guigar
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AMA — "What's the piece of advice you wish you'd been given?"
🕑 Added 2022-09-11 18:00:05 +0000 UTCQ.: Best piece of advice you wish you’d been given?
That’s a pretty common question. But it’s also a trick question.
I’ve gotten tons of great advice over the course of my life. Some of it, I listened to. And other advice, I ignored — mainly because I wasn’t ready to hear it yet. So, yes, I wish someone had told me to focus on writing over art — that my art was going to progress naturally, but unless I became a better writer, none of it was going to matter. That would have been tremendous advice to have gotten ten or twenty years ago.
I wouldn’t have listened.
I wasn’t ready to hear that yet. And I hadn’t gotten knocked on my ass enough to force me to pay attention. And that’s OK because it wasn’t until those things happened that I was capable of really making full use of the advice.
Ironically, I spend a ridiculous time trying to give other people advice! I teach two classes at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. I have a weekly podcast, ComicLab, that launched in 2018. Our 250th episode comes out soon, and along with the Patreon-exclusive Pro Tips episodes we record, that's 500 episodes of advice! And I’ve been posting several times a week at Webcomics.com since 2010.
I give people a LOT of advice — most of it based on the dumb mistakes I made along the way. And I see folks dismissing it constantly. It would be easy to get frustrated about that, but I have to remind myself that I was exactly the same way. And that’s OK. Sometimes advice is like a time bomb. I might throw it into someone’s hands today, but it might not actually activate until years later. Giving advice is all about playing the long game.
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Comments
Brian
I actually want to know how you feel the transition from 3 panel to 6 panel is going. Has it given you the greater freedom with writing you hoped for? Does it make establishing a theme more or less difficult? Does it make some characters better or worse options for the new length, and if yes with whom?
Brad Guigar
The response has been very good! But there really isn't any extra effort. Since I already prep my comic for a vertical scroll, it's just a matter of dragging all of the panels into one PDF. It only takes a few minutes. :)
Mark Ashworth
How well received are the phone-ready versions of your books? Have they been worth the extra effort?
Some Ed
On that particular note, I've found that most if not all of the best advice I could've wanted *had* actually been given to me, I just wasn't ready for it at the time. Most of the time, I completely forgot it had been given to me. I only know about having been given the advice because 1. Sometimes, people say, "I told you so." Most of the time, if I've forgotten about it, this seems unbelievable. But I have had enough of the following sorts of experiences to feel like I should believe it by default rather than not. 2. I'm a data packrat. While I've lost tons of emails and stuff over the years, I've spent a lot of effort to not do that. And every so often, I read the old stuff. Some of the time, I find advice I wasn't ready for and didn't remember reading at all. 3. People I trust have pointed out someone or other had told me about stuff after I explain to them this thing I learned totally on my own. 4. On much rarer occasion, there's accidental video or audio recordings to commemorate the advice. Possibly the first of these was a video recorded when my family first got a camcorder. My older brothers made the video, one being the intended subject and the other holding the camera. But in the background, my mother was giving me advice I wasn't ready for.
Aaron Bredon
I read a very insightful comment once about how lots of successful entrepreneurs give talks about how they succeeded, but success is mainly luck and having the right prosuct at the right time, and the truly useful talks would be failed entrepreneurs talking about how/why they failed, as one is more likely to be successful if you know what to avoid, and the only way to learn that is to talk to those that failed. The successful people might have succeeded despite doing things that should have caused failure, but if you know what makes failure more likely, and avoid repeating those mistakes, you will survive long enough to have a better chance to succeed. TL;DR - Advice about dumb mistakes to avoid is great advice.
