So there’s this speech that Neil Gaiman gave to the Philadelphia University of the Arts graduating class of 2012 that my sister is totally obsessed with. He is an amazingly creative man who has accomplished so much and he has fantastic words of wisdom for creative people about to go out into the ‘real world’. One of the pieces of advice he gives that really stuck with me is this:
“The one thing 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.”
Walking down the street naked. That’s what I’m doing. And I’m terrified. No one tells you when you start out that being a good artist means baring your soul, exposing deep, dark, painful and delicate parts of yourself in order to create beautiful things. My beautiful things are fragile and I’m very protective of them, which can be seen as a weakness in the industry. My ideas are my babies and what kind of shakespearean mother enjoys letting her beloved children die? And yet, with each success or failure I grow and deepen as a person, I mature as an artist, and I find new pieces of my puzzle to explore. Today I’m the mother figure, tomorrow I’m the hero or maybe the villain, I play all the characters in the stories I weave and I find truth in each new role. Archetypes are a good place to start, but character is about so much more.
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