'Frozen'

A few weeks ago, I wrote 1000 words for the purposes of entering an Editor’s Brief on the website Ideas Tap. The brief was on the theme ‘Frozen’, and it resulted in a disarmingly honest (and perhaps overly-metaphorical!) piece of work. The closing date was the end of February, and I’m assuming nothing has come of the entry (the process was a touch clumsy, and I couldn’t be 100% confident that I’d done it correctly), so I thought it was time to share it here.

The invitation dropped onto the doormat, landing with a soft thud.

Well, okay, it arrived in my inbox. Silently, without fanfare or fuss, and lacking any of the romance you might associate with invitations delivered by the postman’s caring hand. Perhaps someone could create an e-mail service where the inbox is a doormat and an animated dog virtually fetches your new mail…

Or maybe not.

The invitation arrived just before Christmas and I accepted it graciously, without hesitation. The celebration was a month-and-a-half away and there was every reason to celebrate.

Six months on a library-run writing course left me with a mile-wide grin, thrilled at the experience of nurturing a project I hadn’t realised could exist within me. Thrilled at creating a living piece of work, enjoyed by others on the course. Thrilled at the regular sessions with other writers, learning from their experiences and teaching them something new.

So thrilled that I launched, breathless and unprepared, into creating a website to extend the project. My confidence said it could be successful, and that I should also agree to read some of my work at the impending celebration.

I accepted the invite eagerly, and came to wish I hadn’t.

January is a difficult month for a lot of people. Normally I’m not one of them, but January 2012 was different. It was the month that I lost the ability to cope with responsibilities at home. A new job became all-consuming. Satisfying, but all-consuming and therefore detrimental to the creative me.

The real me.

In feeling that I had to choose between career fulfilment and creative fulfilment, the project I took such joy in building the previous summer stalled. I wanted the project to blossom into something greater and it stalled and I couldn’t get it going again and I didn’t know how to deal with that and it left me exhausted.

Across 40 days-and-nights, I lost all sensation of being a writer. Lost any sensation that I could be a writer ever again.

* * *

I sat on the shore of a frozen lake, lacking the will or the energy to walk round to the other side. Confidence and inspiration waited there, but I only understood the path straight across. Mercifully, I also understood how brittle the ice was, and how I was apt to drown if I didn’t negotiate a sensible path. Occasionally I put a testing foot on the surface, but always withdrew at the last moment.

I didn’t want to drown.

My heart begged for what was on the other side. I’d tasted those riches but I clung to what I had on my side of the lake. I didn’t know how to get across and back again, didn’t understand how to follow the shoreline. It left me cold, shivering, creatively impotent. I was aware of it happening – painfully aware – but I didn’t want to drown.

February arrived. My foot fell through into the watery blackness and I wrote the most cowardly e-mail I’ve ever written. “I started a new job last month, and I might not be able to make the celebration event” was the half-truthful gist. Mysterious work commitments that I knew nobody would question, and that masked (convincingly?) a debilitating lack of the confidence I once discovered.

The freezing water was up to my thigh a few days later. “As I thought, I’m not going to be able to make Thursday night. I’m really sorry for any inconvenience.” I physically typed the words, but mentally wondered how I would breathe if I fell through the ice any further. I didn’t want to drown.

I missed the event. Missed the celebration I was so eager to attend just weeks before. I felt better for it, content in the numbness as I sat on the ice with my legs dangling in the water. I sat, and the ice sat with me. I sat through the fresh spring and the joyful summer and the lake remained inexplicably frozen.

* * *

The crisp autumn finally brought some warmth to the year. It spread through the water, gradually melting the frozen surface: the warmth of the people on my side of the lake, the warmth of home and work finally in harmony. I understood what it meant to be outside. What it meant to be alive, and to have a body that deserved better than I was giving it. The colder the changing seasons became again, the warmer I felt.

Drowning was no longer an option: I wanted to swim.

And swim I did. My mind awoke to the benefits of a healthy body and, bit-by-bit, I started to swim freely between the two sides of the lake. Not always in a straight line, sometimes following the shoreline, but always enjoying the warmth of the water. Enjoying feeling good about myself and my place in the world.

* * *

The invitation dropped onto the doormat, landing with a soft thud.

It was a metaphorical invitation, so it possessed all the tactile qualities I wanted to imagine. The invitation was to me, from me, asking if I would like to start writing again. Asking if I wanted to wake the project I’d left frozen in time for twelve months. And it wondered if I might have learnt something that I could share with other people.

I accepted, rationally and without haste. The project was well preserved and I had a better idea of how I could help it blossom. I wrote on my own, I wrote in the company of friends (a first). I wrote for hours on end, I wrote in 45 minute bursts snatched from the clutches of the day. I’d avoided drowning – just – and I didn’t want to risk it again. As long as I remembered how to swim…

After a mild Christmas, the UK froze into 2013 but the blood was flowing and I no longer felt the cold. I didn’t want to drown. I wanted, finally, to just write.

Gonna Get Myself Connected

Given the choice, most people would not elect to spend a cold Friday morning on an industrial estate just outside Wolverhampton.

I certainly had no choice in the matter, and so found myself walking across my employer’s manufacturing site with only a few inadequate layers to shield me from the wintry climes. A group of us were trekking across to another warehouse, and along the way my heart lifted as I spied an unwanted office desk sitting abandoned on a patch of unused ground.

