Mucking out pigs on a farm when I was 15.
What is the worst job you have done?
Question
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Identity & self
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
Taste & recommendation
Question
What happens when we die?
Death & what remains
Question
What would you like to be remembered for?
Death & what remains
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's long-running Q&A repeatedly asks this standing question, with minor tense variation.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The only job I quit was, aged about 23, subediting a “men’s” magazine. My job was typing out readers’ pornographic fantasies. I started wishing people would reproduce by splitting down the middle.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 October 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 229 →A holiday job as a chambermaid at the Scratchwood Travelodge on the M1. The state some people leave their rooms in was a revelation.
Adjoa Andoh
English actress
Cleaning men’s toilets in the Swan hotel in the Cotswolds.
Craig David
British singer
Selling double glazing.
More from Neil Gaiman
View profile →Imaginative, dull, amiable.
The idiocy of going to Skye from New Zealand in April 2020. All of a sudden, I’m turning on the news and hearing myself as an item. I have never been more mortified.
I’ve never read Proust.
I like the idea of being atoms that other people can breathe in, and fabulous worm food.
As someone who left the world slightly more interesting than he found it.
My kids, and getting some of the stories I had in my head on to paper in a way that wasn’t too far removed from the thing I dreamed about writing.
More on craft & work
- What do you consider your greatest achievement? 192 answers
- How do you know when a piece of work is finished? 67 answers
- What do you do when you feel creatively blocked or stuck? 66 answers
- How does a new work begin for you? 63 answers
- How much rewriting or revision do you do? 46 answers
- What is the part of your job that people would be surprised is most of your job? 41 answers
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