Neil Gaiman 2012 Commencement Speech "Make Good Art"

Neil Gaiman's commencement speech to the University of the arts graduating class of 2012 Philadelphia

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've never even started at one!

I escaped from the school as soon as I could,

when the prospect of 4 more years of enforced learning before I'd

become a 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 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 a career plan

(and I never did)

The nearest thing that 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 audio book, an episode of Dr. Who and so on.

I didn't have a career, I just did the next thing of the list.

So I thought I'd tell you everything I wished 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're doing.

This is great!

People who know what they're 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 what'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.

(applauds)

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

or simple 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, 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're 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 what worked for me was imagining where I wanted to be.

Which was an author, primarily in 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've paid proper money,

because I knew that, attractive though they were,

for me they would've been

walking away from the mountain.

And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them

because they still would've been closer to the mountain than I was at that time.

I learnt 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 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 the 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 hundreds of things

for every bottle that winds up coming back.

The problems of failure are the 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've been a bestseller

it should've 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 run never happening,

and before any royalties could be paid.

It would've 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'do my best in the future

not to write books just for the money.

If you didn't get money, than you didn't have anything.

And if I did work I was proud of, and I didn't get the money,

at least I have the work.

Every now and then

I forget that rule

and whatever I do, the universe kicks me hard and reminds me.

I don't know if that'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're getting away with something,

and that any moment now they will discover you.

It's Impostor Syndrome,

something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.

In my case, I was convinced there would be a knock on the door,

and the man with a clipboard

(I don't know why he carried 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 read job,

one that didn't consists 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

I would have to get up early in the morning for and wear a tie and not making things up anymore.

The problems of success... they're real.

And with luck, you'll experience them.

The point when you stop saying Yes to everything,

because now the bottles you throw 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

and watch how miserable some of them were:

I'd listened 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're 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 very useful,

I once misspelled Caroline, in a letter,

transposing the A and the O,

and I thought, "Coraline

looks almost like a real name".

Remember, whatever the discipline you're in,

whether you're 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've 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 a mutated boa constrictor?

Make good art.

IRC on your trail? Make good art.

Cat... 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...

That doesn't even matter.

Do what only you can do best.

Make. Good Art.

Make it on the bad days...

Make in on the good days, too.

And fifthly, while you're at it, make your art.

Do the stuff that only you can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy, and it'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 maybe started 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 kind of embarrassing failure 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.

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've never been reprinted.

Some even never left the house.

But I learned as much from that as I did from things that worked.

Okay. Sixthly, I will pass on some secret freelancer knowledge.

Secret knowledge is always good!

And it's 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 worked for,

I lied.

I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely,

and I sounded confident, and I got jobs.

(applauds)

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.

(laugh)

And 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!

(laugh)

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.

(laugh, applauds)

So when I agreed to give this address,

I thought: What the best piece of advice

I was ever given?

And I realised that it was actually piece of advice

that I had failed to follow.

And it came from Stephen King,

20 years ago at the height of the success,

the initial success of Sandman,

the comic I was writing. I was...

Oh thank you!

I was writing a comic that people loved...

and were taking seriously

and Stephen King had 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:

He said, "This is really great. You should enjoy it".

And I didn't.

Best advice I'd ever 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 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 a 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 for me

is one of those places.

And I am enjoying myself immensely.

(applauds)

I'd actually put this in brackets, just in case I wasn't...

I wouldn't say.

(laugh)

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 do you work,

the luckier you will get.

But there's 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 the roof over their heads

and buy sandwiches while they did that,

they're all changing.

I've talked to people at top of the food chain

in publishing, in bookselling, in music

and in all those areas,

and no one 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 are supposed-to's

of how you get your work seen, or what you do then,

they're 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 the audiobook.

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.

(laugh)

(applauds)

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.

(applauds)