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 audio book, 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
thick-skinned, 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 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 e-mail,
and who wrote as a hobby.
I started answering fewer
e-mails, 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.
