I never really expected to find mylf giving advice to people graduating from an establishment of higher education. I never graduated from any such establishment. I never even started at one. 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.
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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 emed 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 el for them.
Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that tho of my friends and family, who attended Universities, were cured of long ago.
冬装搭配2013四级考试Looking back, I've had a remarkable ride. I'm not sure I can call it a career, becau a career implies that I had some kind of career plan, and I never did. 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
and so on. I didn't have a career. I just did the next thing on the list.
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 suppo that I did know. And that I would also give you the best piece of advice I'd ever got, which I completely failed to follow.
First of all: When you start out on 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 had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can.
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If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And becau nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.
Secondly, If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, th
en 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. Becau 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, becau journalists are allowed to ask questions, and to simply go and find out how the world works, and besides, to do tho things I needed to write and to write well, and I was being paid to learn how to write economically, crisply, sometimes under adver conditions, and on time.
英国留学签证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 are doing the correct thing, becau you'll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourlf, paying debts, finding work, ttling for what you can get.hewlett packard
Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be – an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and supporting mylf throu上海中学官网
gh my words – was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.
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And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. 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 becau I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if tho job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, becau they still would have been clor to the mountain than I was at the time.
华妃体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.
Thirdly, When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, 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 dert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottl
outcomee 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 a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.
The problems of failure are 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 had done for the money, and which had already bought me an electric typewriter from the advance – should have been a bestller. It should have paid me a lot of money. If the publisher hadn't gone into involuntary liquidation between the first print run lling out and the cond printing, and before any royalties could be paid, it would have done.
