Pain, passion, power

I put my fear back in its box
And I put the box where love is blind
And I walk in the dark
Where pain waits smiling
And I know that I can’t leave

I look at what I’ve become
I’m a pure and perfect lie
Like a blind man falling
Scared and helpless
And I’m still falling from grace

I’m so cold
Don’t leave me blind
I’m so cold
Don’t leave me blinded

I don’t know why I’m afraid
I don’t know why I’m unsure
And if it all comes down to
What I’m feeling
I don’t know what I can say

Gary Numan – Blind lyrics, Jagged Album (The link will take you to a youtube recording of the ‘Blind’ performance last night … I wish I could include the whole performance – I can highly recommend taking a look at more of the youtube recordings from last night ).

We went to see Gary Numan at the O2 Shepherds Bush Empire last night, and it was one of the most intense and overwhelming experiences of my life – the man is a legend and I could run out all sorts of cliches to attempt to describe how awesome he was. But I’m not going to do that … I learned some powerful writing lessons last night and I want to try to capture them.

Gary Numan by Arathrael (Flickr Creative Commons)

 

Gary Numan has been one of my heroes for more years than is comfortable to count, and over the past 30-odd years has produced a pretty constant stream of edgy, dark, epics that both keep his existing fans fanatically loyal and attract new fans to his work. As a performer, I guess that 30-odd years of live work has allowed him to hone his stage presence so that he can both hold and electrify an audience to the extent that they are totally with him for the duration. The age range at the concert last night was the broadest I’ve ever seen – from people in their late fifties, through people of my generation right down to teens for whom this must be amongst their first experiences of live music (and it’ll be a hard act to follow if it was).

As a writer, understanding that this is a desirable state of affairs – to have people so loyal to your work that even after 30 years they are still desperate to hear not only the *new* works but to hear again the old standards – made me think a little more deeply about how he does it, what it is about his work that commands such adoration and commitment.

I think there are a number of elements. Firstly, his themes are consistent – dark, edgy, futuristic – and his songs are both passionate and intelligent, and all have that epic electro-synth-rock drive underneath them … but even with this consistency, he’s evolving,  so that he’s moved with the times, from the punk energy of the Tubeway Army through the controlled emotional stillness of New Wave to the current incarnation – electro-rock-god. So, with his consistency in terms of theme, he’s constantly finding new ways of exploring those themes and keeping them relevant to his audience and the musical times in which we find ourselves. It’s an offering that satisfies the needs that drew his original fans to him in the first place, but gives some new twist to keep them interested, a new interpretation, a shift of emphasis and delivery that builds on what has gone before but does not repeat itself. And those same twists, reinterpretations and shifts are what draw in new fans.

That’s something worth thinking about: certainly, I think you could do a lot worse than to have people coming back to you again and again and pulling new people in with them, because your work has something powerful about it that compels such loyalty.

How does he do it?

Thinking about the structure of the set gives some clues. The music is epic in scope, theatrical and utterly compelling, rich, complex and carefully structured so that the contrasts of peaks and troughs add weight and emphasis to the lyrics. The set echoed this, with the slow build of tension and energy up through the songs until there was a massive explosion of power in the heavy guitar drive of Pure about midway through which carried everyone through to the emotional and poignant conclusion of ‘Prayer for the Unborn’.

To engage with and involve an audience to that extent, to carry them with you, is a feat every writer should aspire to, to evoke that heartsick yearning, the adrenaline rush of total commitment to the action, the tearful farewell ….

How does he do it?

And this is where one of Holly Lisle’s lessons is vividly illustrated, for me, at any rate. For copyright reasons and out of fairness to Holly, I won’t go into any detail about the lesson, which is part of her SURVIVAL SCHOOL FOR WRITERS, but, essentially, she says that in order to write powerful, compelling novels you need to draw fully on your experiences, emotions and understanding otherwise you just won’t deliver the goods. I read it, but her meaning didn’t fully dawn on me until last night.

