"Reach for the Stars"

When I was your age, I wanted two things. Well, I wanted more than just two things. There was a whole bunch of ways I thought my life could have been better. School sucked, of course, and so did my little sister. My name, too, was an issue. Is there anyone else here who hates their name? It's good to know you're not alone; maybe you could arrange a trade afterwards. And if there's anyone here called "John Silver", I hope you're happy. You've got the name I always wanted.

Anyway, when it came to the future, there were two things I specifically wanted. I wanted life to be a whole lot more interesting than it was for me back then, and I wanted to be taller.

Regarding the first point: I'd been reading science fiction from a very young age, and you learn pretty fast when you read that kind of stuff that the real world is plain dull in comparison. There are no robots, no flying cars, no space ships, no aliens, no lasers (not the shooting kind, anyway). And if you read fantasy, there are no magic wands, no dragons, no elves, no dwarves. There are no heroes waving swords and saving people.

My memory is pretty dim of those days, but I'm pretty sure I wanted to be a hero. Heroes have to be tall, hence the second wish. I'm not tall now, and obviously I was even shorter back then. That didn't stop me from dreaming. If there was any likelihood at all of heroes appearing, my chances would only be improved if I could gain an extra foot or so.

I never did amount to much, height-wise, and the heroes still haven't appeared, but I did keep on reading. And reading, and reading, and reading. And eventually I started writing, attempting quite blatantly to do what my favourite authors did: to tell a story that would keep readers entranced.

At an early age, I mastered the two first steps to being a writer, without even knowing I was doing it. The first is to read a lot. The second is to write a lot, and most importantly to write what you like reading. If you can do those two things, then any dreams you have of being a writer will come that much closer.

I didn't dream of being a writer back then. I was just dreaming of ways the world could be more interesting. The stories I wrote were full of all the things I wished I’d had. Bear in mind how long ago this was, by the way. There were no mobile phones or home computers back then. The Internet hadn't been invented. Cable TV, Nintendos, Sony walkmen, CDs, DVDs--even video players--were all in the future. If I'd been reading about now back then, I would've thought it was pretty cool.

I didn't have the imagination to see any of these things coming. Instead I wrote about lots of other cool things. I had space ships crashing into Jupiter; I had aliens trying to invade the Earth; I had giant spiders and a young boy with a fancy sword who could kill them. I was dreaming of a better life.

None of these things came true, but somehow I've managed to fall into a better life, almost by accident. The world may not have all the cool stuff I dreamed about back then, but I do make a living dreaming about the world as it could be--and that’s the next best thing.

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Science fiction writer Gregory Benford describes his job has dreaming in public. "These must be machine dreams," he goes on to say, "with gritty substance and some fact behind them"--but at their heart, they're still dreams. If we didn't dream, there would be no science fiction or fantasy stories--or horror stories either, for that matter, for nightmares are dreams too. And if people didn't want to dream, there'd be no one to read our stories. It works both ways.

I was ten years old when the first Star Wars movie came out: the one now called "Episode IV: A New Hope," in which Luke Skywalker inherits his father's lightsaber and Obi-Wan Kenobi is killed by his former apprentice. Even looking back on it now, that's a pretty impressive dream. As a kid, I was utterly infected. I saw the movie ten times at the cinema.~ I bought the book of the movie, and all the other books in the series. I listened to the soundtrack over and over again. I recorded the radio play every week as it went to air. I did a jigsaw with an X-wing shooting at a TIE fighter. If I could've signed up to become a Jedi Knight, I wouldn't have stopped to say goodbye to my family. I would have been out the door and on the landspeeder before you could say, "I've got a bad feeling about this."

For a few years, that world of Star Wars occupied a fair proportion of my dreaming time. Not all of it; there were other books and movies I liked, as is only healthy. But a significant chunk. I imagined stories and I put myself in them. If the World Wide Web had existed then, I almost certainly would have put some fanfic on-line--copyright-breaking attempts to tell stories in the same universe, featuring all the characters I loved, that probably would have been highly embarrassing to me now. Because they would have been terrible. I look back on my early work and cringe--but I'm glad I wrote it, because every word brought me one step closer to where I am now.

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I said earlier that I didn't dream of being a writer back then. This seems amazing to me now, and maybe it seems strange to you, too, given where I am now. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words through late primary and high school, including three full-length novels and lots of smaller pieces. But it never occurred to me that I might do it for a living. I was just dreaming. By the time I was old enough to consider careers, I knew that writers earn a pittance, most of them, despite working horribly long hours, and they don't have such benefits as sick pay, leave loading, superannuation, and so on. Only a fool would take on a job like that. A fool or a dreamer.

The best advice I ever received was from a guy called Charles Brown. He edits a long-running magazine called LOCUS, which all the world's SF& F writers read to find out what's happening in the field. He's a big deal, in other words, and he came to talk to a bunch of new writers who'd won prizes in something called the Writers of the Future Contest.

