So was the direction of your class influenced by how occupied you are with TV making these days?

We talk a bit about that stuff, but we also talk a good deal about comics, which was a lot of fun for me—just going back to some of my favorite issues of Sandman, particularly “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Taking that apart and showing how a comic script is written. This is stuff that applies as much to telling a story on the screen and on the comic-book page as it does to prose. There are people out there doing fabulous MasterClasses on how you write a TV series or whatever. I’m not sure I can teach people how to write a TV script, but I am really good at story, so I will tell them that stuff.

Can you give us a sense of the shape of your lesson plan?

One of the things I do—not right now, as much as I’d like—is I’m a professor in the arts at Bard College. I’ve been teaching a course in writing the fantastic and in adapting Shakespeare, as well, for the past five or six years. But I’m, essentially, teaching a maximum of 25 or 26 students over the course of a year. So, a lot of what I was actually trying to do here was to take those courses, but do them in a sort of weird, mad, concentrated burst. Trying to explain the simple stuff, which is so simple it gets missed. Also trying to explain some of the bells, whistles, and fiddly bits.

What was the most enjoyable MasterClass lesson to put together?

I wrote this thing called A Calendar of Tales back in 2012 or 2013. I went out on Twitter and asked 12 questions: What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen in February? What do you wish you could give away? And what do you wish you could burn in November? I took thousands of replies and then, picking pretty much at random, wrote a short story based on each suggestion. I did 12 short stories in about three days.

So for MasterClass, I took the March short story from A Calendar of Tales, which is a story about a piece of history. I’d asked, which famous person would you like to be in March? Someone suggested Anne Bonny, the pirate queen. I wrote a lovely story about a retired pirate queen with a nice quiet life, and nobody knew that once upon a time she was a pirate queen. So here I talk about, O.K., if you’re going to build it up into a novel, how would you do that? What do you do with a retired pirate queen?

If you were to pick one person to take a MasterClass from, who would it be?

I was really lucky, when I was 24, to get to work with Terry Pratchett, who just started sending me his books and a beta reader every few weeks. He’d use a floppy disk, back when disks were literally floppy. One of those would arrive, and it would have 10,000 words on, and I would read it, and then Terry and I would talk about what I’d read.

So, I got to do this for a bunch of novels, and I got to talk with Terry about his writing process and story building. Which was why when we came, some years later, to write Good Omens together, we were both very much on the same page, and I felt like an apprentice who was working with a master craftsman. I would have loved to have had a master class from Terry Pratchett because Terry knew more about putting stories together than most writers have forgotten.