What Gary Numan does so well is to take us to the dark places in our souls, to write out of the fear and pain and longing, the unacknowledged needs and terrors with such total, unflinching honesty that he provides a black box for his audience to place their own fears, believing that he understands and can take their pain and reshape it so that, just for a while, it becomes a little more bearable, to take it to a place where it can be shared and diminished and translated into something common and controllable.

To bring that level of passion and power into my writing, I need to be brave enough to face the levels of pain that go with it, to open up my own black box and take a walk into the darkness to find those levels of emotional honesty that will allow my stories and characters to engage with readers across the barriers of words and genres, to speak from one soul to another and to be strong  enough to bear it and go back again and again.

It’s daunting and frightening.

Those things are in the black box for a reason.

But perhaps that’s the boundary between those people who are artists and those who are not: artists access those dark, lonely places to express and articulate in words or music or images the shared fears and needs and emotions on behalf of everyone else who has to keep them under control and shut away so that society can function. And in return artists are permitted that necessary relief in child-like playfulness, to stay connected to a child-like sense of emotional honesty, intense sensory awareness and distance from social dissimulation in order to both offset and maintain that contact with the painful isolation of the black box.

To go there myself, for real, to allow all artifices to fall away, to fall from the grace of contentment and complacency? 

It’s daunting and frightening.

Those things are in the black box for a reason.

I’m scared and helpless, but I know that if I want to deliver the stories as they exist in my head, then I cannot pull back from those truths, I cannot diffuse them, I cannot distill their power without accepting their poison back into me and hoping that somehow I find the antidote before they drive me into madness.

I know I cannot leave.

A pause for thought ….

It pleased you to make me endless

You empty this frail vessel over and over

Then fill it with fresh life again.

You carry me like a hollow reed over hill and dale

Eternally breathing new melodies through me.

At the immortal touch of your hand

My little heart loses itself in joy.

Still you pour into me, and still there is room to fill.

(Deepak Chopra, Living the Infinite – On the Shores of Eternity, Poems from Tagore)

All in all, a good week – everything on the list is ticked off!! (which is nice), but plenty of food for thought, and so a pause to reflect on what I’ve done and learnt and a look at what I’ve got coming up seemed in order.

I started back into Holly Lisle’s Survival School for Writers (How to Think Sideways) and am up to lesson 14 now.  I’ve reached the conclusion that I do need to be applying this to actual writing, rather than just constructing theoretical situations to test out the techniques. I’ve got so much out of the lessons this week, that I’ve realised that I should be using these techniques on the edits I’ve got in progress AND in some of the short stories that are picking up multiple rejections.

I guess that’s pretty obvious, but eureka moments do shift the universe left a couple of paces and need time to adjust to . 

I’m already being pinged a lot of new ideas and fresh perspectives on existing stories, all of which help me explain and understand the issues with them, AND these ideas are showing me new ways of approaching them to resolve those problems. All of this is tremendously exciting and energising on the one hand, but on the other I feel rather daunted, because the amount of work and the urgency with which I want to carry it all out *right now* is overwhelming.

So, some sort of replanning/rethinking needs to happen.

I’m going to use the ‘time off’ whilst we’re away camping next week to figure it out, I hope.

I’m considering the planned CONTAIN THIS HOUR novella as a test-bed for the HTTS work. As it is, it’s an experimental piece, so I feel I have less to lose by ‘playing’ with it than with the SERE project which is really burning me, and it’s considerably shorter at around 40k planned words than the anticipated 120k-odd that SERE will need. To work HTTS together with the novella in this way fits, more or less, with the headline timings of the different pieces of work I’ve got lined up. 

Initially, I’d planned to clear the HTTS backlog in July, and then work on the ANNETH edits in August, with CONTAIN THIS HOUR dropping into September. What I’m now thinking is that switching CONTAIN THIS HOUR back into July/August will work, mostly because I can work offline in notebooks whilst we’re on holiday.

I did some work on the planning of it this afternoon whilst Honey was riding, and realised it was stalled because other than a pretty high-level concept and a handful of Philip Larkin poems, I had virtually nothing else driving it … so …. back to the drawing board. I’ve now got sentence, a clearer concept/outline query for it, and have started going back over the character pre-plans to flesh it out. I can already see that although it’s only planned as a little novella, it’s going to be a big task to get this story done right.

