Original subtitles

Over

the years, one of the things that I've

given an enormous amount of thought to

is what my responsibilities are as a

person who creates art.

It wasn't something I thought about to

begin with.

It wasn't until um a man was found dead

believed to be a suicide

with a note on his chest saying that the

Sandman did it and the Sandman would

bring perfect peace and a copy of

Sandman by the body that I had to go

hang on. Did did I do this? What

happened?

and I had a very very bad weekend.

And then

a few days later,

I discovered that actually he wasn't it

wasn't a suicide. He'd been murdered.

He'd been murdered by his boyfriend who

had written the note and put the comic

there to try and make people think that

this was a Sandman inspired suicide.

And the boyfriend also killed himself.

And I was very angry.

I felt like someone had tried to frame

me for murder. But I also thought that

the questions that it raised, what is my

responsibility

were huge and important questions.

And what I decided was

my responsibility

is to tell good stories, tell honest

stories,

tell them as well as I can. Tell them to

as many people as I can.

My responsibility

is to encapsulate

as much as I can the things I believe

and the values that I believe in the

stories,

but also

having a point of view, being willing to

allow other points of view in to be able

to allow characters who I might not even

want to associate with into my fiction

and to do them justice. Those

I figure are my responsibility

and that for me

has to be there at the bottom of

everything that I write. So I need to be

able to point to good omens and say yes

it's a far it's a silly funny far about

the end of the world but absolutely it

has a message I can stand behind. It

says that human beings have to be

responsible. We have to fix the world.

That war is very rarely a good idea. And

avoiding war, which rarely gets praised,

actually is huge and important. And that

really we have to remember that the

greatest triumphs and the greatest

tragedies of the human race

and nothing to do with people being

basically good or people being basically

evil. They're all to do with people

being basically people.

And so that I can take a fast and I can

stand behind it. I can say this this is

something I believe. This is real. I can

take a book like Coraline

and say

it's filled with scary stuff for kids.

Absolutely. There are people who feel

that is absolutely and utterly

inappropriate and kids should be kept

safe from all the darkness and all the

terror and all the bad things. And to

those people I say good luck to you.

Although I personally believe that if

you are keeping people, young people

safe from the darkness, then all you're

doing is when the darkness shows up, you

are denying them tools or weapons that

they might have needed and could have

had.

But really, it's a book about bravery.

It's a book about carrying on.

And that for me is important. I know I

can be responsible with that. So, I can

absolutely stand by, you know, people

like, "How can you write a book of

horror for a seven-year-old child?" And

I can say, "I can do it as best as I

possibly can because there are kids out

there who need to know that they'll get

through this."

So, you've just finished the class.

Let me give you some advice.

The first question that I get asked

all the time

is I am an aspiring writer. What should

I do?

And I give an answer that is meant

absolutely seriously and some people

think it's flippant. It isn't. That

answer is you should write.

And some people say yes I am already

writing

what should I do now

and I say you should finish things

and some people again think I'm joking

but some people go ah yes you have a

very good point I should finish things

and they go off and now they continue to

write but they start to finish things

sometimes people need other kinds of

advice.

I remember Brian Vaughn

uh wonderful writer did why the last man

when he was very young came up to me and

he said what should I do I want to be a

writer and

it isn't happening and I got him to tell

me a little bit about why it wasn't

happening for him and what became

apparent from what he was saying was he

could write he could finish things. He

just didn't have anything to say. And I

said, "Good. So, what you should do?" I

said, "Look, normally I would tell

people just to write, just to finish

things for you,

go out there into the world. Go get a

job. Go get fired from a job. Go get

your heart broken. See as much of the

world as you can. Find things. Bump into

things. Get hurt.

come back in a few years time and you

will have a lot of things to write

about.

And he did. And when he came back and he

told me the story, he said, "Do you tell

that to everybody?" And I said, "No, I

tell it to people every now and again

when it seems like that's what they

need." But it is a really good thing to

remember that the experience is good.

Reading is fantastic. Read everything

you can, write everything you can, but

do a lot of living because everything

that happens in the living is going to

wind up in the fiction. It's going to be

needed. You are going to need every

human being you ever meet. You're going

to need everything that you see because

one day you'll write a story and you'll

realize that actually you can write this

story because once

on a mountaintop in China,

a little man tried to sell you a pot of

snow white honey.