I am posting the commencement address given by English author Neil Gaiman at the University of the Arts on 17 May 2012. His address is directed specifically to artists of all sorts, from dancers to musicians to writers. I confess I have never actually read any of his books, and the movie based on his book titled Coraline
looked a little creepy. His photos on the internet are all rather odd or sinister looking, which was surprising to me because he has a pleasant demeanor and a cute smile if you watch live footage of the address here. So I tried to find a photo where he was at least smiling a little. I'm told that he loves Tolkien, Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis but his views on religion and morals are rather screwy. But in my experience good advice comes from all sorts of places and backgrounds, and I plan to remember this address for as long as I live.
134th Commencement
University of the Arts
May 17, 2012
 |
Neil Gaiman is an English author of short fiction,
novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre,
and films. His notable works include the comic book
series The Sandman and novels Stardust,
American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. |
I never really expected to find myself giving advice to people
graduating from an establishment of higher education. I never graduated
from any such establishment. I never even started at one. I escaped
from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of
enforced learning before I'd become the writer I wanted to be was
stifling.
I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the
more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that
I was making it up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and
they paid for it, or they didn't, and often they commissioned me to
write something else for them.
Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher
education that those of my friends and family, who attended
Universities, were cured of long ago.
Looking back, I've had a remarkable ride. I'm not sure I can call it a
career, because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan,
and I never did. The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was 15
of everything I wanted to do: to write an adult novel, a children's
book, a comic, a movie, record an audiobook, write an episode of
Doctor Who... and so on. I didn't have a career. I just did the next thing on the list.
So I thought I'd tell you everything I wish I'd known starting out,
and a few things that, looking back on it, I suppose that I did know.
And that I would also give you the best piece of advice I'd ever got,
which I completely failed to follow.
First of all: When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.
This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules,
and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should
not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made
by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond
them. And you can.
If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And because
nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing
that again, yet.
Secondly, If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.
And that's much harder than it sounds and, sometimes in the end, so
much easier than you might imagine. Because normally, there are things
you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be. I wanted
to write comics and novels and stories and films, so I became a
journalist, because journalists are allowed to ask questions, and to
simply go and find out how the world works, and besides, to do those
things I needed to write and to write well, and I was being paid to
learn how to write economically, crisply, sometimes under adverse
conditions, and on time.
Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and
sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you are
doing the correct thing, because you'll have to balance your goals and
hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for
what you can get.
Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be –
an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics
and supporting myself through my words – was a mountain. A distant
mountain. My goal.
And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I
would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could
stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the
mountain. I said no to editorial jobs on magazines, proper jobs that
would have paid proper money because I knew that, attractive though they
were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And
if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them,
because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at
the time.
I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it
felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant
that life did not feel like work.
Thirdly, When you start off, you have to deal with
the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not
every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is
sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and
hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read
it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you:
appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept
that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up
coming back.
The problems of failure are problems of discouragement, of
hopelessness, of hunger. You want everything to happen and you want it
now, and things go wrong. My first book – a piece of journalism I had
done for the money, and which had already bought me an electric
typewriter from the advance – should have been a bestseller. It should
have paid me a lot of money. If the publisher hadn't gone into
involuntary liquidation between the first print run selling out and the
second printing, and before any royalties could be paid, it would have
done.
And I shrugged, and I still had my electric typewriter and enough
money to pay the rent for a couple of months, and I decided that I would
do my best in future not to write books just for the money. If you
didn't get the money, then you didn't have anything. If I did work I was
proud of, and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work.
Every now and again, I forget that rule, and whenever I do, the
universe kicks me hard and reminds me. I don't know that it's an issue
for anybody but me, but it's true that nothing I did where the only
reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter
experience. Usually I didn't wind up getting the money, either. The
things I did because I was excited, and wanted to see them exist in
reality have never let me down, and I've never regretted the time I
spent on any of them.
The problems of failure are hard.
The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.
The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the
unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that
any moment now they will discover you. It's Imposter Syndrome,
something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.
