What goals?
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Transcript
- Greymouth High student
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When you started writing did you have any goals that you wanted to get out of your writing career, and have your ambitions changed since you started?
- Hone
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I had no goals (Bernard: You achieved them all) Yeah, I just wanted to do it and it just happened. I kept working at it and I just feel so fortunate that I write and get to cruise around the world and see my work and stuff like that. No specific goals just as I said, initially for me anyway I just had things I felt needed to be said and just did it.
- Bernard
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It’s sort of wonderful because you are always getting told ‘You’ve gotta have goals… You’ve got to set plans… You’ve got to know where you are going, what is your five year plan?’ And my five year plan is to be alive! And that will do. And I actually find the hardest thing in writing, is avoiding goals. And I mean that in the sense that other people want…have goals for you, and so you start writing and there’s somebody who wants to sell ‘x’ number of books because they make money out of it, or there’s somebody who has decided that they are the critic, you know the critical culture of this country, and they want you to make…. “Oh that’s the sort of book you’re good at. That’s what we need more of,” or whatever. And suddenly loads of other people will have goals for you as soon as you’re noticed. And I find the hardest thing is ignoring them – and it’s very hard to ignore flattery by the way. It’s easier to ignore criticism, but when someone says, ‘This is what you’re good at’, and they sort of colonise you really…. they go ‘We need more comedy like that. That’s what we want. More comedy. Write more comedy’. And the moment when it’s not your goal it’s sort of awful.
- Lynda
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Just thinking, if I was going to be completely honest, one of my goals when I was very young was to be really famous and I had to eat a lot of humble pie, and realise that is not the way you go about it and I learned the hard way, that it was about loving story telling, loving to tell stories, and when I started to understand that, then the goal of just getting each piece done became a priority.