The Creative Identity

Sculpting The Writing

Sometimes I sit here trying to coax words to come out and play. I think of them wafting in the wind, high above the clouds, like Platonic ideas separated from our world and yet forever intertwined with it. I've always thought of words as being available, ready and willing to be strung along, if only the writer allows himself to become receptive to their quiet message of possibility and creativity. Sit still and they will drift from the clouds to your page. That's what I tell myself when I feel like I am getting nowhere. In this sense writing is no different from all other art forms; we have the tools, we should just use them. Words are to a writer what colours are to a painter, aren't they? When I think of the similitude between expectant canvas and expectant page, glaring as it may appear, I feel that this idea of 'blankness to fill', with words or colours, doesn't quite pay justice to the inherent difficulty of creating, of moving from one state of matter (blank, emptiness, nothingness) to another (colour, story, painting). But is the page really blank? Aren't words in existence regardless of my putting them on the page? What happens when I decide to inject them with a specific type of life on my page? Many years ago I read that Michelangelo detested oil painting. He saw landscape painting as 'a vague and deceitful sketch, a game for children and uneducated men' and portraiture as 'a... Read more →

I'm A Versatile Blogger

You know when you tell yourself that awards, like visible panty lines and really bad perms, only ever happen to 'other people'? Yeah, right. Imagine my surprise last week when Roz dropped me a line to tell me that she had given me The Versatile Blogger award at her online digs! Very fab, no? Now about that VPL and perm... Thank and link back to the person who gave you the award: thank you Roz! Rock on, with or without boots! Share seven things about yourself... 1- I am very accomplished in the kitchen, especially insofar as cakes and chocolate are concerned. One of my latest creations. 2- I love animals. They are a never-ending source of joy and worry. My darling dog William at bath-time, taken yesterday. 3- I adore autumn-winter. As I struggle through the heat wave that currently afflicts my parts of England, I torture myself by leafing through images of Chicago, which I last visited in January 2008. It was a brisk -25C, the sky was the deepest cobalt blue I had ever seen and the pound was worth twice against the dollar. I returned with armfuls of Marc Jacobs from the Nieman Marcus sale and now I wish I had the DeLorean so that I could zip back by the lake covered in lumps of ice as big as me, and down the Magnificent Mile with a spanking new AmEx. Chicago in winter 2008. Super-mega-massive bliss. 4- I'm a vampire expert which is really no... Read more →

Try This

I would say that, as a creator, the main part of my work consists of struggling against reality. -Jean Giono- Finally, I've dragged myself to Friday. This has been a very awkward week for me. I am usually on top of things, ticking things off my lists and making progress, however slowly it may seem to take place on occasion. But this week, boy, has it been a struggle! Various gurus, from marketing to writing, tell you that you must stop making lists and must act on them. Yes, sure, I agree, but I think that there is great value in listing when all you can bring yourself to do is, in fact, just that. So I have filled my notebooks with next steps and now I don't feel too awful (if I discount the number of things I should do between now and the end of today and between the end of today and the end of tomorrow). And now I've thought of a little writing prompt that turns a list on its head. If, like me, you still have the summer blues, try this: List three actions you never do which would potentially improve your writing output. Can you think of any? Can you think of one at least? Why do you think it would help you? Read more →

Summer Blues

Weather too good to do any work? I deeply dislike summer. I don't know whether it's the hay fever, the never-ending light, the insects or what else that annoys me the most, but the upshot is always the same: when summer in England looks like a regular summer in other parts of the world, I am deflated, flat, off colour and operate at a glacial pace. It's been sunny and dry and bright for a good two weeks (a bit unheard of, frankly) and I am in desperate need of a weather-related shift. Last week I worked at full speed at the uni but since Monday I feel like I am walking in freshly-laid tar. I guess that this morning these few words may be more for me than for you dear reader, but if you also struggle with the mere idea of working when outside it all looks so frigging holiday-like, you may find some words of comfort for your struggles. Because I do have work to do, regardless of how poorly the good weather makes me feel, I thought that stringing together a little list would help. If you too are feeling the summer blues, try these: Don't start from the most difficult task first! When you feel the blues, gentle is best. This is the reason why I am writing this piece now, instead of updating the proposal I am currently working on. Write 200 words about feeling blah. Yes, you heard, 200 little words about feeling... Read more →

Fallen Through The Cracks

One-twentieth of the shelves I worked through If you follow my Twitter stream, you may have noticed that last week I was particularly quiet, only surfacing occasionally to report on how good the weather was in Nottingham. I was working at the university for an academic friend of mine, cataloguing thousands and thousands and thousands of books at his office and then his house. This process alone took me four days, but on Thursday I took a break and worked with my favourite poet instead, editing her work in preparation for the selection that will go in the book. It's not the first time that I am welcomed in offices and houses to have a good snoop around books. The upshot of all of this dust inhaling is that I always have a good flick of the most interesting volumes and that I exist on a healthy diet of coffee and sweets provided by my hosts. As I was scanning and typing (and I was using this software which is fantastic), my mind hopped and skipped through my entire adult life, juggling flashbacks from my own uni days to the present, wondering about the choices I took and the ones that were taken on my behalf. As I was working in my friend's office, the odd colleague came and went, mostly barely acknowledging my presence at the desk, for I obviously looked like nothing other than a lowly filing assistant and as all lowly filing assistants I was probably not... Read more →