Neil Gaiman Addresses the University of the Arts Class of 2012

Thank you

[laughter]

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 4 more years of enforced learning,

before I could become the writer who 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.

[laughter]

And often they commissioned me

to write something else for them, which has left me

with a healhty 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 Dr. 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 wished I'd known starting out

and a few things that looking back on it

I suppose I did know.

And I'll 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 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.

[applause]

Secondly, if you have an idea of what you want to make,

what you were put here to do,

they just go and do that.

And that's much harder than it's 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 would 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 that worked for me

was imagining 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'd be alright.

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 it

- the mountain.

I said no to editorial jobs on magazines

- proper jobs that would have paid proper money -

bcause I kew 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 hundreds of things

for every bottle that winds up coming back.

The problems of failure, 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'd done only for the money

and which had already bought me an electric typewriter

from the advance, should have been a best seller.

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 run 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'd do my best in the future

not to write books just for the money.

If you didn't get the money then you didn't have anything.

And 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.

[laughter]

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 faillure 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 unshakeable conviction that you're getting away with something

and that any moment now they will discover you.

[laughter]

It's Imposter's 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

I would have to get up early in the morning

and wear a tie

and not make things up anymore.

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 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 are older than me

and I watched how miserable some of them were.

I'd listen to them telling they couldn't envisage a world

where they did what they've always wanted to do anymore,

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 realized

that I had become someone

who professionally replied to email

and he wrote as a hobby.

I started answering fewer emails

and was relieved to find, I was writing much more.

Forthly, 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 A and the O,

and I thought "Coraline

looks almost like a real name".

Remember, whatever discipline you're in,

whether you're a musician of 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 though 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 though, this is what you should do.

Make good art.

I'm serious.

[laughter]

Husband runs off with a politician?

Make good art.

[laughter]

Leg crushed and then eaten by a 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,

eventually time will take the sting away

and that doesn't even 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're at it,

make your art.

Do the stuff that only you can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy

and that is not a bad thing.

Most of us only find our own voices

after we've sounded like a lot of other people.

[laughter]

But 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 work 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 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 when 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 have never even left the house.

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

Ok, sixthly, I'm gonna 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.

[laughter]

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.

[laughter]

I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely

and I sounded confident and I got jobs.

[cheering]

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 had just been chronologically challenged.

[laughter]

But 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 the work is good

and because they're 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.

[laughter]

People will tolerate how unpleasant you are

if your work is good and you deliver it on time.

[laughter]

People will forgive the lateness of your work

if it's good and they like you.

[laughter]

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.

[laughter]

[applause]

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 to follow

and it came from Stephen King.

It was 20 years ago, at the height of the success

- the initial success -

of Sandman, the comic I was writing.

[applause] Oh thank you

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.

He said "this is really great

you should enjoy it".

And I didn't.

Best advice I 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 the ride that 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.

[applause]

I'd actually put that in brackets.

Just in case I wasn't, I wouldn't say it.

[laughter]

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 that 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 head

and buy sandwhiches while they did that

they're all changing.

I talked to people at the top of the food chain

in publishing and bookselling,

in music, 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 have 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-tos

of how you get your work seen and 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 all 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 audiobook.

And I suggested she pretend that she was someone who could do it.

[laughter]

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.

[applause]

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.

[applause]