#Transcribed by SingjuPost.com
Thank you.
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 could become the writer
I wanted to be seemed 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 all up as I went along,
they just read what I wrote and they paid
me 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 about 15 of everything I wanted
to do: I wanted 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 they know what is possible and
what is 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 particular thing again.
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 deadline.
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 -- which was an
author, primarily of fiction, making good
books, making good comics, making good drama
and supporting myself through my words -- imagining
that 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 earlier I
might have taken them, because they still
would have been closer to the mountain than
I was at that 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 out, 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 only 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 print were never happening,
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 then, 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 there would be
a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard
-- I don't know why he had a clipboard, but
in my head, he always had a clipboard -- would
be there, to tell me it was all over, and
they 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 I would have to get up early
in the morning, aware of time, and not 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 you have to learn
to say no.
I watched my peers, and my friends, and the
ones who were older than me, I watched 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 realized
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 make mistakes, it means you're out
there doing something.
And the mistakes in themselves can be very
useful.
I once misspelled Caroline, in a letter, transposing
the As and the O, and I thought, "Coraline
looks almost like a real name..."
And remember whatever discipline you are in,
whether you are a musician or a photographer,
a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a
dancer, a singer, 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.
Sometimes life is 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.
Someone on the Internet thinks what you're
doing 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 can do best.
Make good art.
Make it on the bad days.
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 than
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 that people would gather together
and discuss until the end of time.
They always had that in common: looking back
at them, people explain why they were inevitable
successes.
And 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 am going to 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
a lot of 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 written 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 honor 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.
But 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.
People will forgive the lateness of your work
if it's good, and if they like you.
And you don't have to be as good as everyone
else if you're on time and it's always a pleasure
to hear from you.
So when I agreed to give this address, I thought
what is the best piece of advice I was ever
given.
And I realized that it was actually a piece
of advice that I had failed -- and it came
from Stephen King, it was 20 years ago, at
the height of the success of -- the initial
success of Sandman, the comic I was writing.
I was writing a comic people loved and they
were taking it seriously.
And Stephen King liked Sandman and my novel
with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, and he saw
the madness that was going on, the long signing
lines, all of that stuff, and his advice to
me was this: "This is really great.
You should enjoy it."
And I didn't.
Best advice I ever got but 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 14 or 15
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 that 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.)
I actually put that in brackets just in case
I wasn't.
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 will 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 music,
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.
Thank you.
