Neil Gaiman: Common Misconceptions That Can Damage Your Creative Career!

Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor. Make good art.

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.

Saying that we have enough artists is like saying we have enough scientists, we have enough designers.

I tended 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 Newbery and Carnegie Award for the same book. He's Neil Gaiman, and here's my take on his top 10 rules for success. Rule number 1 is my personal favorite, and make sure to stick around all the way to the end for a special bonus clip.

Remember, whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, singer, 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. 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.

Write things people want to read, write things you care about.

Um, don't— you know, 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. Nobody—

there's nobody in the whole world of marketing ever would have woken up one day and said, "A Series of Unfortunate Events is exactly what the world needs." You know, 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. 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 I'd love to write. but I'm much more likely to go, "Oh, shiny," when confronted by something I have no idea how to do. If I find something over here that I really do know how to do, and I figured it out, and I learned how to do it the last time, and everybody loved it, and there are people waiting— and then over here is something I have no idea what it is, and nobody's waiting for it, I don't even think anybody's really going to like it, I will do that thing because that's, that's cool and it's new.

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 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.

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.

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 them—

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.

Um, so do you have any advice for someone who would like to start doing creative writing but has no idea where to start whatsoever?

Um, depends. Are you the kind of person who, um, Do you read a lot?

I read a lot, yes. And I write snarky emails, but that's about it.

I've been told they're very good.

I mean, 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—

Fiction, I would think.

You want to do stories?

Yes.

Okay, so my advice is start writing stories.

Just like do it?

Really, it's almost as simple as that. It's start writing. So 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 will either give to your dog or to a child, trying to convince them, "Yeah, it's nice." You write, you finish things, you start the next thing, you write that, you finish it. Somewhere in there, you get reasonably good.

And—

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 the moment—

these days, probably the moment you'd see things up on the web. But yeah, show them 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.

[Speaker:AUDIENCE] Thank you.

[Speaker:NEIL GAIMAN] 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 will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you're doing the correct thing, 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 gonna publish and make sure everybody in the whole world reads." And instead, you know, 6 weeks later, it would come back with a little slip saying, "Not quite right for us," or whatever. It was OK. 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, you know, 2 months later, I had sold 2 books and then I 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." And that was my quote. And I went, "How did I?" I just sold 2 books. I've never written a book. What am I doing?

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 in food and investment in everything. Dandelions, they just have a head with lots of dandelion seeds on it, and then they let them go.

The idea is that some of them will survive.

Most of them won't survive, but that's OK 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 5 things that you do to fail if 1 succeeds and 1 succeeds well. Just try more. Don't be locked down. I think that would be my big piece of advice right now.

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.

I was—

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 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. 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.

Thank you so much for watching. I made this video because Benjamin Sirbai 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 also love to know which of the top 10 rules have the biggest impact 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. Continue to believe, or whatever your one word is, and I'll see you soon.

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 our ideas. We get mean. We don't just get mean, we get mean in a writer-y way, which means we'll make fun of you. And we do that.

I'm not afraid.

And the reason we do that is because we don't really know. And we're terrified the ideas will go away. So every writer I know has a funny answer. And, you know, Harlan Ellison used to say that he got them from a little idea shop in Schenectady. I knew a writer who when asked would say he gets them from the Idea of the Month Club, and people go, "Really?" He goes, "Oh yeah, every month they send you an idea." 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 from essentially from daydreaming. It's that point, and I suspect it's something that every human being does. Artists 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?' There's that moment where you're sitting thinking, 'So what happens if a werewolf bites a goldfish?' 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, and then what about the— oh my God, then you'd have to set it in the winter because 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— so a lot of it is daydreaming. 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 something like a chocolate, you eat it, you have an idea. I don't know, you make them up out of your head.

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 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 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 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.