One day this week someone asked me if I was a medical person, because of some of the things I had recently said in a group chat. All of those things came from a position of common sense, not any holding out of specialist knowledge. All of those things were about taking your recovery time seriously, don’t rush back into full-pelt, listen to your body and to the medics. All of those things were about ‘we want you back but we don’t want you setting yourself back to get here'. I was surprised by the interpretation that this in any way purported to be coming from any perspective other than a normal compassion.
This is not about that.
This is about what I said in response, and how much it surprised me. Asked if I was a medic, I replied with “Good god, no! I’m a creative. I’m a writer.”
Not the most earth-shattering statement in the history of the universe, I know, but I spent 50+ years insisting that I did not have a creative bone in my body. For me claiming it as my identity in an unthought moment, that is earth-shattering in my personal world. In a good way.
I have been working towards claiming this identity for a few years now, and sometimes I take a deep breath and admit (?!) that I’m a poet, but that was the first time that it came out unthought.
It was a surprise. It was something I thought about afterwards. Something I might have regretted saying if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t do regret – on principle. So, there it was, and here it is. I am saying it again, purely to reinforce it for myself, so that I don’t get to backtrack.
I am a creative. I am a writer. I am a poet.
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So then I have to figure out what to do with all this stuff I am writing. My journal musings were heavily into the whole who-am-I-now? scenario. In particular I’d gone down a road of wondering if my motivation (officially diagnosed as ‘achievement’) had changed; whether other things might be more important to me now, or needed to be. Should relationships matter more to me now, or spirituality, or...???
My former coach, now good-buddy & everyday angel, called BS on that. I think what he actually said was Eff that (without deleting the expletive). Told me that I am an achiever, to own that, and go find myself a bigger mountain to climb. He also told me it didn’t necessarily need to be the one in front of me.
If I don't want to go down the prescribed routes, then fine, but still - find a bigger mountain to climb. You won't be happy if you're not achieving. And I have to own the truth of that. By trying to move away from my baseline of being motivated by achievement (however right or wrong that might be), I have been making myself miserable.
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How I square it all with the idea of simplifying what I’m already doing is the challenge. How, in other words, do I hold to that part of me, the achiever, the completer-finisher, without squandering my newfound need for relationships and community and spirituality? And simplify everything in the process?!
No easy answers.
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I have been reading Satish Kumar on Elegant Simplicity and he tells me that poets are artists, and artists are rebels, and rebels are necessary. He tells me that art is a pure component of elegant simplicity – or can be. He has things to say about art locked away in museums, about things that are claimed as art but are really entertainment or concept or money-making or fame-generating schemes.
Art, he asserts, and I concur, should be what we live with, what we live in, and amongst, what we could be doing, every day. He references Morris and the ‘arts and crafts’ movement. I wonder, again, why differentiate between art and craft? What is the difference between fine art and folk art, and who gets to decide? All creative work could be considered art, whether it is water-colouring or cooking, spinning words or weaving cloth, sewing clothes or making tapestries, gardening or farming, or choreography, or photography, or raising children, or trying to save the planet.
Anything and everything where we use our imagination and create something that was not there before can be art, but perhaps it stops being so when the doing of it or the completed thing in its own self matters less than the response to it, when the ego overrides the flow, when it becomes purely (or at least mainly) about money. Not money as a just reward - artists also have to pay their bills - but money as a symbol of the ‘worth’ of the piece of work (as in what's it worth?), money as a proxy for value.
From the point of view of my inner artist, the line is crossed when what started as a joy, becomes a job. I remember reading a quote somewhere which read art is that thing no-one asked you to do. I like that: it's the thing you do even when you're not being paid for it. But wouldn't be a wonderful world if everyone could be paid for doing it, if everyone could be led to their creativity and then allowed to make a right livelihood from it: not fame and fortune, but a sustainable living. This is what Satish means. And I concur.