The first problem is how I weave together two apparently unrelated stories – to an extent I did this in DISCONNECTION, but this takes it a step further – so that they both share the same resolution or, perhaps more accurately, the resolution of the older story, the war-story, sets up the resolution of the contemporary story thread.

The second problem is that this story takes a big step out of the spec fic comfort zone I’ve been playing in up to now, and means that I need to tie this fictional world more closely to reality than I have done before – in novel terms, anyway, as a startling number of my short stories are firmly grounded in a contemporary reality. There’s a part of me that’s rebelling against this, telling me that I could switch it equally well into a spec-fic fantasy environment, but I know that’s just my fear talking: this is a mainstream story, a blending of a WWII love story with a more modern family morality tale and it will be written as such. It will *not* work as well as a spec-fic, because place, culture and historical period are as important to the story as the characters themselves.

A further contributing factor is that because this more mainstream, the themes are much smaller in scale – no epic fantasy heroic struggles here, no space opera political machinations to factor in. This is a human scale story, and the costs and benefits are personal, nor global. The world will not end if Florence’s does, and so getting to grips with her hopes, fears, needs and ambitions requires that bit more finesse. It will be interesting to see if I can manage the subtleties …

So: plenty of thinking done on CONTAIN THIS HOUR. What is equally fascinating to me is the corresponding level of new thoughts going into the novels waiting to be edited, and how this can be applied to my short story writing …. and how the heck I’m going to find the time to work them all in! The novel edits are pretty much scheduled, so that is less a concern, provided I can contain my own impatient enthusiasm to get started on them, but the short stories are more problematical: I guess I need to find some patience from somewhere and just turn them round, one at time, and get them back out there again, better and stronger than before.

I keep hoping that I will learn that time is immaterial, and that I do not need to get stressed that I have so much backlog stacked up, feeling that I have the almighty list constantly on my back like the old man of the sea. I have moments when I can accept that all things have their season, that there is no rush, that I do not need immediate gratification. The frequency and duration of such moments are increasing, so that I feel like that more often, and for longer.

But all too soon the panic returns, the looming sense of onrushing death and failure to shape my stories and ideas and put them out there, the eye of the clock watching me and demanding that I obey its command to perform now and now and now and now, whilst still the stories pour into me, and still there is room to fill.

I need to set aside this need to pour my stories out in a single, rushing stream and become more mindful of what it is that I am doing. In the sea of my own silence, I work these words for my own enjoyment, and the satisfaction of the craft comes as much from the process – as it does in sewing and working with textiles – as it does in the completion of an object or a story.

When I accept those moments of awareness and insight, when I work a story for its own sake rather than to be able to say ‘I finished another story’, then the work I produce is better, and gives me more satisfaction because I have been more involved and more intimate with it, and because it is more wholly given from my core self.

As a writer, this is a powerful lesson to learn.

We’re all going on a summer holiday …

Goldfish play

They do not work.

They do not set the alarm clock

And get up at half-past seven

And get on a crowded commuter train

And go to the office.

They are playful creatures.

Goldfish play.

from Goldfish Nation by Wendy Cope (Serious Concerns)

 

The summer holidays are almost upon us again, and the annual debate about whether the schools’ long summer holiday should be curtailed has started up again.

The proposal is that the school summer holidays should be curtailed from the current six-week stretch, to a two-week blast “just like the rest of us”.

The arguments supporting this point of view are powerful. For working parents, it avoids the need to juggle holiday, and it also avoids the stress and expense of finding suitable and affordable childcare to cover the portion of the holiday that the parents can’t cover – day camps, childminders, grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends all get pressed into service and the children can end feeling rather passed from pillar to post, well and truly farmed out. At least until they are old enough not to need formal childcare, but that’s a transition that brings its own set of problems and anxieties. The whole business is an inconvenience that ought to be avoided, and an anachronistic hangover from the days when village children were needed on the farm to cover the busy harvest period.

