Ignore Everybody - MacLeod, Hugh [1]
http://us.penguingroup.com
This book is dedicated to my nephews and nieces—
lots of love from Uncle Hugh!
Preface
WHEN I FIRST LIVED IN MANHATTAN IN DECEMBER 1997, I got into the habit of doodling on the backs of business cards, just to give me something to do while sitting at the bar. The habit stuck.
All I had when I first got to New York were two suitcases, a couple of cardboard boxes full of stuff, a reservation at the YMCA, and a ten-day freelance copywriting gig at a Midtown advertising agency.
My life for the next couple of weeks was going to work, walking around the city, and staggering back to the YMCA once the bars closed. Lots of alcohol and coffee shops. Lots of weird people. Being hit five times a day by this strange desire to laugh, sing, and cry simultaneously. At times like these, there’s a lot to be said for an art form that fits easily inside your coat pocket.
The freelance gig turned into a permanent job, and I stayed in town for the next two years. The first month in New York for a newcomer has this certain amazing magic about it that is indescribable. Incandescent lucidity. However long you stay in New York, you pretty much spend the rest of your time there trying to recapture that feeling. Chasing the Manhattan Dragon. Somehow the little drawings on the backs of business cards managed to capture this—the intensity, the fleeting nature, the everlasting song of New York.
This has been my predominant cartoon format for over ten years. The originals are drawn on either business cards, or bristol board cut to the same size, i.e. 3.5 inches by 2 inches. I use mostly a Rotring 0.3mm Rapidograph pen with jet-black India ink. Occasionally I’ll use other things—pencil, watercolor, ballpoint, tablet PC—but not often.
In 2001, then living in the UK, I started a blog, gapingvoid .com, where I began publishing my “business-card cartoons” online. In 2004 I published a series of blog posts that collectively went on to become “How to Be Creative,” which formed the basis of the book you’re reading now. In the meantime I’ve had many adventures, as a cartoonist, a blogger, and a marketer. I now reside in far West Texas, miles away from any big city. To get the whole story of my trials, travels, and, well, life, go check out my blog and give it a read.
“How to Be Creative,” an earlier incarnation of Ignore Everybody, has so far been downloaded over a million times. For both creative and commercial reasons, I’ve made some changes from the original online document—adding more chapters and cartoons to it, and replacing certain potty-mouth words with something more palatable. But part of the deal I made with the publisher going into this project was that I was totally unwilling to alter the spirit of the original blog posts just to see the book appear in print. Happily, they wanted it to remain pretty much as is, within reason. For that I remain very grateful to them.
1.Ignore everybody.
The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. When I first started with the cartoon-on-back-of-bizcard format, people thought I was nuts. Why wasn’t I trying to do something that was easier for markets to digest, like cutie-pie greeting cards or whatever?
YOU DON’T KNOW IF YOUR IDEA IS ANY GOOD the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is. There’s a reason why feelings scare us—because what they tell us and what the rest of the world tells us are often two different things.
And asking close friends never works quite as well as you hope, either. It’s not that they deliberately want to be unhelpful. It’s just that they don’t know your world one millionth as well as you know your world, no matter how hard they try, no matter how hard you try to explain.
Plus a big