Creativity For The Overachiever - Kelly McCaughrain

The general consensus seems to be that all this free time is your opportunity to take up a new and creative hobby.

 

Not one to argue, I’ve been sketching and messing about with watercolours. And I’ve made several observations about people’s reactions to this.

1. ‘Oooh, you could illustrate your own books!’

No, I couldn’t. I have no artistic training and even less ability.

2. No, you’re really good! These are really good!

You don’t have to console me because, even if they were good (they're not), I’m doing this for relaxation, why does everything we do have to be monetized? It’s just fun, you should give it a go.

3. Oh no, I’d find it discouraging. I wouldn’t be good enough.

But that’s exactly my point. It's about relaxation and fun, not being good at it or being better than anyone else. You don’t even have to show anyone.

4. But then why bother?

I feel like we’re going round in circles here. I’m going to pour some more gin.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered this. I spend my working life trying to create opportunities for kids to be creative, and a big part of that message is ‘Just jump in! Write whatever you want! It’s about self-expression, not perfection!’ etc. And the adults are fully on board with that. When it comes to kids. But somehow we think it doesn’t apply to adults.

 

For example, my husband and his mates regularly get together (pre-Covid) to write songs. They might even get organized enough to play an actual gig someday. When one of them told a friend about this, the friend laughed and said, with complete incredulity, ‘But you’re like forty…’

I.e., you’re too old to be a popstar, therefore you’re never going to make a career of this, therefore why are you doing it?

Would you say that to a kid? ‘Listen, sweetheart. It’s really unlikely that you’re ever going to be Taylor Swift so I don’t think you should get a guitar for Christmas/take piano lessons/sing in the shower anymore, OK?’ Or to an adult who nervously wandered into your writing workshop and wasn't much good at writing? No. Because you know they're getting so much more out of it than a career path.

Hubby and his band all have proper jobs and sensible haircuts, they just happen to like music. Why do we find that so strange? Actually this is exactly the reason I hid my writing from everyone right up until the moment it became a career opportunity.

We’re always banging on about schools cutting funding for creative subjects, because we know creativity is so good for development and mental health. So why do we do we think adults can’t do creative things unless we’re brilliant at them in some sort of professional capacity or intend to make them a career? Apparently women are especially prone to avoiding things they're not good at because we're raised to be 'perfect' rather than 'brave' so that probably compounds the issue for us.

In fact I took up sketching precisely because it’s an area I have zero ambitions in. I have very few hobbies and activities that don’t relate to writing/reading and so they always feel a little like ‘work’. I do believe that, wonderful as publishing a book is, turning your creative outlet into paid work changes the nature of it and leaves you needing a new creative outlet.

Anyway, point is, it doesn’t matter if my sketching is rubbish. But it takes a surprising amount of mental reprograming to convince even yourself of that never mind everyone else. I found Grayson Perry’s Art Club on Channel 4 quite helpful. He was doing portraits and he said something about ‘resemblance’ not being the point. I know nothing at all about art so I found that quite mind-blowing. I’d been copying models I found online and trying to get them perfect and criticising myself when a head was too big or an arm too long or the expression not quite right. Hands are a nightmare!

But when I give someone a writing prompt, the first thing I always say is, ‘this is just for inspiration, it’s just a jumping off point, see where it takes you.’ If someone was trying to respond to a writing exercise like it was a set of military instructions I doubt they’d come up with anything good. Why should it be different for drawing? After all, we have photocopiers for that. Photocopiers are not artists precisely because they can't do anything but resemblance. 

 

Of course professional artists need to be able to do both, but my point is, we don't have to be professionals and it's a lot more fun when you stop caring about how good you are. I don't find drawing relaxing because it's easy (it's not), I find it relaxing because it's completely absorbing, and that's all I want from it.

 

I think we even know this. It's why we waste hours playing whatever time-suck game is on our phones. Because you don't have to be good at Candy Crush, and that makes it quite relaxing. If we could feel the same way about painting or music or dance we could get our heads out of our phones and be having a lot more fun.

So I stopped worrying about resemblance and just started using models as inspiration. They might not have the same expression, but that’s because they’re not those people, they’re my people. And I actually like them more for that.

Now I’m trying to convince my mum to give it a go too. Ironically, she’s a much better artist than me but she’s resisting because she thinks she’s not good enough at it. Good enough for whom, I have no idea. So she's watching telly instead.

So what are you doing to be creative during lockdown? Do you have a hobby you suck at but love anyway? How do people react to it and do you put pressure on yourself to be ‘good’ at it? I’d love to hear what other people think about this. 

Kelly McCaughrain is the author of the Children's Books Ireland Book of the Year,

Flying Tips for Flightless Birds. 

She is the Children's Writing Fellow for Northern Ireland #CWFNI

She also blogs at The Blank Page

@KMcCaughrain

HAVE A HAPPY NEW YEAR! from Penny Dolan

Hello again, at the start of another New Year!

