I’ve just been sorting through some old journals and I came upon this bit of writing from when I was a younger man and it gave me food for thought. This is what it said:
Wednesday August 21st 1996 14.10pm
Well here we go! Let’s see what happens. What I’m doing now I’ve been contemplating for a good few months now.
Colin died suddenly- just when I was beginning to appreciate the joys of a new confiding relationship. I then started reading Alan Bennett’s diaries and something he had written in the introduction about why he had started keeping a diary made me wonder if it would be good for me too.
I used to keep a book of ‘significant thoughts and ideas’ when I was at Uni’ intending to maintain this as a scrapbook charting the maturation of my character as time progressed. But then I got Glandular Fever and then became depressed for years and when I finally got round to wanting to write in my ‘thought scrap book’ all my previous entries seemed silly and embarrassing and irrelevant. And there was this massive chunk of life that had happened in the meantime, which had profoundly changed my outlook.
If the project had been to take a time-lapse sequence of a bud bursting into flower it was as if there had been a bud and then there was a blossom and I had somehow missed the photo opportunity. And now I didn’t see the point of taking the end-shot.
But then I started to get the urge to write. To put my thoughts on paper and have them published. I can’t think why. Vivid images would occur to me, which I would find myself mentally writing about and considering for inclusion in a brief article somewhere…..
Bangkok.
Amazing city! But why?
I’m trying to locate the feelings of combined disgust and fascination.
It’s a teratoma.
Teratomata are weirdly wonderful tumours. Most cancers are mundane lumps of glandular tissue. But a teratoma is a lump of pluripotential cells. When a surgeon cuts a tratoma open who knows what will be there- some hair, a couple of teeth, a finger nail.
The sprawling mess of roads and high-rise building work that is Bangkok invokes the imagery of a rapidly metastasizing malignancy. The traffic jams and petrol fumes are stagnant capillaries struggling to perfuse the centre, which is destined to choke on its own excrement.
Hardly thrilling that- but the temples with their glistening golden spires nestle between anonymous multi-storey international chain hotels. And then there are the Thais with their serenity, cheerful acceptance and friendliness. These are unexpected and wonderful elements of the malignantly destructive process that accompanies the growth of westernisation, tourism, and the market economy in this place ………
That kind of thing. Then I started surprising myself with the things I was thinking through. I was in the shower one morning and figured something out-I can’t remember what it was but it seemed important and new at the same time; probably something to do with gender and sexuality: the sort of thing that I would have mentioned to Colin and he would have seemed like he’d thought about it ages ago but now he’d moved on to higher things. Anyway, I felt sad that there was now nowhere for these ideas to go. They couldn’t get ‘earthed’!
I was on my bike one day just enjoying my own company and it happened again. Just thoughts about cycling. How, when the weather was fine, it was a superb way to exercise and pass the time. How I felt superior to the car travellers uncomfortable and sweaty in their metal boxes. How I smirked as I imagined the guys at the gym slogging away on their exercise bikes burning off energy but getting nothing out of it, going nowhere!
The thoughts started stringing themselves together. Pleading to be conveyed.
I had this idea for a regular slot in a magazine somewhere. “Peddling Thoughts” it would be called.
☺
It would then just be a question of getting out on the bike once or twice a week, remembering the ideas that had occurred to me, committing them to word processor and hey presto! One slickly executed career move. But could that happen? Certainly never whilst I wasn’t writing. So I have to start somewhere.
I’m starting here
After this entry I made a couple more entries and then nothing. Life crashed in around me. So why did it take me the best part of 13 years to get round to doing something about it? OK I’m not a professional journalist-yet! But I am now published as a columnist in a free monthly listings magazine. Isn’t that kind of heading in the right direction?
1 I suppose the biggest obstacle was not having the discipline of writing regularly. I cracked that one once I did Julia Cameron’s Artist's Way. Twelve weeks that changed my life! Almost two years ago I got into the habit of writing 3 pages every morning and I carried on the habit until very recently. There is something about just writing ‘stuff’, regardless of what it is, that gets rid of mental blockages and ‘cocks a snook’ at the internal critic which is always ready to get you to pack it all in before you even start.
2 The blog is a wonderful thing because after getting 18 months worth of getting 3 pages a day out of my system I could then allow myself the possibility of contributing regularly to a weekly ‘publication’ which would in my imagination be the column I was writing for that magazine.
