(audience laughing) make good art.
I get puzzled and lost when people start asking me
questions about what they should be writing
for the market or whatever.
There is no market.
Saying we have enough artists is like saying
we have enough scientists,
we have enough designers.
I tended you to do anything as long as it felt
like an adventure and to stop
when it felt like work.
I would try and write things that were so brilliant
that nobody could reject them.
Do lots and lots of little trial projects.
Send your trial, balloons out,
float your dandelion seeds.
– He’s an English author of novels, comic books,
and films.
He’s won numerous awards for his works.
He’s the first author to win the Newberry
and the Carnegie Award for the same book.
He’s Neil Gaiman, and here’s my take on
his top 10 rules for success.
Rule number one is my personal favorite.
And make sure to stick around all the way to the end
for a special bonus clip.
(swoosh)
– Remember, whatever 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
that 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.
(audience laughing)
Husband runs off with a politician, make good art.
(audience laughing)
Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor,
make good art.
(audience laughing)
IRS on your trail, make good art. (audience laughing)
Cat exploded, make good art. (audience laughing)
Someone on the Internet thinks that 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.
Write things people want to read.
Write things you care about.
Don’t…I get puzzled and lost when people start asking me
questions about what they should be writing
for the market, whatever, there is no market.
There’s nobody, there’s nobody in the whole world
of marketing, ever, would of woken up one day and said,
“A Series of Unfortunate Events” is exactly
what the world needs.
(audience laughing)
Nobody would have turned around and gone,
ah, your market niche is do a sort of reply
to Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” and set it in the graveyard.
(audience laughing)
That’s not, you know, things like that happen
because somebody wants to tell a story
and because you have an idea and because
you think you can tell that story better than anybody else.
I always mean to write sequels.
People say why don’t you write sequels?
Neil Gaiman does not write sequels.
And I go, well, actually.
It’s not like I’m standing up going
“I shall never write a sequel.”
There are sequels that I’d love to write.
But I’m much more likely to go, oh, shiny,
(audience laughing)
when confronted by something I have no idea how to do.
Find something over here that I really do know how to do.
And I’ve figured it out, and I’ve learned how to do it
the last time, and everybody loved it,
and there are people waiting.
And then over here is something that I have
no idea what it is, and nobody’s waiting for it.
And I don’t think even anybody’s going to really like it,
I will do that thing.
(audience laughing)
Because that’s cool, and it’s new.
When you start out in 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 it’s impossible, it’s easier to do.
(audience laughing)
And because nobody’s done it before,
they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone
from doing that particular thing again.
Saying that we have enough artists
is like saying we have enough scientists,
We have enough designers, we have enough politicians.
We have enough politicians.
(audience laughing)
But you know…nobody gets to be you except you.
Nobody has your point of view except you.
Nobody gets to bring to the world
the things that you get to bring to the world,
uniquely get to bring to the world except you.
So saying there are enough writers out there,
enough directors out there, enough people
with points of view, well, yeah, there are.
But none of them are you.
And none of those people is going to make the art
that you will make.
None of them will change people and change the world
in the way that you could change it.
So, if you believe somebody who says
no, no, we’ve got enough of those,
then all it means is you’re giving up your chance
to change the world in the way that
only you could change it.
– So do you have any advice for someone who would like
to start doing creative writing
but has no idea where to start whatsoever?
– Depends.
Are you the kind of person who… do you read a lot?
– I read a lot, yes. and I write snarky emails, but
(audience laughing)
That’s about it.
I’ve been told they’re very good.
– When you say creative writing,
do you want to write fiction?
do you want to write humorous essays?
Do you want to, there’s an awful lot
– [Young Man] Fiction I would think.
– You want to do stories.
– Yes.
– Okay. So my advice is start writing stories.
(audience laughing)
– Just like do it?
– Really, it’s almost as simple as that.
It’s start writing stories, pick a style, pick a theme
Look at the kind of, you know, you are not expected
straight out of the hat to be a brave and original voice
producing fine and wonderful fiction.
It’s much more like the first pancake on the griddle
which is going to be this weird black messy thing
that you either give to your dog or to a child.
(audience laughing)
Trying to convince them yeah, it’s nice,
you know, you write, you finish things, you start
the next thing, you write that, you finish it,
somewhere in there you get reasonably good, and
– [Young Man] Do you give these to people or do you just
– Yeah, the point, I always found that I would always
learn more about what I’d done the moment I saw it in print
or these days probably the moment you see things up
on the web, but yeah, show ’em to people but the most
important thing when you’re just starting out is
write the next one, assume that you have a million
words inside you that are absolute rubbish, and you
need to get them out before you get to the good ones
and if you get there early, that’s great,
that’s really my biggest advice, read everything
you can, read outside your comfort zone, and write a lot.
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’ll 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 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’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 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.
