Let it Flow - Fear & Creativity

It’s 13.10 on a Thursday and I’ve just topped up my glass of red. It’s Ok because I’m in the South of France on a self imposed writers’ retreat so it would literally be rude and counter productive not to. That’s what kind of person I am these days, literary and pretentious. I teach yoga too and I really like wine  so…I can’t be pinned down. It’s also ok because it’s getting hot and I’ll jump in the sea shortly, that’ll wake me the fuck up.

I’ve come here with my mate Liz, she’s working on a novel. We need the space to be creative and bohemian and cool so we rented this Air B n B which is just gorgeous and the sea is literally across the road. And when I say road, I mean the M6. We can just about make out the soothing sounds of the Mediterranean lapping away at the shore, beneath the roar of dozens of HGVs en route to Italy.

Manchester knocked the wind out of my sails recently. I finished Emergency Door Release, my one woman show, about three months ago. That was a crazy thing and it’s been whirlwind ever since. Ever want to scare the living shit out of yourself? Write a 50 minute ‘play’ and book the space to perform it, don’t finish writing it a week before and finish learning it the day before. Invite everyone you’ve ever met and completely dry on the first night with your Mum and several reviewers a few feet away. That’ll give you the grey hairs you’ve been dreading. It was one of the most intense and surreal experiences of my life, I highly recommend it to anyone. The project took about five months from inception to completion and was mostly borne from a need to shift a malaise I’d been struggling with after the end of several painful relationship breakdowns. I was very stuck in a lot of areas of my life so I looked at my bucket list and picked the solo show knowing it’d be relatively cheap and accessible and that I needed to spend the creative energy that was manifesting in a quiet self loathing. I’d written a couple of things that’d been performed in Salford and it did wonders for my confidence. And that’s all this shit is, confidence building. If you’re reading this thinking I’d love to write and create a show, solo or otherwise, then do it. You probably won’t die and you’ll learn a fuck ton about yourself and other things in life, and some argue that’s the only reason we’re here.

Back to this little trip then, I decided I was going to enter (and no doubt win) the Bruntwood prize earlier this year with my debut full length play and worked (pretty) hard finishing off almost 60 pages of what started out as a response to a BBC Writers’ room submission call out about…well, I can’t even remember now but it gave me a massive kick up the arse to produce something which turned into a story about a mother and her daughter’s relationship in the aftermath of environmental collapse. Topical and cathartic. So I’ve finished a loose draft and am here with no distractions (apart from my addiction of Instagram and feelings of low self esteem every time my pictures fail to get likes, which we all know is linked to feelings of self-doubt in my ability to produce and finish a full length play worthy of a paying audience. Humans; ain't we just insane.)

So yeah. The creative process was as painful as ever and it’s easier for me to bang out this self-negating blog post than it is to sit steadily and re-draft my ‘masterpiece’. Which by the way didn’t even get long-listed for Bruntwood. I know, I was as surprised as you are.

We’re all artists. Some of us allow the flow more easily than others, sometimes wine helps. Also it helps me feel like a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and you know, whatever gets you in the mood.

If you’re thinking of writing or creating something yourself but haven’t done anything about it, know this, none of it is easy, and it’s taken me years to work up the courage to even try. The reason I’ve had to come away from ‘Life’ is because it’s too damn demanding, and I don’t even have kids. So give yourself a break, break open the Malbec (unless your in recovery then please, put the Malbec down…) and breathe. 

Open the laptop, pick up the paintbrush, pluck the guitar string and begin.

One day you could be here, in Marseille, covered in mosquito bites, distracting yourself from the work you came here for, gazing out to sea, across the busiest main road in the South of France.