Trust your obsessions. This is one I learned more or less accidentally.

People sometimes ask whether the research or the idea for the story comes first for me. And I tell them, normally the first thing that turns up is the obsession: for example, all of a sudden I notice that I’m reading nothing but English seventeenth-century metaphysical verse. And I know it’ll show up somewhere—whether I’ll name a character after one of those poets, or use that time period, or use the poetry, I have no idea. But I know one day it’ll be there waiting for me.

You don’t always use your obsessions. Sometimes you stick them onto the compost heap in the back of your head, where they rot down, and attach to other things, and get half-forgotten, and will, one day, turn into something completely usable.

Go where your obsessions take you. Write the things you must. Draw the things you must.

Your obsessions may not always take you to commercial places, or apparently commercial places. But trust them.

A footnote to this, for writers:

When I was working with new artists on Sandman the first question I would ask was “What kind of stuff do you want to draw?” The second was often “What don’t you like to draw?” I found both of these pieces of information astonishingly useful, and often very surprising.

Play to an artist’s strengths; it makes you look good. Play to your own strengths if you’re an artist—but don’t relax into shtick or into the dozen things that you do.

6. Don’t stop learning.

It’s too easy to achieve a level of competence in your field, whatever it is, and to stop there.

Competence is one thing, but writers and artists are like sharks: when we stop moving we die. (I got that piece of information from reading Jaws at a young age. I have no idea whether it’s true that sharks die when they stop, or go into reverse, but I now believe it utterly, just as I know that double-bass music signals a shark attack.)

I tend to think of technique as the kind of gardening tools one keeps in the potting shed (an English expression that has no equivalent that I know of) at the bottom of the garden, grabbing a garden fork, or a hoe, or one of those metal things you find hanging from a hook that the previous owner left behind and no one ever quite knows what to do with.

At Will Eisner’s eightieth-birthday bash several months ago, in Florida, I was most impressed by some lithographs Will had done recently, because these were the first lithographs he’d done since art college, over sixty years earlier, and he thought it was a technique he should master.

You never know what tool you’ll need. Every now and then I’ll set myself writing exercises—types of formal verse, or styles from other times and other places. Sometimes I surprise myself, and wind up with something wonderful. Sometimes I wind up with something that leaves me hoping I don’t die before I get a chance to clean out that directory, because if it were published posthumously, it’d kill me. But either way I have, literally, learned something.