The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Non-Fiction

by Neil Gaiman

Fourthly, I hope you’ll make mistakes. If you’re making mistakes, it means you’re out there doing something. And the mistakes in themselves can be useful. I once misspelled Caroline, in a letter, transposing the A and the O, and I thought, Coraline looks like a real name . . .

Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art.

And fifthly, while you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

when I started out, in those pre-Internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I’d worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honor to have written something for each of the magazines I’d listed to get that first job, so that I hadn’t actually lied, I’d just been chronologically challenged . . . You get work however you get work.

his advice was this: ‘This is really great. You should enjoy it.’ And I didn’t. Best advice I got that I ignored. Instead I worried about it. I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next story.

To all today’s graduates: I wish you luck. Luck is useful. Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get. But there is luck, and it helps.

Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going to be difficult, in this case recording an audiobook, and I suggested she pretend that she was someone who could do it. Not pretend to do it, but pretend she was someone who could. She put up a notice to this effect on the studio wall, and she said it helped. So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.

And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.

I realise my facial recognition skills do not work when people are in tuxedos. (Except for James Cameron, whom I have now only ever seen in a tuxedo and would not recognise wearing anything else.)

The lights go down and Neil Patrick Harris sings a special Oscars song. It does not seem to have a tune. Several people on Twitter who aren’t sure which Neil is which congratulate me on it.

A nice young man in a suit asks me for my ticket. I show it to him. He explains that, as a resident of the first mezzanine, I am not permitted to walk downstairs and potentially bother the A-List. I am outraged. I am not actually outraged, but I am a bit bored and have friends downstairs. I decide that I will persuade the inhabitants of the mezzanines to rise up as one and to storm the stairs, like in Titanic. They might shoot a few of us, I decide, but they cannot stop us all. We can be free; we can drink in the downstairs bar; we can mingle with Harvey Weinstein.

The images of our forebears and our loved ones give us context, they tell us who we are.

I learned the poem as a boy, when Death was merely an abstract idea, one I suspected I would almost certainly manage to avoid as I grew up, for I was a clever child and Death seemed quite avoidable back then.

Because we do not know who we are, but sometimes there is a light caught in someone’s eyes, that comes close to giving us the tiniest hint of an answer.

Then a crazed, wonderful improvisation that slowly crashes into Amanda’s song about parents, ‘Half Jack’. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,’ said Philip Larkin long before either of The Dresden Dolls were born, in a line that sounded like it could have swaggered out of an Amanda Palmer song, and ‘Half Jack’ is just all about that. Jack Palmer, Amanda’s father, is up on the balcony near me, beaming proudly.

Life has a sense of humor, but then again, so does death.

the hardest battles are the ones you fight inside your own head, when nobody else is going to know if you won or lost or even if a battle was fought at all.

I keep going, talking to the refugees, to the people who run the camps and care for the refugees, and then, after accompanying Ayman, a Syrian volunteer nurse on his rounds, as he changes the dressings on a youth whose foot was blown off by a land mine and an eleven-year-old girl who lost half her jaw in a mortar attack that killed her father, I realise I can’t think straight. All I want to do is cry. I think it is just me, but Sam, the cameraman, is crying too. I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them. It is probably just an artificial divide but UNHCR is on the side of the people who want to feed their children, on the side of human dignity and respect, and it is rare that you know you have picked the right side. You are on the side of people.

taxi-summoning apps

I said something hoping to placate him. Perhaps I said that ah well, it had all worked out in the end, and it hadn’t been the end of the world, and suggested it was time to not be angry any more. Terry looked at me. He said, ‘Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered Good Omens.’

but I, who have seen some of them being built close up, understand that any Terry Pratchett book is a small miracle, and we already have more than might be reasonable, and it does not behoove any of us to be greedy. I rage at the imminent loss of my friend. And I think, What would Terry do with this anger? Then I pick up my pen, and I start to write.

Terry died on 12 March 2015. I can’t talk to him any longer. I miss my friend.