pretty good blog: January 2012

Friday, January 20, 2012

Words of Wisdom

I remember sometime in the late 90's/early 2000's I was reading Wizard Magazine & I cut out this quote from Amazing Spiderman/Thor writer & Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski because it really hit home.

I wanted to share with everyone because I think more people need to hear this,

Wizard Readers,
You, reading this. Yeah, you, by the comics rack. Listen to me. Listen carefully. Because this lesson doesn't come around often, and you have to be attentive when it does.
Put down this issue and go into a restaurant, to a park, someplace where there are kids around. Watch the kids. They run, spontaneously; they color and draw and make up little stories, spontaneously; they sing, spontaneously. But these are all the things we become self-conscious about as we grow older. At some point, we stop drawing and coloring and making up stories because people will judge us or laugh at us. We unlearn the things that give us joy.
You've probably got people around you who don't understand why you keep wasting your time and money with comics. These are the same people whose voices we hear when we stop singing, and drawing, and telling stories. And here is the lesson: They're wrong. They're always wrong.
Follow your passion, whatever it is. Sing. Draw. Tell stories. Because the thing of it is, the remarkable, astonishing, nearly unbelievable but utterly, undeniably true thing about it is… if you follow your joy, and step out on the frontier of your passion, sooner or later, if you do it right, you can actually make a living at it.

It may sound dopey, but it’s the truest thing I know. The faces and names between the covers of this magazine stand as profound testimony to that truth.
Go thou and do likewise.
J. Michael Straczynski
Writer, Rising Stars, Midnight Nation,
occasional singer