Make Good Art

Excerpts from the chapter titled Make Good Art, 

from the book, The View From the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman.

"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."

"When you start out in a career in the arts, you have no idea what you are doing.  This is great.  People who know what they are doing, know the rules and know what is possible and impossible.  You do not and you should not.  The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who have 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."

"If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go do that.  And that's much harder than it sounds.  And, sometimes, in the end, so much easier than you might imagine."

"You have to deal with problems of failure...Not every project will survive...You have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back."

"If I did work I was proud of and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work."

"The things I did because I was excited and wanted them to exist in reality, have never let me down.  And I've never regretted the time I spent on any of them."

"The problems of failure are hard.  The problems of success can be harder because no body warns you about them."

"I hope you'll make mistakes.  If you're making mistakes, it means, you are out there, doing something.  And the mistakes, in themselves, can be useful."

"The ability to make art...the ultimate life saver...It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones...When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art...Do what you do best.  Make good art.  Make it on the good days too."

"Make your art.  Do the stuff that only you can do...The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you - your voice, your mind, your story, your vision."

"People keep working (in the arts) because their work is good, they are easy to get along with and they deliver the work on time (and you don't even need all three, two out of three is fine)."

On his best "advice from Stephen King: 'This is really great.  You should enjoy it.'...And I didn't.  Instead, I worried about it...Let go.  Enjoy the ride.  Because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected places."

"The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are, so make up your own rules."

If you liked this post, you may also like Tag, You're It! and be INVINCIBLE