Because normally, there are things you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be. 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.Īnd that’s much harder than it sounds and, sometimes in the end, so much easier than you might imagine. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet. If you don’t know it’s impossible it’s easier to do. 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. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. And that I would also give you the best piece of advice I’d ever got, which I completely failed to follow.įirst of all: When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing. So I thought I’d tell you everything I wish I’d known starting out, and a few things that, looking back on it, I suppose that I did know. The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was 15 of everything I wanted to do: to write an adult novel, a children’s book, a comic, a movie, record an audiobook, write an episode of Doctor Who… and so on. 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. Looking back, I’ve had a remarkable ride. 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. 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 for it, or they didn’t, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them. I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I’d become the writer I wanted to be was stifling. I never graduated from any such establishment. I never really expected to find myself giving advice to people graduating from an establishment of higher education. This speech was delivered as the keynote address for the commencement ceremony at The University of the Arts.

Neil gaiman speech make good art