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【英语语言学习】逃学威龙

时间:2016-09-27 03:18来源:互联网 提供网友:yajing   字体: [ ]
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    (单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Thank you.
 
I never really expected to find myself 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 prospect1 of four more years of enforced learning before I'd become the writer I wanted to be was stifling2.
 
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 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, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them.
 
Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family, who attended Universities, were cured of long ago.
 
Looking back, I've had a remarkable3 ride. I'm not sure I can call it a career, because 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 Doctor Who... 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 suppose 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.
 
If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.
 
Secondly4, If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then 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. Because 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, because journalists are allowed to ask questions, and to simply go and find out how the world works, and besides, to do those things I needed to write and to write well, and I was being paid to learn how to write economically, crisply, sometimes under adverse5 conditions, and on time.
 
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, because you'll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get.
 
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 myself through my words – was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal.
 
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 because I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time.
 
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 desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation6, 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 journalism7 I had done for the money, and which had already bought me an electric typewriter from the advance – should have been a bestseller. It should have paid me a lot of money. If the publisher hadn't gone into involuntary liquidation8 between the first print run selling out and the second printing, and before any royalties9 could be paid, it would have done.
 
And I shrugged10, and I still had my electric typewriter and enough money to pay the rent for a couple of months, and I decided11 that I would do my best in future not to write books just for the money. If you didn't get the money, then you didn't have anything. If I did work I was proud of, and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work.
 
Every now and again, I forget that rule, and whenever I do, the universe kicks me hard and reminds me. I don't know that it's an issue for anybody but me, but it's true that nothing I did where the only reason for doing it was the money was ever worth it, except as bitter experience. Usually I didn't wind up getting the money, either. The things I did because I was excited, and wanted to see them 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 nobody warns you about them.
 
The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you. It's Imposter Syndrome12, something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.
 
In my case, I was convinced that there would be a knock on the door, and a man with a clipboard (I don't know why he carried a clipboard, in my head, but he did) would be there, to tell me it was all over, and they had caught up with me, and now I would have to go and get a real job, one that didn't consist of making things up and writing them down, and reading books I wanted to read. And then I would go away quietly and get the kind of job where you don't have to make things up any more.
 
The problems of success. They're real, and with luck you'll experience them. The point where you stop saying yes to everything, because now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and have to learn to say no.
 
I watched my peers, and my friends, and the ones who were older than me and watch how miserable13 some of them were: I'd listen to them telling me that they couldn't envisage14 a world where they did what they had always wanted to do any more, because now they had to earn a certain amount every month just to keep where they were. They couldn't go and do the things that mattered, and that they had really wanted to do; and that seemed as a big a tragedy as any problem of failure.
 
And after that, the biggest problem of success is that the world conspires15 to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.
 
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...”
 
And remember that whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, a designer, whatever you do you have one thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.
 
And for me, and for so many of the people I have known, that's been a lifesaver. The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones.
 
Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.
 
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. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
 
Make it on the good days too.
 
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.
 
The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable16 successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.
 
I still don't. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work?
 
And sometimes the things I did really didn't work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked.
 
Sixthly. I will pass on some secret freelancer17 knowledge. Secret knowledge is always good. And it is useful for anyone who ever plans to create art for other people, to enter a freelance world of any kind. I learned it in comics, but it applies to other fields too. And it's this:
 
People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, and 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 honour 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 chronologically18 challenged... You get work however you get work.
 
People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.
 
When I agreed to give this address, I started trying to think what the best advice I'd been given over the years was.
 
And it came from Stephen King twenty years ago, at the height of the success of Sandman. I was writing a comic that people loved and were taking seriously. King had liked Sandman and my novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens19, and he saw the madness, the long signing lines, all that, and 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. There wasn't a moment for the next fourteen or fifteen years that I wasn't writing something in my head, or wondering about it. And I didn't stop and look around and go, this is really fun. I wish I'd enjoyed it more. It's been an amazing ride. But there were parts of the ride I missed, because I was too worried about things going wrong, about what came next, to enjoy the bit I was on.
 
