It took me longer to learn that you can say no. And it’s an easy thing to say. It helps define your boundaries.

3. Get it in writing. Or put it in writing.

This is important. And those few times I haven’t put something in writing, I’ve regretted it. Right now I’m locked in a fairly heated and as yet unresolved situation with one publisher about payments for characters, for toys, spin-off comics, and other uses of a bunch of characters I made up for this publisher. And part of our dispute is over verbal agreements made on the phone four years ago. If we’d put it in writing then—I’m not even talking about contracts, I’m talking about my writing down what was said and faxing him a copy with a “just to confirm this was what we said”—life would be easier now.

4. Everything is negotiable.

If someone sends you a contract, whether you are dealing with it yourself or getting someone else—an attorney or agent or someone—to vet your contracts, remember that absolutely everything is negotiable. In the early days I used to think that contracts were a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. And they aren’t.

And, by the same token, contracts are renegotiable, something that I first discovered after the first year of Sandman. I wanted a creator credit and a creator share of the character, which, according to DC’s original “take it or leave it” contract, was entirely theirs. And I wrote a long, sensible, perfectly friendly letter to Paul Levitz explaining why this was a good idea, demonstrating that the Sandman character that I’d created was no more the Simon and Kirby Sandman than it was the Lee and Ditko Sandman. And, after some to-ing and fro-ing, a new contract was issued, giving me a share of the character.

One reason I did it this way was that I’d observed over the previous few years that when people gave DC Comics ultimata, whether DC were right or wrong, they would become inflexible. Corporate history perhaps: Siegel and Shuster wanted the rights to Superman back, and were shafted, and left with only the rights to Superboy. They went back for another legal go-around, and lost even that. Meanwhile Bob Kane was “taken care of.”

Do not be afraid to negotiate. And if you have people whose job it is to negotiate on your behalf, don’t be afraid to use them. Nor to accept input. You are not looking a gift horse in the mouth, nor is the contract going to go away because you got someone to look it over.

This is speaking as someone who has been, from time to time, screwed over by overlooked clauses in otherwise pretty good contracts, and who has, from time to time, been astonished by what, in a contract, the other party let slide.

5. Trust your obsessions.

I remember Alan Moore in the late 1980s telling me about a documentary he’d seen on TV about Jack the Ripper. And then, over the course of the next few months, telling me about Jack the Ripper books he’d read. By the point where he was asking me to go and find rare and forgotten biographies of possible Ripper suspects at the British Museum, I thought it quite possible that a Jack the Ripper comic would be in the offing. From Hell didn’t start with Alan going, “I wonder what I’ll write about today.” It started as an obsession.