At the outset, Gaiman’s line refuses the comfort of known audiences and invites the artist to risk singing into the dark. Work that “sings” doesn’t flatter; it trusts clarity, feeling, and form to find ears it has never met. In his Make Good Art speech (2012), Gaiman urged graduates to make honest mistakes in public—because only public song can discover its strangers. That stance reframes success: instead of pleasing a circle of peers, you craft something a stranger can carry home. This shift prepares the way for what follows, because once a work leaves its maker, it begins a second life in the lives of others. [...]