Yesterday, home after family travels, I skipped sociability and spent the afternoon simply tidying my desk: a most wonderfully satisfying activity. I removed a set of seasonal shopping receipts, discarded the now-cryptic notes to self, popped different categories of pen into their own pots and stuck together the remnants of post-it pads. I even gathered several scrunched and scribbled notes into a real-world folder marked “Possible Blog Ideas???”

Several fireworks and peals of bells later, I considered today’s date – the first day of the first month of the new year, ta da! – and suddenly my bright golden glow of smugness faded.  I realised I had no idea what to write for my post today.

I could explain that my big desk-clearing was also a way of making space in my head for some work I need to do. Two useful tasks in one!

I could mention a Christmas present from a well-wisher: a good-quality, carry-around-able notebook obtained from a bespoke bookbinder, which has these rather pointed words on the cover:

                              SHE BELIEVED SHE COULD

                              SO SHE DID.

Hmmm. Should this be my mantra for 2019?

I could flick through the pages of two more book gifts: RAVILIOUS & CO: THE PATTERN OF FRIENDSHIP by Andy Friend or THE SECRET LIVES OF COLOUR by Kassia St Clair, which will remind me that art – in all its forms – is calming and inspiring to me, and that I need to follow those paths more readily during the months ahead, and also that non-fiction – in all its forms - can be more helpful middle-of-the-night reading for insomniacs than compelling fiction. Or twitter. Or Mick Herron’s Slough House series . . .

Or I could write about my new diary.

Now, I must admit that I was feeling daunted and depressed by the flurry of book publicity and prizes hanging like bunting across media all through the last months of 2018. Good luck to them all, truly, I thought, although my confidence and voice shrank a little more and my horrible cold continued for another week.

So when I saw the PERPETUAL DISAPPOINTMENTS DIARY, my heart lifted, because the thing has been designed to bolster the naturally pessimistic. The journal might look rather like those Moleskines diaries used by the great achievers and explorers, but it definitely isn’t aimed at success.

For example, the On this Day section lists includes events such as  

Edward Munch inspired to paint the Scream 22 January 1892 

or M25 Orbital Road completed in UK 29 October 1986  

or Mary Celeste sets sail 7 November 1872.

The inspirational Quote for the Week roams from 

Tomorrow is just another day

to It’s no use sobbing uncontrollably over spilt milk

or Burn that bridge when you come to it.

There are pages at the end too, to enter your details of  

Real Enemies,

or Notes Towards a Dull Novel, 

or Notes Towards an Unnecessary Verse Drama,

or Ideas You’ll Never Follow Up and more.

Oh, how I know this place! I thought. Although this rather negative angle might not appeal to you, by heavens, it does cheer up my own inner Eeyore!

I intend to keep my Disappointments Diary as a quiet and secret place for recording those things I should note – word count, progress of projects, daily walks, and so on – on the basis that anything at all hopeful that I write down will feel good against that delightfully dark mood and help me feel better.

I could write about all these odd things, I decided, and now . . . 

I find my first post of the year is writ!

However, if my entry seems sad or dark, tomorrow you’ll be able to enjoy Dianne Hofmeyer’s bright and lovely post for Awfully Big Blog Adventure.

Do call in!

Meanwhile, in the most cheerful and hopeful way, I hope you have a very Happy New Year, with good wishes for you and your year ahead. Despite – you know, just everything - I hope you have a good 2019, with good reading and good words when you need them. 

Penny Dolan

Words and Pictures – Black History Month, by Sophia Bennett

There’s one thing that always scares me about writing a new book – and it’s what I always end up enjoying the most: research. 

This summer I’ve been writing a non-fiction book for teens about female artists. Together with my editor we’ve put together a list that includes women I didn’t know, as well as those I’ve admired for years. One of the artists I’d only vaguely heard about, Yayoi Kusama from Japan, turns out to be the most popular contemporary artist in the world! She's an inspiration. 

Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013 by Yayoi Kusama

This time last year I worked with a writer who told me that she always felt disheartened when Black History Month came along, and her children would come home from school with stories of the same few trailblazers year after year. Not that Rosa Parks and Mary Seacole aren’t deeply inspirational – but what about all the other black people in history? Where are they? 

I often think back to that conversation. Above all, I want children to read for pleasure, as I did, but in a perfect world I want them to learn things from books too. To have facts and feelings at their fingertips. To be amazed by the world, and as the French say, 'engagé'. This summer of research has given me a host of new faces and stories to suggest to teachers looking for ideas this October.  

Did you know that the first professional African-American sculptor was a woman called Edmonia Lewis, who came of age at the time of the Civil War? In 1865, aged just 20, she went to Rome and worked in the studio once used by Antonio Canova. She became a Neoclassical sculptor with an international reputation, who's been celebrated by Google. 

Edmonia Lewis

Here in the UK, I’ve learned that the black arts movement of the 1980s was brought about in part because the young black people leaving art school at the time didn’t see themselves reflected in society – except in newspaper images about crime. They were perceived as ‘exotic’ and wanted to express what it was like to be in their skin, and for that to be ordinary. Their art doesn’t ‘describe’, as we do, it is. You have to stand in front of it for a long time and let it sink in to you, until you feel like you're inside it, looking out. 