Our agrarian days are well and truly over, so surely we should put a stop to this outdated practice?

Maybe, or maybe not. There are some other perspectives that ought to be considered here.

Firstly, back to those working parents. From my corporate days, I can still remember the hell that was negotiating holiday during the summer period. Only a limited number of people could be on holiday at any one time, given that the corporate machine needs to keep functioning. So, bidding for summer holiday leave started early, and caused so much resentment and argument that it was a permanent issue at staff meetings – in every organisation I encountered. Cutting the summer holidays to two weeks means that *every* parent in a given office will be trying to book holiday for those weeks, to maximise that precious family time. However, unless we are going to go down the French route with the ‘grand vacances’, when basically the whole country closes for August, it is not feasible to even imagine that allowing all employees who are also parents holiday in a given two-week period will leave a viable corporate function in its wake.

Secondly, consider it from the children’s point of view. Here in the UK, our children start school – formal education – younger than pretty much any other First World country, and both their school days and terms are longer than most other European countries. And, when it comes down to it, most children would prefer *not* to be in school. They want to play. But, we send them into school, and they work long and hard, and then we often add homework and after-school activities to that workload. The short Christmas and Easter breaks really don’t give them enough time to recharge their batteries in full, and by the time the summer holidays come around, children are exhausted, mentally and physically. They need a good long rest to recover their energy, space to settle the business of the previous academic year, to reflect and organise and absorb - often subconsciously – everything they’ve learned in the past year.

They need time to play, to not have the responsibilities of school and homework, and the pressure of expectation and performance on them. They need time to rest, to be themselves, to explore their world and their environments and their relationships with their families and others without the constant stress of school routines. Education and routine is important to the adults in their lives, less so to the children themselves. We need to be aware that we are not dealing with mini-adults here, and we are not training them up to be productive and useful cogs in the corporate machine.  Learning should be less about stuffing them with skills needed for the workplace – it should rather be about igniting their imagination and curiosity, and the summer holidays – endless weeks of long, lazy days – give them precisely that opportunity.

We should not force children into adult routines as soon as we can – they have no interest in alarm clocks and commutes and office jobs – rather we should allow them to enjoy the only period in their lives when they have no (or few) responsibilities and have to bear little of the daily stresses and compromises that will characterise adult life. We should celebrate their  playful natures, and allow them this precious time of freedom when they can wallow in their ignorance and innocence, and let their souls and dreams take flight.

They have playful natures. Let them play.

Constant Creativity

Imagining is like feeling around

in a dark lane, or washing

your eyes with blood.

You are the truth

from foot to brow. Now,

what else would you like to know?

(Rumi, Birdsong)

Coming off the back of last week and a bit of reflection on the year to date, I feel like I’m getting into a good rhythm of activity, and feeling like I have a fantastic balance in my life between family, work and play – of course, it helps that for me the two ‘work’ elements pretty much *are* play.

Balance Beam, Sheilaz413 (Flickr Creative Commons)

Of course, my balance is not perfect. I have wobbles, days when I can’t even find my own centre of gravity, let alone balance anyone else’s needs with my own, and I have great days, when I just float with practised ease through a sequence of apparently physically impossible manoevres to get from the beginning to the end of the day. There are days when I’m too tired to remember, or want to remember, what I’m supposed to do, when I’m stupid and sluggish, and there are days when the behaviour of others pushes me to the limits of what I can tolerate, leaving me physically exhausted and emotionally and mentally drained.

But, on the whole, I am getting closer to a balanced life, when each part is coming together and I feel that I am living a complete existence.

There are three factors at work here.

The first is understanding and acknowledging what’s important to me, the ‘headline’ items that I can’t do without. For me, those things are family, writing, textile arts, home, and garden. Defining this list has allowed me to disconnect from any activity that doesn’t come under one of those headings, and that has freed up huge amounts of time and energy.

The second part came when I moved away from writing lists to ‘time-blocking’. Instead of having an enormous, overwhelming to-do list, I block times of day for certain activities. To give an example: I get home from the school run at approximately 9 a.m. every day, so I spend an hour on general housework and ‘daily’ chores, but instead of having a list or rota or routine or whatever, I will do a quick ‘tour’ of the house and just decide what to do based on what needs doing most. What doesn’t get done in the time available, doesn’t get done – it might get done tomorrow, if it’s higher priority than the other things that need doing. 

