He spent the rest of his life behind bars, locked up with the criminally insane, as criminally insane as any of them, but with a message for us from, as it were, the other side. Apart from this, his life was wasted.

Still, he left us paintings, and riddles, and one unfinished painting, which continues to obsess. Angela Carter wrote an astonishing radio play, Come Unto These Yellow Sands, about the painting, Dadd’s life, Victorian art. I wrote a film treatment once in which the painting was a key, and came close once to organizing an anthology in which each story would be about one of the witnesses to the Fairy-Feller’s chestnut-smashing blow.

The mystery, like the painting, like our understanding of the painter, will always remain unfinished, or abandoned, and always ultimately remain unexplained. As Dadd himself put it, at the end of his poem, “Elimination . . .”

But whether it be or be not so

You can afford to let this go

For nought as nothing it explains

And nothing from nothing nothing gains.

This was written for the July/August 2013 issue of Intelligent Life magazine, and I cannibalized an earlier introduction I had written for Mark Chadbourn’s excellent novella The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke, 2008.

IX

MAKE GOOD ART

“Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art.”

Make Good Art

I never really expected to find myself giving advice to people graduating from an establishment of higher education. I never graduated from any such establishment. I never even started at one. I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I’d become the writer I wanted to be was stifling.

I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and they paid for it, or they didn’t, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them.

Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family who attended universities were cured of long ago.

Looking back, I’ve had a remarkable ride. I’m not sure I can call it a career, because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan, and I never did. The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was fifteen of everything I wanted to do: to write an adult novel, a children’s book, a comic, a movie; record an audiobook; write an episode of Doctor Who . . . and so on. I didn’t have a career. I just did the next thing on the list.

So I thought I’d tell you everything I wish I’d known starting out, and a few things that, looking back on it, I suppose that I did know. And that I would also give you the best piece of advice I’d ever got, which I completely failed to follow.