Sandman creator, bestselling author and all-round nice guy Neil Gaiman talks to us about getting lucky, the David Lynch collaboration that was not to be, and how he deals with deadlines.

I think the weird and wonderful thing about writing is that at the point where you start writing something, that becomes the entire focus of your energy.

Weird and wonderful coincidences always do seem to happen more when you’re working and when you’re on the right track. For example, getting a text message from somebody suddenly saying that if we phone some guy and mention their name, we’d have a chance to talk to the fourth-most holy Buddhist priest in China, who is incredibly busy and never talks to anybody and doesn’t give interviews. We make the phone call and that afternoon, I’m getting to interview him and afterwards, I discover how impossible that was. Normally people would have to wait eight months but we just sort of made a couple of phone calls and showed up with a fruit basket.

The only book in my life that I have really ever missed and never been given was a gift from my father, which he bought for me before I was born. He told me about this incredibly beautiful, hardback illustrated edition of Monkey that he found in England and bought but did not give to me because I was a tiny boy. And at the point where he went looking for it seven or eight years later, he was never able to find it, which immediately fascinated me.

Right now, I’m working on this big book on China and Journey to the West. I want to tell people about Xuanzang (the Buddhist monk whose 17-year trip to India inspired Wu Chengen’s Journey to the West), what he did, the process of what real Buddhism is, bringing Buddhism to China and the fact that you have one man who had an amazing 7,000-mile [11,269 km] round trip which should have been impossible, but he survived. In England, we’re wearing skins and eating things that couldn’t run fast enough, and he’s writing beautiful essays.

The best collaborations come absolutely out of the blue, and some of the things that you think would be perfect collaborations aren’t. David Lynch and I were once put together on a project. It began as an idea for an audio series for the web and then David decided he wanted it to be a movie and I was going, “This is so exciting! I’m going to write a David Lynch movie. He’s one of my heroes, oh my god!”

[When we meet in his house], he says, “Okay Neil, I think I’ve figured out the whole shape of the story. The first part is going to be the stuff we talked about, with the family vanishing and a guy goes looking for them. And then in the second part of the story, we’re going to be somewhere completely different, with another family driving through Europe and we’re going to follow them through Europe.” And I’m thinking, “Okay, how is this going to tie it together?” And he says, “And in the third part, we now follow the detective who’s gone to Europe and who’s now back at the original house. He walks through it and it’s completely empty. Then he comes out, and we pull back and we are … on the moon.” And that was the moment I said, “This is not going to work.”

On big projects, I tend to have to be disciplined. I create a world in which everybody knows from one o’clock to six o’clock each day, I’m off the radar. But yes, I still look up and go, “Oh my god, that deadline. I completely forgot about it. Excuse me, world. I’m going to vanish [for a few days] and return in a very unshaven, bleary-eyed state but with a viable manuscript. — Interview by Lisa-Ann Lee