In my case, I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door,
and a man with a clipboard (I don't know why he carried a clipboard, in
my head, but he did) would be there, to tell me it was all over, and
they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real
job, one that didn't consist of making things up and writing them down,
and reading books I wanted to read. And then I would go away quietly and
get the kind of job where you don't have to make things up any more.
The problems of success. They're real, and with luck you'll
experience them. The point where you stop saying yes to everything,
because now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and
have to learn to say no.
I watched my peers, and my friends, and the ones who were older than
me and watch how miserable some of them were: I'd listen to them telling
me that they couldn't envisage a world where they did what they had
always wanted to do any more, because now they had to earn a certain
amount every month just to keep where they were. They couldn't go and do
the things that mattered, and that they had really wanted to do; and
that seemed as a big a tragedy as any problem of failure.
And after that, the biggest problem of success is that the world
conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are
successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had
become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a
hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was
writing much more.
Fourthly, I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're
making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. And the
mistakes in themselves can be useful. I once misspelled Caroline, in a
letter, transposing the A and the O, and I thought, “
Coraline looks like a real name...”
And remember that whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a
musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a
dancer, a designer, whatever you do you have one thing that's unique.
You have the ability to make art.
And for me, and for so many of the people I have known, that's been a
lifesaver. The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and
it gets you through the other ones.
Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in
business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that
life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should
do.
Make good art.
I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg
crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on
your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the
Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done
before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and
eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do
what only you do best. Make good art.
Make it on the good days too.
And
Fifthly, while you are at it, make
your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.
The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most
of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other
people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is
you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the
street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what
exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment
you may be starting to get it right.
The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was the
least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either
work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would
gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had
that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were
inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.
I still don't. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work?
And sometimes the things I did really didn't work. There are stories
of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the
house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that
worked.
Sixthly. I will pass on some secret freelancer
knowledge. Secret knowledge is always good. And it is useful for anyone
who ever plans to create art for other people, to enter a freelance
world of any kind. I learned it in comics, but it applies to other
fields too. And it's this:
People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did
something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into
trouble, and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed
like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I'd
worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely,
and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of
honour to have written something for each of the magazines I'd listed to
get that first job, so that I hadn't actually lied, I'd just been
chronologically challenged... You get work however you get work.
People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of
today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they
are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time.
And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will
tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it
on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if
they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're
on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.
When I agreed to give this address, I started trying to think what the best advice I'd been given over the years was.
And it came from Stephen King twenty years ago, at the height of the
success of Sandman. I was writing a comic that people loved and were
taking seriously. King had liked
Sandman and my novel with Terry Pratchett,
Good Omens, and he saw the madness, the long signing lines, all that, and his advice was this:
“
This is really great. You should enjoy it.”
And I didn't. Best advice I got that I ignored.Instead I worried
about it. I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next
story. There wasn't a moment for the next fourteen or fifteen years that
I wasn't writing something in my head, or wondering about it. And I
didn't stop and look around and go,
this is really fun. I wish
I'd enjoyed it more. It's been an amazing ride. But there were parts of
the ride I missed, because I was too worried about things going wrong,
about what came next, to enjoy the bit I was on.
That was the hardest lesson for me, I think: to let go and enjoy the
ride, because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected
places.
And here, on this platform, today, is one of those places. (I am enjoying myself immensely.)
To all today's graduates: I wish you luck. Luck is useful. Often you
will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work,
the luckier you get. But there is luck, and it helps.
We're in a transitional world right now, if you're in any kind of
artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the
models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to
keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are
all changing. I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in
publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what
the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade
away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last
century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians,
for creative people of all kinds.
Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely
liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of
how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The
gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need
to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes
after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than
television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what
the new rules are.
So make up your own rules.
Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going
to be difficult, in this case recording an audio book, and I suggested
she pretend that she was someone who could do it. Not pretend to do it,
but pretend she was someone who could. She put up a notice to this
effect on the studio wall, and she said it helped.
So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be
wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they
would.
And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes,
make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more
interesting for your being here. Make good art.
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