She Ain't Holding Them Up, She's Holding On (Some English Rose) 1985 by Sonia Boyce

In researching artists like Sonia Boyce and Lubaina Himid – both professors now – I’ve been discovering not only what it was like to be black in London in those days, but also about the other black lives they have brought to life, like slaves in European royal courts depicted by painted wooden cut-outs by Himid. They stand on the floor, so we can literally walk among images of past black lives and wonder who these people were and what they were thinking. 

Naming the Money, 2004 by Lubaina Himid

A great artist can jog us into seeing the world differently. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye paints beautiful, timeless oil portraits of people from her imagination. Like her, most of them have black skin, but what is most interesting about them is their expression, and the vivid interior life she suggests with a few brushstrokes. She makes skin colour irrelevant – but at the same time her paintings can’t help highlighting the absence of other black faces in the history of Western portraiture. She would be a wonderful role model, I think, for my friend’s children. 

Any Number of Preoccupations, 2010 by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

These are just some of the wonderful women I’ve been discovering. There are many more. You can go and see some of their work at Tate. Soon, Boyce’s current project for Crossrail will be finished at the Royal Docks, and at 1.8 km long, it will be the longest artwork ever seen in the UK! 

The Tate has more ideas for things to go and see in October, if you're celebrating Black History Month. 

And I know more keenly than ever that art generally is eternally rich with resources for us writers to draw on, as soon as we start to look. A picture is worth a thousand words, after all. 

The Question of Money by Chitra Soundar

 I’m still wrapping up the last of the World Book Day events across the whole month. I visit primary schools and spend time with children across Reception to Y5.

This year when I was visiting a school, I had two Q&A sessions with two Y4 classes that had read my books as part of their lessons. The usual questions came up:

a)    How old are you?

b)    Did you come from India to our school today?

c)     Where do you get your ideas from?

Then came the question that I get once every 5-6 schools, “Do you make a lot of money?”

This boy was immediately cut short by another one who said, “That’s not a proper question to ask.”

 Normally I would smile, and say not a lot and tell them I do my own dishes, took the tube to their school etc.

But I wanted to answer this time (and I’ve been since that day, answering this question seriously).

Doing what I love - 2016

A job to support myself while writing - 2004

I explained how sometimes you might have to do your art alongside other things. I explained how difficult it can be sometimes and how many writers do have another job. I iterated to them a few times that do not give up on writing or any other artistic pursuit because you can’t make a lot of money. There will always be a way to find an opportunity or avenue if you work hard at it. I told them it was hard work but it was also worth it because I enjoy what I do.

The vigorous nod of heads and big smiles told me they would want to become writers and of course they’d have to become engineers, doctors, teachers, firemen, accountants as well. That is fine, I am one of those people who never gave up writing through my life as a teacher and then as a bookworm stuck in corporate plumbing.

Since then whenever the question of money comes up in Junior School I’ve not been evasive or even embarrassed about how little we make. The school is not the place to discuss what Nicola Solomon has written about in last week’s The Bookseller.

But then I do get a series of questions, which after discussions with fellow authors, I’ve concluded has come from celebrity publishing thrust under their noses.

a)    Do you get fans coming up to you in supermarkets?

b)    Do you have a limo?

c)     Are you a celebrity?

d)    Are you famous?

e)    Do you live in a castle?

f)      Do you have a Ferrari?

And that I worry about. When the majority of books they see in a WBD line-up or in bookshops are from celebrities on TV, then it does create an expectation that only celebrities write books or if you write books, you must be a celebrity.

I’m wondering if a part of my presentation now should include photos of me cleaning the house, taking the rubbish out and being squished in a bus with my WBD gig bag to bring the glamour of being a writer down.

I do take my notebooks into schools and then I show them the ones that I’ve been writing for years without any success. When they see my Work in Progress scrap-books and research notes, my multiple drafts of the same story, they hopefully will realise hard work will get the books on the shelves. 

If I also get a TV show before or after, fantastic! I’d love to buy that Ferrari.  

While writing this blog, I wanted to provide some resources for those young people who are interested in arts. Here are a few. If you are sharing this with young people in your life, please do research them thoroughly before taking it further.

YPIA - Young People in Arts - https://www.ypia.co.uk/about-us
The Roundhouse Trust - http://www.roundhouse.org.uk/about-us/our-work-with-young-people/

Impact Arts - Cashback to the Future - https://www.impactarts.co.uk/content/our-work-young-holiday/

And finally a teenager's view on how to engage young people in the arts - https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/article/how-get-young-people-interested-arts

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Chitra Soundar never knew arts was an option as a teenager. She graduated from university with a degree in commerce and accountancy and a diploma in computer science. As an adult, while working 12-hour shifts, she pursued her writing and she's hoping the day will come when she didn't have to work in a corporate firm for sustaining her arts. Follow her on Twitter @csoundar and on Instagram @chitrasoundar