And this is where the third element comes in.

Being in touch with my creativity, allowing myself the time and space to express myself, is something that runs through everything I do, and is so closely connected with the ‘enjoy’ element of the intention I set myself at the beginning of the year.

It’s taken me a while to understand how closely the two are connected, and how creativity comes into play to generate enjoyment even in the most tedious of housework tasks. But viewing my life in terms of constant creativity, and trying to make sure that everything I do is driven out of that creativity, has transformed the way I see a lot of things. I read somewhere that artists are the only people in society who are permitted to not grow up, who are allowed to carry on playing way past the time when everyone else has gone out and got a sensible haircut and a safe job, as if we are the guardians of the dreams everyone else has had to set aside. To see my life in terms of a privilege granted, in terms of something that is worthwhile both for my own sake and for others, has let me approach what I do much more lightly, with more sense of play about it.

Because, for me, creativity is so closely allied to the sensual side of life, the transformation of a room from a messy, dirty, cluttered space into an ordered, sensually appealing space is an act of creativity, and I am able to focus on the pleasure I get from a completed chore whilst I am doing it, and at the same time see the chore itself as a worthwhile act that feeds my own sense of wellbeing, and that of my family. Gardening is a creative pleasure, because there not only is the anticipation of the taste of the food, but there is also the visual appeal of a well-planned garden and the fragrances and textures of the different plants that combine to make a coherent whole.

In other areas of life, my creativity lies closer to the surface, but it is interesting for me to start seeing how it feeds off itself.

For example:

At the moment, I am in a ‘learning’ phase with my writing. I’m working on Holly Lisle’s ‘Survival School for Writers‘ and I’ve just come off the back of a month or so of administration, editing, short story submissions and critique group work – all these things are good and necessary, but they are not the same as writing – the actual process of sitting down and letting a story flood out onto the page. At the same time, I’m experiencing huge levels of doubt and insecurity about my writing, because of course the higher level of submissions and critiquing activity is leading to more criticism and rejection: whilst I can’t shake my belief that my *writing* is strong, it does all make me doubt my ability as a *storyteller*, but that’s not for discussion here.

What I have found is that, at the moment, I’m generating fewer story ideas than I would normally, but both the ideas and productivity in my textile arts are off the scale. The number and quality of ideas I’m getting is astonishing, and I’m almost resenting having to do paid work for others because it’s interfering with my desire to get on with the work I want to do for *me*.

I figure, in a pretty simplistic way, that my creativity runs at a pretty constant level, though perhaps slowly and steadily increasing the more I use it. What I figure as an extension from that thought is that because it’s not being channelled into writing, it’s diverting itself into textile projects and busying itself over there. This is a good thing – the last few weeks have generated some fantastic refashions and stock items, and some wonderful ideas for bigger projects that I want to try, as soon as I get a space in between commissions .

When I think back, and compare textile art idea generation currently against that in a period when I was heavily involved in a novel first draft, I can see that there’s a corresponding curtailment (I keep a separate diary/sketchbook for my textile work, everything that goes in there gets dated) in the volume and quality of ideas and desire that is generated for new textile experiments.

I’m quite taken with the idea that the apparently unrelenting rush of ideas swirling around me does have its own rhythm and balance, too.

What’s useful for me is to see that the creativity I bring into my writing and the creativity that drives my textile arts are not two separate elements that I draw on as and when needed, but part of the same whole, and that acknowledgement has been like fitting a couple of jigsaw puzzle pieces together and suddenly seeing them fuse together to make a single, complete, picture.

Seeing beyond that to how I can allow creativity into the other areas of my life and let them get absorbed into that same complete whole is something I get in flashes, like a puzzle piece I know fits somewhere here, but can’t quite join on yet. It will come, but it will take more time and more patience and more testing until I get there.

I am optimistic, though, that I *will* get there.