That was the hardest lesson for me, I think: to let go and enjoy the ride, because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected places.
 
And here, on this platform, today, is one of those places. (I am enjoying myself immensely.)
 
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.
 
We're in a transitional world right now, if you're in any kind of artistic20 field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux21 for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.
 
Which is, on the one hand, intimidating22, and on the other, immensely liberating23. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling24 and nobody knows what the new rules are.
 
So make up your own rules.
 
Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going to be difficult, in this case recording25 an audio book, 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.

点击收听单词发音收听单词发音  

1 prospect P01zn     
n.前景,前途;景色,视野
参考例句:
  • This state of things holds out a cheerful prospect.事态呈现出可喜的前景。
  • The prospect became more evident.前景变得更加明朗了。
2 stifling dhxz7C     
a.令人窒息的
参考例句:
  • The weather is stifling. It looks like rain. 今天太闷热,光景是要下雨。
  • We were stifling in that hot room with all the windows closed. 我们在那间关着窗户的热屋子里,简直透不过气来。
3 remarkable 8Vbx6     
adj.显著的,异常的,非凡的,值得注意的
参考例句:
  • She has made remarkable headway in her writing skills.她在写作技巧方面有了长足进步。
  • These cars are remarkable for the quietness of their engines.这些汽车因发动机没有噪音而不同凡响。
4 secondly cjazXx     
adv.第二,其次
参考例句:
  • Secondly,use your own head and present your point of view.第二,动脑筋提出自己的见解。
  • Secondly it is necessary to define the applied load.其次,需要确定所作用的载荷。
5 adverse 5xBzs     
adj.不利的;有害的;敌对的,不友好的
参考例句:
  • He is adverse to going abroad.他反对出国。
  • The improper use of medicine could lead to severe adverse reactions.用药不当会产生严重的不良反应。
6 appreciation Pv9zs     
n.评价;欣赏;感谢;领会,理解;价格上涨
参考例句:
  • I would like to express my appreciation and thanks to you all.我想对你们所有人表达我的感激和谢意。
  • I'll be sending them a donation in appreciation of their help.我将送给他们一笔捐款以感谢他们的帮助。
7 journalism kpZzu8     
n.新闻工作,报业
参考例句:
  • He's a teacher but he does some journalism on the side.他是教师,可还兼职做一些新闻工作。
  • He had an aptitude for journalism.他有从事新闻工作的才能。
8 liquidation E0bxf     
n.清算,停止营业
参考例句:
  • The bankrupt company went into liquidation.这家破产公司停业清盘。
  • He lost all he possessed when his company was put into liquidation.当公司被清算结业时他失去了拥有的一切。
9 royalties 1837cbd573d353f75291a3827b55fe4e     
特许权使用费
参考例句:
  • I lived on about £3,000 a year from the royalties on my book. 我靠着写书得来的每年约3,000英镑的版税生活。 来自辞典例句
  • Payments shall generally be made in the form of royalties. 一般应采取提成方式支付。 来自经济法规部分
10 shrugged 497904474a48f991a3d1961b0476ebce     
vt.耸肩(shrug的过去式与过去分词形式)
参考例句:
  • Sam shrugged and said nothing. 萨姆耸耸肩膀,什么也没说。
  • She shrugged, feigning nonchalance. 她耸耸肩,装出一副无所谓的样子。 来自《简明英汉词典》
11 decided lvqzZd     
adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的
参考例句:
  • This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
  • There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。