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I read a lot of writers talking about their craft, about their profession, about their business. I read very few talking about their art. I totally respect these people making their living, paying their bills, doing whatever other good stuff they do with their income, by doing what they love. And some of them – not all, probably not even the majority – but some of them do still dearly love what they do. My all-time favourite author, Terry Pratchett, sadly no longer with us, described writing as being absolutely the most fun you can have by yourself. He was an artist. He would have done it anyway. I'm glad we paid him more than the Electricity Generating Board so that he could have that much fun.
Too many of the others that I read and listen to, they talk about "what it takes", what the problems are, how hard it is to "make it" in the publishing industry. That word ‘industry’ tells us as much as we need to know in terms of how we have come to view the printed word, the sharing of stories, the ‘art’ of poetry. If you want to be taken seriously, take the business seriously, work hard and you might be rewarded. Work hard – not perfect your craft – not develop your art – work hard. Treat it like a job.
So, when people tell me I ‘should publish’ I think to myself: I don’t want to work that hard.
I want to improve my craft. I want to share my word-smithing even in its current form. I don’t want to be meeting targets and satisfying stakeholders and being what other people want me to be. Been there, done that.
Then I remember that I am SO lucky: I don’t need to work that hard.
So why would I?
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I came to the joy of writing relatively late in life – why on earth would I now want to turn that joy into a job. You know about jobs, yes? They’re the things where you have to show up every day – or at least, every day that someone else tells you that you have to show up. They’re the things with rules and targets and deadlines. They’re the things where someone else tells you what to do and how to do it and you have to comply. They’re the things that most of us spend a lot of our lives wishing we didn't have to have.
So now that I don’t have a job – by great good fortune, and a decent career behind me, and a pension etc – now that I can write for the joy of writing… remind me again: why would I turn that into a job?
Why would I want deadlines, and restrictions, and limitations? Why would I want pressure and anxiety and what if it’s not good enough? Why?
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Whatever answers you might have to those questions, simply fact is: I don’t.
Which raises the question: why am I writing at all if I don’t want to be read. What are the poems and stories and histories and memoirs and all the rest for, if I don’t want them to survive me or go beyond me?
And of course the answer is that of course I want to be read. Every writer wants to be read. I submit work to magazines, I release stuff on this site. I put things on social media. I write poems specifically for calendars and cards to be given away. My caged birds need to be allowed to fly. But these are all (relatively) short form writings. What to do with the longer ones, which are actually the more important ones, the ones I really want out in the world?
Kind people tell me I should publish. They say this with no reality-check on what publishing means. They may simply be being kind, or they may actually believe the work needs to get out into the wild, as I do. They may genuinely think it is good enough to hold its own out there, about which I am uncertain. They do not understand what it takes to put a book out, and then to sell enough copies of it to recoup the costs of doing so. They have no idea of the time, effort, emotion and – let’s be blunt – money – involved in bringing a book to market. Oh yeah, and then you have to market the damn thing. You don’t get to just birth your baby, you then have to prostitute it. Or yourself to feed it.
I have dipped my toe in that pond. It has cured me of wanting to swim in it.
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Reminder note to self: I don’t want to work that hard. I don’t need to work that hard. I can just open the cage.
I decide to open another cage.
Taking a brave step, I abandon one of my writing projects as being basically unfeasible, I'll never bring it to term. The work done on it so far may get repurposed. It may languish. For now it is pushed aside to create space for more important things. Sometimes simplifying means removing one thing to make space for another.
Taking another brave step, I select one of the other works in progress to release serially on Substack. I’m still finding my feet in terms of how the site works and how to break the work down into manageable reads. It is a project that has no definitive end-point, but already has a goodly chunk of material that can be edited at point of posting. This means I can continue to add new content to the whole, continue writing it (as originally envisaged), without pressure of deadline, and at the same time, release it into the wild, piece by piece, editing as I go and improving the original.
That's the theory.
And the theory is that this way I also get to keep the joy alive.
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Anyone who feels like jumping over to take a look at my Memoir of Things (just launching) at Lesley Mason | Substack would be much appreciated – as would your patience while I figure out how that whole new-to-me space works, and get the project up and running.