It lifted because I take great joy in out-of-context things. They appeal to my creative side, to the part of me that knows these things wouldn’t be half as effective if they had been done deliberately. They appeal to the same creative side that wishes it had taken photos of all the abandoned shopping trolleys I saw around Macclesfield town centre once upon a time.

After seeing what needed seeing in the warehouse, I hung back from the group as we retraced our steps. I wanted to snap a quick picture of the desk, but without making a big fuss. Although I’ve become more open with people about my creativity since the turn of the year, I still don’t feel as though I can adequately explain it or ‘prove’ it (until such a time as I hopefully finish my cinema tour book, at least!). Thus, I still perceive the occasional ‘funny look’ whenever I indulge in a spot of creative talk.

The only person behind me was a friendly chap called Jim who has spent 30 years installing roofs and is a pro at bedding roofing felt in hot bitumen. The iPhone blurted out its mock-shutter noise and, with a chuckle and the slightest hint of sheepishness, I explained that I simply couldn’t resist taking a photo.

“Well, it’s abstract isn’t it?” said Jim, and merrily continued on his way.

In my last blog post, I mentioned some of the creative/business books I’ve been reading. I’m nearing the end of The Icarus Deception now, and one of Seth Godin’s central themes is the ‘connection economy’. The world is no longer about manufacturing goods for a faceless consumer population. It’s about making an emotional connection with like-minded people, however much of a minority those people might be.

As a result, I’ve started to look harder for connections I can make. I could make more, certainly, but these things take time and I’m also trying to see the connections that other people make, so that I might learn from them. The connection I made on that West Midlands industrial estate was only short-lived, but it was a connection nevertheless. And it was a perfect illustration of how they can be found in even the most unlikely places.

As an aside, one of the other appeals of this abandoned desk was the image it formed in my head: an image of Monty Python-era John Cleese sat behind it, wearing a dinner suit, and saying, “And now for something completely different.”

Mixing Business And Pleasure

I never expected to find myself reading business books.

Being creative, writing – what does any of it have to do with business? And yet, here I am. The last book I finished was Make Your Idea Matter by Bernadette Jiwa. Currently, I’m halfway through Seth Godin’s The Icarus Deception – the book I won from The Clear-Minded Creative.

As I’ve got to know Godin’s work a little more over the last few weeks, it has become clear just how much of an inspiration he is to many creative souls. And the crucial word in the title of Jiwa’s book is ‘Idea’.

In other words: these aren’t dry, weighty tomes full of traditional theory and called things like, 100 Common Mistakes Made By Top CEOs (I don’t know if that is a real book, by the way. I’m guessing it isn’t!). I’m not some wannabe industrialist who wants to bring the essence of Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War to his shop floor.

I’m just a guy who wants to write. And as interesting and inspirational as these books are, a small piece of me thinks I’m betraying myself by reading them. The old, It’s only the quality of your writing that counts reflex kicks in. It kicks and screams a bit; tells me I shouldn’t need to create a ‘brand’ around myself.

Meekly, I reply, “I’d have gone to work at the local newspaper if that was the case.”

In truth – and however much it pains my subconscious to say it – the only reason I’m starting to make any sort of progress is because I finally understood what ‘fruitless work’ meant to me. After four years with a blog jokingly entitled ‘The Repository of Fruitless Work’, suddenly I inverted the whole thing and worked out a way to use everything I’d done before as an example for others of how not to do things.

Finally, I had an idea of how to stop flying so low and aim a little higher. And now, I can write sentences like that because the likes of Godin have made sense of those thought processes.

In Make Your Idea Matter, Jiwa writes: “The best artists market to save their own souls, so they can keep doing the thing that matters. Marketing is part of your art now.”

I think I’ve gone some way to understanding and accepting that. And it’s why I’ve added an ‘About’ page to the blog. Because it’s part of my writing now.

Lunchtime in Aldi

“Can I have these as well?”

The man in front of me in the checkout queue handed over a couple of seed packets to be added to the total.

“Have you grown leeks before?” the Store Assistant asked.

“Yeah, they were really easy.”

“Hm,” came the disappointed response. “Mine were terrible. Tried growing asparagus as well, but that failed. My potatoes and carrots were mint.”

No wonder you couldn’t grow anything, I thought as I loaded my shopping on the conveyor, if you expected to get vegetables from herbs.

BADUM-TISH!

Education, Education, Education

A couple of lessons I’m learning as a customer, which carry greater meaning for me as a writer:

1.      Saying ‘coming soon’ too often gets tiresome.

Either set a date in stone, or say nothing until such time as you can.

2.      Typos and incorrect facts are REALLY annoying.

Maybe I feel this one more than most because a mild OCD exerts its influence on my life more heavily than it should. Nevertheless, imperfection becomes irritating, so I try to be meticulous about spelling in my own work.

Of course, where facts are concerned, an incorrect one is only spottable if you know better than what is written. There will always be someone who knows better, however. Someone who genuinely knows better, as opposed to someone being argumentative for the sake of it.

I know there have been occasions where I’ve written a statement based on being 75% sure (at best) that it’s correct. Now the realisation has struck that I need to be more meticulous, rather than making vague pronouncements that decrease the probability of being taken seriously.