When you have finished your latest masterpiece ask
yourself a question. Who are the most important people to you and that work?
So you are sitting in the cave, and you have your new tale finished, ready to share. You’ve given you loincloth a fresh wash in the local
stream and stoked the fire ready for the show, and now you wait. But while you
are waiting you sit and think about this tale and how it will be received. How
do you tell if it is a good one? How do you know if your tales will please?
You look across at the entrance to the cave, and there
sits Ugg, a big, ugly brute… your agent. He is charging two goats for entry
tonight, but that is all right as you do get eighty percent of all goats received.
After every tale he will inform you of the total goats taken, and praise you
for a fine tale based on this number, but is that something you can judge your
tale by. Ugg is after all only interested in the goats, although the tribal
council could never prove some of the more salacious rumours. So as long as he
can see your work as being goatworthy, then he will praise it. But this doesn’t
tell you how good your tales are, how much people really enjoy them.
Ugg can only see goats when he takes you on, he is always mindful
of his success percentage, he doesn’t really care what your story is about just
as long as the people turn up every night to hear the new one. When he tells
you it is wonderful he will always have those commercial thoughts in the front
of his mind, and how you will affect his reputation in the world of tale
telling, because frankly it is the only world he has a reputation left in.
The person that is of most value, other than that little
voice in your head that likes to pop up at the most annoying times, is the one
who turns up, sits through your tale, and is willing to hand over a couple of
goats to do so. The audience, the reader, the patron of your art is more
important than all the Uggs of this world. The audience do not have a commercial
interest in your tale. They are not making money from your work, but want to
give you the time to tell your story. So when someone sits through your latest
masterpiece, their feedback is worth more than any goat trader.
When someone reads your story, or watches your performance,
and then tells you what they think, it should be an unbiased opinion. It should
be comments that are not based on commercial values of how you can be exploited.
Apart from the occasional tribe member that you may have upset during the
weekly cave painting, and whose opinion might have ulterior motives, this
feedback should be valued and appreciated above the likes of Ugg’s every day.
If you want to improve your tales then listen to the
people that have given it the time, without financial interest. If you want to
be a goat mogul then go find Ugg, there is sure to be a cave nearby with one of
his sort inside.
And finally please remember that if the audience don’t
like the tale, there are no refunds, as Ugg does not return goats.
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