3 Then after 10 weeks worth of entries I was ready to hawk it around. Knowing I had the discipline to produce something and that I could generate ideas without too much sweat
4 Gay Times politely declined. Then G Scene declined assuming that I didn’t live in Brighton. When I pointed out I did indeed live in Brighton I was taken on as a regular columnist!
So from good idea to reality in 4 easy steps. Eleven years to think about it. A year and a half to build up to it and then 3 months to get on with it and produce the work. And finally doing it for the past 3 months.
My advice to you then young men out there is to get on and do something creative now. There’s no excuse. Just do it and keep on doing it. Don’t wait. Don’t put it off. Don’t think that you can’t. Whatever you may have thought that you’d like to do. Just do it!!
Many years ago I started writing out of a compulsion to explain myself, not to anyone else, but to me.
ReplyDeleteI was close to the end of a relationship (as it turned out), unhappy, in a job that was rapidly disappearing before my eyes as the company I was with slipped into receivership.
Not a good time, except for creative writing.
With nothing else to write about, I started chronicling my life, my gay life, that is, in terms of snapshots from my sexual history. I never thought about getting published. The writing was for me alone.
I then 'got happy'. Out with the old boyfriend, in with the man who would later become my husband. My need to chronicle stopped. My writing tapered off.
A year and a half ago I started a blog. It wasn't a gay blog and, frankly, it wasn't particularly good when I started with it. It was clinical. Technical. Over time, more of me crept into it, but not enough. I started to feel that urge to write again, which is why I started 'One More Nine'.
The new blog has already brought me some highs and some lows. My hope is that it will inspire me to write more fiction rather than to simply continue documenting my life and my history.
I do believe that if you read and edit your own work rather than just thinking about doing it, you hone your craft. Your 'work' becomes better, sharper, more incisive.
"Just do it" should be every aspiring artist's motto.
Thought you might be interested in a discussion of 'crazymakers' in The Artists Way. Here is one person's position (others are responding at the link, bottom):
ReplyDeleteRe: Another form of thought control, re: The Artist's Way? Mon, March 31, 2008 - 6:02 PM
While i find what you have to say on this interesting, i *still* hold solid against her push towards so-called "protection by restriction"--that is, trying to get artists to internalize a value system where their fellow --more intense-- artists are to be divided from them via the classic thought control method of *manufacturing consent*; as the despised luminary, Noam Chomsky has articulated, and can be beneficial here to those to whom this sentiment is new.
The very idea of allegedly "wanting to use [others] as their ground, or stepping stone" is a war-stuck idea!
Who gets to say WHO is doing WHAT and WHEN?
When a well-financed, quickly "best selling" (everywhere!) publication can come in and TELL us all how to think about our fellow artists, there's something fishy; especially when they are labeling people with supposedly authoritative Truths. And as though such Truth is *all that possibly can be*.
As for "abuse in the end", no, such interaction may be INTENSE and FLAILING, even VIOLENT, but to reduce it simply to be "abuse" (for all time, thus "in the end" not "so far"), that is manipulative. That is the stuff of ideology (even as it masks itself in alleged science, i.e. the concept "abuse" being founded in *the social sciences*).
What we *ought* to be doing is seeing abusive behavior (and other flailing) as *symptoms* of truths that ought to be more inspiringly articulated!
But those who reward strategically-challenged authors with much, do not *want* us to see our powers in this way and others. So they finance and heavily "reward" fellow people like Julia Cameron, whom may not see what they do in their possibly wanting to authentically help. That's where i'm wondering of Julia is stuck in *internalized values*.
Anyway, there you are. i look forward to challenges on this!
Link (takes awhile to load, apparently):
http://artistsway.tribe.net/thread/d4f0a14f-305a-4ce5-8f58-4819f769b3dd
Hi there anonymous. Thanks for your comment. From my reading of the thread it looks like someone got a bee in their bonnet about JCs expression 'crazymakers' . My understanding of her use of this term was - a person with whom I was in relationship, who not only failed to facilitate my creative drive, but who undermined and sabotaged it through the generation of mess and drama incompatible with my artistic process. Once I recognised the crazymakers in my life I could give them a wide berth and not allow them to interfere with my power to manifest. Hey I checked out some of your work- Are you a fae too?
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