Stephan Pastis

And that was the thing about Scott's advice.

It did not consist of the usual platitudes that other successful people might give you.

He was willing, as I often told him, to give away the keys to the kingdom.

But you had to listen.

And I listened, as he told me when I saw him a few weeks ago, and he reminded me of the time I met him at his restaurant and asked him questions for two hours.

He said, you wrote down every single thing I said for two hours.

I don't think anyone else ever took it that far.

And then there was the more specific advice he gave me about writing a comic strip.

Like the time he told me, if you have a really dirty strip, you want to get past the syndicate and into newspapers.

Create a second, even dirtier strip.

You have no intention of running and send them in together.

The syndicate will fight you like crazy on the really dirty one and the one you want to run will slip by unnoticed.

That's the kind of guru Scott could be.

In fact, Scott would rarely email me to tell me a particular strip was good.

But if it was dirty and I got it published, Scott was like a proud father.

Like the time I had my main character, Rat, tell someone in a restaurant to eat shit talky mushrooms.

Scott thought that was awe-inspiring.

But if you knew Scott, you also knew he was very competitive, which meant he had to top it.

The student could not eclipse the teacher.

So Scott emailed me.