrote for it, he really put the whole thing together. “The pressure was fantastic. We were writing it hours before it was due to be recorded. (Later on, in the second series, things got really silly: he was writing during the recording.) “Having written the thing, that was more or less it, and it had been great fun. As Douglas said, it was a tremendous relief for him not to have to do it on his own, and we both enjoyed it, and I didn’t think that much about it. It was just a job, and we’d written together before.

Apocryphal stories have grown up about Douglas Adams’s almost superhuman ability to miss deadlines. Upon close inspection, they all appear to be true.

“Although Hitchhiker’s does not have any real political significance, there is a theme there of the ubiquity of bureaucracy and paranoia rampant throughout the universe. And that is a direct debt to Python, along with the comparative style of ‘individual events, little worlds’. The difference comes with the narrative structure, so the world of Hitchhiker’s is based outside the ‘Real World’ while still co-existing with it. It’s like looking at events through the wrong end of a telescope.”

Then I came back and sat down and wrote; and threw out practically every word of the first draft of Life, the Universe and Everything. Take, for example, in the first draft, the first twenty pages, which were Arthur waking up in his cave, two and a half million years ago. (I think it was just that was where I wanted to be at the time.) I rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote, and at the end of twenty rewrites those thirty pages were the first two lines of the book, and that was it.

“Writing comes easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.