12 syndrome uqBwu     
n.综合病症;并存特性
参考例句:
  • The Institute says that an unidentified virus is to blame for the syndrome. 该研究所表示,引起这种综合症的是一种尚未确认的病毒。
  • Results indicated that 11 fetuses had Down syndrome. 结果表明有11个胎儿患有唐氏综合征。
13 miserable g18yk     
adj.悲惨的,痛苦的;可怜的,糟糕的
参考例句:
  • It was miserable of you to make fun of him.你取笑他,这是可耻的。
  • Her past life was miserable.她过去的生活很苦。
14 envisage AjczV     
v.想象,设想,展望,正视
参考例句:
  • Nobody can envisage the consequences of total nuclear war.没有人能够想像全面核战争的后果。
  • When do you envisage being able to pay me back?你看你什么时候能还我钱?
15 conspires 5b49df1543c8e2334ebf2e57090dfca2     
密谋( conspire的第三人称单数 ); 搞阴谋; (事件等)巧合; 共同导致
参考例句:
  • You speak as if all Sparta conspires against you. 你说得好像整个斯巴达在共谋对抗你。
  • The mystical organization syndicate, conspires to harass the social order. 神秘组织辛迪加,密谋扰乱社会治安。
16 inevitable 5xcyq     
adj.不可避免的,必然发生的
参考例句:
  • Mary was wearing her inevitable large hat.玛丽戴着她总是戴的那顶大帽子。
  • The defeat had inevitable consequences for British policy.战败对英国政策不可避免地产生了影响。
17 freelancer freelancer     
n.自由职业者
参考例句:
  • He has great interest in working as a freelancer.他对做个自由职业人很感兴趣。
  • It's not always easy to make it as a freelancer.做个自由职业人,要能时常感觉满足,可不容易。
18 chronologically yVJyh     
ad. 按年代的
参考例句:
  • Manuscripts show cases arranged topically not chronologically. 从原稿看案例是按专题安排的而不是按年代次序安排的。
  • Though the exhibition has been arranged chronologically, there are a few exceptions. 虽然展览的时间便已经安排好了,但是也有少数的例外。
19 omens 4fe4cb32de8b61bd4b8036d574e4f48a     
n.前兆,预兆( omen的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • The omens for the game are still not propitious. 这场比赛仍不被看好。 来自辞典例句
  • Such omens betide no good. 这种征兆预示情况不妙。 来自辞典例句
20 artistic IeWyG     
adj.艺术(家)的,美术(家)的;善于艺术创作的
参考例句:
  • The picture on this screen is a good artistic work.这屏风上的画是件很好的艺术品。
  • These artistic handicrafts are very popular with foreign friends.外国朋友很喜欢这些美术工艺品。
21 flux sg4zJ     
n.流动;不断的改变
参考例句:
  • The market is in a constant state of flux.市场行情在不断变化。
  • In most reactors,there is a significant flux of fast neutrons.在大部分反应堆中都有一定强度的快中子流。
22 intimidating WqUzKy     
vt.恐吓,威胁( intimidate的现在分词)
参考例句:
  • They were accused of intimidating people into voting for them. 他们被控胁迫选民投他们的票。
  • This kind of questioning can be very intimidating to children. 这种问话的方式可能让孩子们非常害怕。
23 liberating f5d558ed9cd728539ee8f7d9a52a7668     
解放,释放( liberate的现在分词 )
参考例句:
  • Revolution means liberating the productive forces. 革命就是为了解放生产力。
  • They had already taken on their shoulders the burden of reforming society and liberating mankind. 甚至在这些集会聚谈中,他们就已经夸大地把改革社会、解放人群的责任放在自己的肩头了。 来自汉英文学 - 家(1-26) - 家(1-26)
24 crumbling Pyaxy     
adj.摇摇欲坠的
参考例句:
  • an old house with crumbling plaster and a leaking roof 一所灰泥剥落、屋顶漏水的老房子
  • The boat was tied up alongside a crumbling limestone jetty. 这条船停泊在一个摇摇欲坠的石灰岩码头边。
25 recording UktzJj     
n.录音,记录
参考例句:
  • How long will the recording of the song take?录下这首歌得花多少时间?
  • I want to play you a recording of the rehearsal.我想给你放一下彩排的录像。
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