What value creativity? by Dawn Finch

I often use my posts on this blog as inspiration for the regular members' updates that I write with my CWIG Chair hat on. This time I'm flipping that by sharing one of those updates here in case anyone missed it. There is a current trend to diminish the work of creatives, and it's time we all remembered how essential our work really is.

With midsummer already becoming a memory we are past the mid-point of 2021. We are all hoping that the pandemic is moving to where we see it as an historic event of the past, but historic events often leave deep wounds that take much time to heal.

The pandemic has undoubtedly changed all of our lives, and for some those changes have been profound. I don’t mind admitting that it has had a devastating impact on my own writing career and on the day I gave evidence to the All Party Writers Group (APWG) for a report on Covid and creatives incomes, I had just left my new job mopping a kitchen floor for minimum wage. The personal impact of the pandemic is terrible, but the wider impact on diversity, inclusion and choice is catastrophic. There is so much to be done to better protect the creative industries and yet there remains this lingering idea that it doesn’t matter as much as some other industries. How wrong that is! The UK’s creative industries contribute almost £13 million to the UK economy every hour.

Think about that a minute. £13,000,000 every hour. That’s a huge amount of money and you are all part of that. For that industry to be truly effective and reflective of all, it’s going to need people from all walks of life, from all backgrounds and life experiences. That can’t happen if the only people who can afford to work in the creative industries are people who are already independently wealthy. The APWG report Supporting Writers Through the Covid-19 Crisis lays this all out with evidence given from many sectors.

It is a sobering read but a useful document for empowering creatives to have a deeper sense of just how important the work you do is. I’m sure I’m not alone in having that lingering feeling of imposter syndrome when I think, is a poem, or my piece of fiction really important in the grand scale of things? Yes, yes it is. In fact I’d argue that creativity has never been more important. Where would we have been during lockdown if we had not had the work of creatives to lift our spirits and distract us from the awfulness of what we were all going through? How would families have coped with the long stretch of home-schooling without the extensive outpouring of material from wonderful creatives? 

There is definitely a long road ahead of us (and possibly more lockdowns to come) but we should stand together with our heads held high and acknowledge the true impact and importance of our work. 

This blog is an edited extract from an article first published in May 2021 on the Society of Authors' CWIG pages.

Dawn Finch is the current chair of CWIG and is an author, cook, floor mopper, poet and former children's librarian