One of the things that happens, especially when
you’re starting out is you write stories,
and you send them out, in my head as a young man
whenever I would send out a story, what I would
expect to have happen was the following morning
a limo would show up at my house and people would
get out of it and they would say this is yours,
we loved your story so much, you never have to work again,
just thank you, thank you for writing this story which
we are going to publish, and make sure everybody in
the whole world reads, and instead, you know, six
weeks later it would come back with a little slip
saying not quite right for us, or whatever,
it was okay, you know, what you do is,
I did two different things, what I did as a very young man
was get things back and go either I’m not very good,
which I do not choose to believe, although probably
was kind of true, or I’m just doing this wrong,
and I need to find out how this all works,
so that was the point where I became a journalist,
and I became a journalist specializing in publishing,
in books, and I found out how it all worked,
and two months later had sold two books,
and then got a quote from Muddy Waters which I stuck
to my typewriter, which tells you how long ago this was,
and it just said don’t let your mouth write no check
your tail can’t cash, that was my quote, and I went,
I just sold two books, I’d never written a book,
what am I doing?
And got through it, my tail cashed those checks, but
really I kind of dealt with it by just vowing to myself
that I would try and write things that were so brilliant
that nobody could reject them.
Do lots of things, try lots of things, the comparison
of dandelion seeds, think dandelion seeds,
dandelions, mammals traditionally spend a lot of time
building a new mammal like them, it’s a lot of time
and investment and food, and investment and everything.
Dandelions, they just have a head with lots of dandelion
seeds on it and they let them go, and the idea is that
some of them will survive, most of them won’t survive
but that’s okay because a few dandelion seeds are going
to go off, and they will make more dandelions.
And I would counsel people to think like that now,
starting off, in the world that we’re in, this peculiar
world where we don’t know what the rules are,
everything’s changing so do lots and lots of little
trial projects, send your trial balloons out,
float your dandelion seeds.
Absolutely be happy for five things that you do to fail,
if one succeeds and succeeds well.
Just try more, don’t be locked down, that would be
my big piece of advice.
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 Steven King,
it was 20 years ago at the height of the success
the initial success of Sandman, the comic I was writing
(audience applause)
Oh thank you, I was writing a comic people loved,
and they were taking it seriously, and Steven 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
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,
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,
(swoosh)
– Thank you so much for watching, I made this video
because Benjamin asked me to, so if there’s a famous
entrepreneur you want me to profile next, leave it
in the comments below and I’ll see what I can do,
I’d also love to know which of the top ten rules
had the biggest impact on you and why,
what change are you going to make now in your business
after watching this video?
Leave it down in the comments, and I will join
in the discussion, thank you so much for watching,
and continue to believe, or whatever your one word is,
and I’ll see you soon.
(swoosh)
– [Audience Member] If you’re feeling particularly
at a creative low point, where do you get your inspiration
from to come up with such amazing tales and amazing
subject matter to write your stories about?
– What you’ve actually done there is ask the question
that must not be asked of writers,
you’ve rephrased it ever so slightly, but what you’ve
fundamentally done is say where do you get your ideas?
And writers are awful to people who ask us where we get
(audience laughter) our ideas
We get mean, we don’t just get mean, we get mean in a
writer-y way, which means we’ll then make fun of you
– [Audience Member] I’m not afraid
– And we do that, the reason we do that is because
we don’t really know, and we’re terrified the ideas
will go away, and so every writer I know has a funny
answer, and you know, Harlan Ellison used to say
he got them from an idea shop in Schenectady
(audience laughter)
I knew a writer who when asked he would say he gets
them from the idea of the month club, and people
would say oh really, he goes oh yeah, every month
they send you an idea, oh good.
(audience laughter)
The truth is I think for me inspiration comes
from a bunch of places, desperation, deadlines,
a lot of times ideas will turn up while you’re
doing something else, and most of all I think
ideas come from confluence, they come from two things
flowing together, they come essentially from
day-dreaming, it’s that point, and I suspect it’s
something that every human being does,
writers tend to train themselves to notice
when they’ve had an idea, it’s not that they have
any more ideas or get inspired more than anything else,
we just notice when it happens a little bit more,
but you’re just thinking, you go well, you know,
everybody knows that if you get bitten by a werewolf
when the moon is full, you will turn into a wolf,
you know that, it’s that moment where you’re sitting
thinking, so what happens if a werewolf bites a goldfish?
(audience laughter)
Or that moment where you start thinking well actually,
what happens if a werewolf sinks its fangs into a chair,
and what if you’re sitting in that chair and the
moonlight touches it, and slowly it starts feeling more
and more wolfish, and then it growls, and you know,
what about the, oh my god, then you’d have to set it
in the winter cos you’d need the snow for people
to try and figure out why you’ve got chair leg marks
in the snow by the body that’s had its throat
ripped out, and suddenly you have a story.
So that’s, a lot of it is day dreaming.
I wish there was something, I always feel I’m in some
ways disappointing people when they ask where
do you get your inspiration, because what they really
always want is the answer, they want you to be able to say
well, what you do is 11:58 at night, go down to the cellar,
you roll the goat bones, there’ll be a banging on the door,
it will open, this thing will fly in, it will explode,
you’ll have a, something like a chocolate, you eat it,
(audience laughter) you have an idea
I dunno, you make ’em up out of your head.
(audience laughter)
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
and 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 run never happening, and before any royalties
could be paid, it would have done, and I shrugged,
and I still have 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 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.
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.
”
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