- Leg crushed and then eaten
by a mutated boa constrictor (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.
