Why do I do this?

Why do I write?  That’s not what I trained for.  I spent five years at art school; five years of thrills and spills, being abused and then praised and then abused again, having my best work rubbished comprehensively and then being urged to carry out stupid ideas I had dreamed up during a drunken pizza lunch with my mother...  (FYI, it’s useful sometimes having a mum one can get plastered with!).  I painted and drew for the life of me.  I learned an enormous amount about myself.  And I tried (& tried, and tried) to connect what I could do with the Fine Art Newspeak Bullsh*t that most of the tutors spoke, most of the time. 

In the end, though, it didn’t work.  I’ll never regret those five years: they were fascinating and fun, I made some great friends, I learned to salsa and speak Spanish, and I did make some good paintings.  And drawings.  Good, big drawings.  If I ever know someone whose house is large enough to hang the really big stuff (which isn’t that big – I think the largest pieces were about six feet by eight – come on, some people make artworks hundreds of feet long) then he or she will be welcome to any of it that they like.  I’m unlikely ever to be able to hang it myself, after all, since I’ll never own a mansion.  I still paint and sketch with great happiness, on holiday, or down at the London Wetland Centre.  But I have come to see I’ll never be an artist.

It’s partly that I haven’t the patience to sit and listen and try to engage with the aforementioned Fine Art Bullsh*t.  I managed to, at college; but five years of it was more than enough.  Way more...  Life is too short to waste time bending one’s brain into that distorted worldview, just in order to please someone who will then turn around and say “But I don’t like the shade of blue you’re using, either”.  Excuse my French, but f*ck them.

I am someone who got a tremendous amount out of spending five years making what I consider to be art; but “an artist” is someone who wants to make a career in the Art World and embrace the Fine Art BS; qv my earlier rude comments, above.  I got into art because after ten years with no creative outlet except my job cooking (which I was good at, and also don’t regret), my rediscovery of creative activity when I was in my late twenties blew my mind.  I could have gone full-tilt into anything creative that I had happened upon, but it was an adult ed art evening class that I hit on, and that hit me. Like anyone who's been hit, I was a little punch-drunk afterwards, though in this case it was punch-drunk with joy.

Ultimately, all I was doing at college, though, was having fun and playing.  I think I had a whole second childhood in those five years at KIAD, and all the fun and all the frustrations of adolescence, too; but at an age when I was mature enough to experience them fully – and, crucially, gain from them - instead of simply drowning in them.  So no, no regrets whatsoever, but still I have come to feel it was a dead-end for me.

When I sat down, in autumn 2005, and did that “what are your creative goals” exercise from The Artist's Way, what came out wasn’t art works.  It was stories.  And they have been coming out ever since.  Not as steadily as I would like, but pretty steady even so. 

I wanted to write when I was a kid.  I had a head full of stories I wanted to tell, and all these years later they are still there.  The “back burner” exercise I did last year uncovered the fact that some of them, even some of the really old ones, were actually worth doing.  New ones pop up in my brain all the time.  Urban fantasies, pseudo-historical fantasies, romantic fantasies; slight things like the fairy tales, and epics that could run to four volumes.  Storytelling; that’s what I was made for, it seems.  I ignored it for all those years, and the moment I let it see daylight, it sprouted anew.  Stories, stories, stories.

That’s why I do it.  It’s what makes me, me, and it’s the greatest delight I have in my life.  I have no idea if I will ever be published (though I intend to keep trying) but I cannot stop the storytelling, because that would be like stopping growing.  I could stop doing the art in any serious way, because it was, ultimately, a blind alley.  But the stories are not blind.  The stories have intense eyes that see me, and see the world, and through which I can see; and nothing looks the same when I see through their eyes. 

I describe Anna and Thorn talking about sensory interference, I send the protagonists of “Café Tana” into the maze in the heart of someone's mind, I trap Simon Cenarth on a battlefield and walk across a desert with Maramne Myas to try and save her husband and reach her lover; I meet aliens, heal gunslingers, discover creatures that feed on fear, and learn to overcome them by overcoming fear, and I find love and lose it and find it again; and then wake up and want breakfast.  In stories.  Which are my truest world.

What more to tell?  A busy weekend: The Olympics Opening Ceremony was great fun, beautiful, exciting and relatively cheese-free, and also managed to be very smoothly drilled while looking completely anarchic and organic; Saturday I got sunburned again helping TCI to gloss paint doors on trestles in her garden; Sunday I did my grocery shopping and cleaning and all the other domestic duty stuff, and got rained on, and wrote, and watched “The Town”, which was excellent.  A classic-tropes heist movie, extremely well done and totally gripping; I’d put it on a par with “Heat” and “Ronin” and “Ne le dis à personne” in terms of good old-fashioned thriller quality.  And surprise surprise, Mr Renner is terrific – playing a terrifying, and ultimately tragic, murderous nut-job. 

And someone came home at 4.00am last night and slammed doors and played music in the flat.  At 4.00am.  Gods, I wish I had my own place! 

