“I and Pangur Bán, my cat,

‘Tis a like task we are at;

Hunting mice is his delight,

Hunting words I sit all night …”

9th Century Irish rhyme ‘The Monk and his Cat.’ In an attempt to make you think that I have actually got a plan for this blog, Lily (my cat) will appear in most of the images metaphorically representing the logical part of your brain.

With no excuses for prevarication left I have finally started work on my book.  As usual I found the hardest part was finding the words to begin the first chapter.  I have overcome this difficulty with a neat little trick that I learnt when I was doing my degree in Creative Writing, namely don’t begin at the beginning.  Start writing half way through the book and in the middle of a chapter, page, paragraph or even sentence.  This will irritate the logical part of your brain so much that it will go and lie down in a darkened room thereby leaving your creativity unsupervised and ready to rock and roll.

So whereas my book (as yet untitled but when you consider it’s about integrating an ethos bound approach and multiple strands of creative practice, is that a surprise?) is going to start with an overview of what it means to have a)an ethos bound approach and b) multiple strands of creative practice before going on to explore how they can be integrated, I have not begun at this point for fear the excitement level would be too much for readers to bear.  Instead I have started writing the chapter which is all about working in isolation (and if you’ve been reading my blogs from their start in 2014, you’ll know that this is something which exercises my mind on a regular basis).

I approach writing with the same degree of preparation that I use for any other craft i.e. none at all: I don’t plan things out, develop a structure or even list key words and concepts.  I sit in front of the computer and as my lovely, talented Creative Writing lecturer Barrie Llewelyn (https://twitter.com/Arleta1?lang=en) used to describe it, ‘projectile vomit words onto the screen’.  This way of working, it turns out, is another irritant for the logical side of the brain and is likely to cause it to not only  lie down in a darkened room but possibly pull the blankets up over its head too so it can’t witness what’s going to happen next.

I’d got in touch with Barrie recently because a friend of mine had decided she wanted to start doing some creative writing but wasn’t sure about whether enrol on a course or join a writers’ group.  Now that she’s four sessions into her studying, writing about anything and everything and even worrying about whether you spell the term for a temporary table as ‘tressle’, ‘tressel’ or ‘trestle’ (it’s the last one if you’re a pedant), Carole is having to face up to the fact that being creative – particularly in an ethos bound approach – comes with its own set of challenges, one of which is – what’s the point  of it?  Like many of us, Carole is unlikely to be able to measure her literary success in monetary terms; no matter how much work she puts in or what she writes about her creative efforts may never be appreciated in the wider world.  So when Carole said to me “why do it if it’s not going to be published or sell?” I had to do a bit of thinking about the answer because I knew  it was going to fit in with one of the chapters of my book – although I haven’t decided which one yet.

This brings me to my niece Alexandra.  Back in 2005, at the start of the school holidays, Alexandra came to stay for a weekend thereby reducing the complexities of her mother’s childcare arrangements.  None of us expected that a 10 year old sophisticate from the city would adapt well to country living in a cottage with no central heating, no computer and not much television allowed.  Alexandra however proved us all wrong and finally had to be forced home after 5 weeks so that she could spend a couple of days with her parents and sisters before going back to school.  What, I can hear you all asking, has this got to do with creativity?  Well, two things actually.  The first is that without the distractions of technology, Alexandra indulged in what Einstein called ‘combinatory play’ and that led to her starting writing wonderful stories which entertained her and us all summer long.  I’ll be honest and say that I hadn’t heard of ‘combinatory play’ until I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s excellent book Big Magic but I find that I have been indulging in it all of my life.  Einstein considered that by doing unrelated things, the human brain has the capacity to think thoughts which would not otherwise jump the synaptic gap. We many not all get the results that he did when it comes to “the act of opening up one mental channel by dabbling in another”, but the next time that you’re struggling for an idea, it might be worth walking the dog, painting some shelves or doing some knitting to see what happens.  There could be a Nobel prize waiting for you.

The second thing that Alexandra did was play a game called ‘the government is banning…’  and it went along the lines of that if the government banned, say, films and you were allowed to watch just one more, which one would it be?  We spent the summer happily considering our final choices of books, music, food, holiday destinations and many more things.  A couple of days ago I was sitting in Carole’s kitchen listening to her wondering aloud whether she should continue her embryonic writing career.  Yes, she enjoyed it but was that enough?  How could she justify the time, the effort and the satisfaction if there was to be no quantifiable measure of success?  The seeds of this sort of angst about needing external validation are sown in childhood when moving from crawl to wobbly walk, clasping your bottom and shouting ‘wee!’ or showing Mum the scrawled drawings made on your first day at school  are held up as successes of such magnitude that without them, we think that the world may stop turning.  This angst lingers with ethos bound (i.e. not in it for the money) artists and writers longer than is reasonable or appropriate but luckily for Carole, for you and for the readers of my book when it finally makes it onto Amazon, I have the answer.

Also in Carole’s kitchen at the time was our other friend Annie.  Annie has the craft skills of a gnat (and won’t mind me saying so).

“Annie,” I said, “Answer this truthfully.  If the government banned creativity; hobbies like knitting, sewing, writing, painting, woodwork, gardening or cake decorating, would it bother you?”

“Nope,” replied Annie, hardly looking up from her magazine.

“Carole,” I said, “Answer this truthfully.  If the government banned creativity; hobbies like knitting, sewing, writing, painting, woodwork, gardening or cake decorating, would it bother you?”

“Yes,” said Carole, going pale and twitching slightly at the prospect, however unlikely.

It may have been a very small and unscientific experiment but it confirmed my belief that for people who are naturally creative, the creative process itself is worth as much as – if not more than – the outcome.  Presented with this Catch 22, the logical part of your brain may well wake up and think that the world is not such a random place after all.   This could prove very useful because things like time management, administration and organising your finances can very easily get in the way of all of the exciting stuff that creativity trawls along in its wake.

Having realised that this is as good a place as anywhere to try out the ideas for my book, in next month’s blog I’m going to consider other aspects of working in isolation like how you come up with ideas, motivate yourself to get started and then keep going.  Textile artists like Lisa Porch and Lydia Needle find inspiration for their work in unexpected places.  I dare say that if you print everything out month by month and staple the sheets together you’ll have the untitled book without having to part with a penny!

In the meantime, I leave the last words of this hunt to the monk and Pangur Bán:

“Practice every day has made

Pangur perfect in his trade;

I get wisdom day and night

Turning darkness into light.”