I was among them. This was ten years ago, when I'd already decided to try to be a writer, but hadn't written any novels yet, or made much money at all. I was just hammering away at it because there was nothing else I wanted to do badly enough. The thought of spending most of my life doing something I hated, like being a doctor or a lawyer, was just unbearable.

Anyway, Charles sat us down and congratulated us on our success. It was pretty cool, he said; we should be proud of getting this far because not many people do. Of every hundred people who want to write, only one goes on to do something about it, to actually try writing something. If you take a hundred of those people who actually do something about it, whether it's write a few poems or the beginning of a novel, only one in that hundred actually finishes anything. And if you take a hundred of those finishers, only one of them will actually sell their work professionally.

If you add up all the zeroes, that means that just one wannabe writer in a million will sell or win an award for their story, poem or novel. So sitting around that table of prize-winners really was something to be proud of.

But that wasn't the end of it. If you take a hundred people who have sold a professional story, poem or novel, how many of them are likely to ever make a career out of writing? That is, how many will take that one pro sale and turn it into a regular income on which they can support themselves indefinitely?

Just one.

Well, I looked around the table. There were around twenty of us in the room, and we were all high on that the thought that we were real writers now. All our stories were going to win prizes, and our novels would all bestsellers.

It doesn't work like that, Charlie said. If the odds are one in a hundred, then the chances were that none of us in that room were going to get anywhere. Oh, we might sell a few more stories, here and there. Maybe a novel, if we were lucky. But earn enough to make a living from it? Unlikely.

It would be better, he said, if we gave up right now. Saved ourselves the years of hardship and heartbreak. Put all that wasted energy into a career that would actually make money, and spare our families and loved ones all that frustration and anger when we didn't ultimately get anywhere. How many zeroes are we up to now? For every one hundred million people who dream of being a writer, there's just one who reaps the rewards. What makes you think you're going to be that one?

I listened to him and thought, "He's making perfect sense. Everything he says is true. It makes me feel sick inside to admit it, but I am crazy for thinking I might get anywhere. I know the odds are stacked against me, and only either pride or stupidity--or both--has got me this far. The bubble is bound to pop eventually, as it will for ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight other wannabe writers. And one lucky one will go on, not knowing just how lucky they are. Damn them."

It took me the rest of his speech to realise that, although Charles was absolutely right, it didn't change a thing. Not one thing. The odds were still awful; I was an idiot for even trying. But if I didn't love it enough to keep doing it anyway, then I would never get anywhere, no matter how much I tried. I would be that one in one hundred million if I had to sweat blood to do it. I would prove Charles Brown absolutely right by doing the exact opposite of what he told me to do.

And I did.

When I was younger, I dreamed. I reached for the stars. When I was older, I realised that dreaming and reaching wasn't enough. I had to do more than just lie there, looking upward and wishing. If I didn't do more than that, I wouldn't get anywhere at all.

###

Another writer, Kevin J Anderson, has a saying I like to quote to new writers, of any age: "The harder I work," he says, "the luckier I get." Sometimes I think that's the wisest thing any writer has ever said. Forget all that stuff about writing from the heart, or writing what you know. That comes with practice. Work hard at what you love; make your own luck. Whether it's skateboard, painting, football, or writing, his words still apply: if you're passionate about it and you're prepared to give it your all, then you'll increase your chances of getting a lucky break along the way.

The trick, I guess, is to find the thing you love. It's all very well for me to stand up here and tell you that this is what you have to do. I mean, I've found my thing. What if yours takes a long time to find? Or you haven't come across it yet? What if your thing is Belgian ice-sculpture and you've never left Adelaide? What happens then?

I don't know. But I do know that being afraid of trying will only hold you back. If you'd told me when I was a kid that I would end up writing Star Wars novels and other books, I would've told you that you were mad--not because I didn't want to do it, but because I assumed I never had a chance.

If I'd never tried, I never would've made it, and neither would any of the other writers assembled here tonight.

But here we are, dreaming for a living. We don't have friends or relatives telling us off or thinking we're weird for sticking our heads into books all the time, like I did when I was younger, because now it's what we do. It's our job. We have to do it, and it's hard work, most of the time. On the odd occasions when it doesn't feel like a job at all, when it takes me across the world to places like Hollywood Boulevard and Skywalker Ranch--at times like that, I have to remind myself that, like all writers, I've earned the fun parts. They don't just happen by magic; we didn't win them in a lottery. We made our own luck; we proved, whether we knew it or not, Charles Brown right.

You could be one of us, one day. Don’t let anybody tell you can’t do it. They’re only right if you believe them. Maybe the next one in one hundred million is sitting in this room right now. If you are, don’t forget to reach for the stars, and always expect to do a lot of climbing to get there. Astronauts have to train for years before they go up in a space shuttle. I may not have actually gone to the stars, but in my head I have a million times or more--and that really is the next best thing.