Tell me a story...

It’s Tuesday afternoon and the ‘phones have gone quiet. Conversation has turned to odd topics (kinky-sounding abbreviated names, intra-species breastfeeding…). I’m looking at a picture of a very strange object which someone has sent in – a sort of hollow terracotta tube with a dish-shaped foot – and wondering who at Kew would know what the flipping heck it is. Various theories were voiced as the picture was passed round the office, varying from the possible through the facetious to the downright rude, but so far it remains a mystery. We’ll see what Stewart Henchie makes of it.

Got some more writing done last night. There’s nothing quite like getting on with it to kick-start the solving of what have earlier appeared really knotty problems. After being beaten at University Challenge (admittedly by Corpus Christi, who I think are going to win overall, with something like 350 to my puny 235) I needed some light relief. Writing and playing “Renaissance of the Celtic Harp” repeatedly did the job perfectly. I think I’ve got to the end of chapter two. Whoo-hoo!

I’m very happy to be finding as I write that the whole thing is taking shape in ways I hadn’t envisaged. This is a story I conceived years ago, as a fairly straightforward space-opera, when I was a “Star Trek”~ and “Star Wars”-mad teenager. It had sat quiet in the back of my mind ever since, much as “Gabriel Yeats” did, simply because I liked the principal characters and felt they interacted well. Frankly, I thought the story was the weakest part, but now I’m actually having a go at it I’m pleasantly surprised to find that there is more to it than I’d originally thought. That sounds terribly self-aggrandising – embarrassingly so. At bottom this is still a western set in outer space, a pretty standardised genre which I make no pretension of revitalising. Far better writers than I will ever be already have that task in hand, anyway…

I’m just happy that when I lifted this particular pot from back-burner to main-burner, it turned out to have a bit more thematic substance than I’d expected. Why is the “alien” alien? – and why do we develop, and hold to, the loyalties we do, and let others go?

There’s a large back-burner in my mind where this story was sitting, and others still sit today; the oldest dates from my teens, the most recent from last autumn. They need to sit on a very low hob and brew for a while, like decoctions.

Back in the late summer of 2005, when I was trying to get my new life in London and my new job at Kew back on track after the chaos and unhappiness of my father’s death, I began working through some of the exercises in a self-help book called “The Artist’s Way” that I had bought shortly before he was diagnosed, and had never had time to start reading. The author, Julia Cameron, has written a lot of this sort of thing; I’ve read several of her books. At times she’s a little too breezily Californian for my tastes, and I feel myself getting all British and stiffened in the upper lip in response; and at times her huge self-confidence astounds (and slightly repels) me. But she’s very good on tips and tricks and ways to keep your creative juices flowing. I remember a cold, damp autumnal day when I was on duty at Lion Gate all day (boringboringboring) when I was reading this book and decided to do one of the exercises; it was like opening the back door and suddenly seeing that far from living in an inner city I had the South Downs out there. That was the exercise that got me writing again, after what was by then ten years of solid, dedicated focus on my visual art work. I had forgotten I’d ever had any other creative dreams; in fact in reading the book I was hoping to kick-start myself into some painting after a fallow period.

This was the exercise I did that day. IT WORKS; so if you don’t want to uncover your lost creative dreams, look away now.

Imagine you are a filmmaker, and you have been asked to make a film and given a generous budget, with no strings attached, by an independent film production company. Their only stipulation is that you make work that really matters to you. What film do you make?

Don’t think about it too much, just make notes. If you find yourself thinking about more than one project, make notes on all of them. If you know who you want to cast, note that down, too, together with why you want those particular actors (& don’t worry, “because he/she is hot” is a perfectly adequate answer to that question!). If you know why this or that project matters to you, write that down too. When you’ve made all the notes you can, then and only then do you start to look at them dispassionately and try to analyse what you’ve come up with. What have you written, and why? Why is this the film you want to make? – why is this what really matters to you?

It’s weird; it disarms all those inner restraints that kick in going “you can’t, it won’t happen, that’s just a silly daydream” and so forth. After all, it’s just a game, isn’t it? – you know you aren’t going to make a film. It’s like saying “What would you do if you had eighty million pounds?” Because the exercise is fantasy it frees you to think about things that otherwise you might have buried under a thick layer of muffling insulation. Mind you, if you want to make films in the first place it may work slightly differently…

In my case, I didn’t hesitate for even a second; I instantly began listing stories I wanted to tell. They varied enormously in subject matter. The one obvious connecting factor was that these stories mattered to me; not their content or their meaning or their message, or any idea of their supposed literary merit, just them as stories. All of them were stories I’d “always meant to get around to writing”. I sat and looked at my three pages of notes and thought “So why aren’t I writing them, then?” And the next day, I began to write “Gabriel Yeats”.

Very sincere and heartfelt thanks, then, to Julia Cameron, for that one. For more of the same, see “The Artist’s Way”.
http://www.theartistsway.com/
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