So this book of poetry I’m featured in is an actual book somewhere. It exists as a tangible object. It went from an idea to a thing… I guess that is what creation is. I get a bit of a buzz out of it to be honest.

I was approached about submitting stuff for an earlier book. And I stumbled. I hadn’t written anything in ages and it just all seemed too hard. Plus even though I was contacted there was no guarantee that I would be accepted. It felt like I was setting myself up to be rejected and my skin was much too thin.

But there was another opportunity and I wrote a few things and I raided my archives for the rest. I was surprised then too because writing was an alchemy I thought I had long lost the secret to.

The muse stopped showing up, and I stopped showing up and over time it just seemed easier. Easier to not show up. Easier to not write. Easier to watch TV. Easier to fill my days with minutiae and pretend writing was never something I was interested in.

There are few things as truly soul destroying as pretending to be “fine” when you’re not, as pretending that something (or someone) important to you actually isn’t. It is a betrayal of the self and you probably won’t even realise why you feel so crummy because you haven’t admitted there’s a problem (you’re a blocked writer). And as the old adage goes admitting you have a problem is the first step in solving it. Perhaps writing about it is the second.

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I distinctly recall reading something in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way about concentrating on the quantity and leaving the ‘quality’ to God. Well today I’ve been doing that. The quality is fairly uninspiring but there’s something nice – even comforting – about about just churning things out and seeing what happens. And it gives me an opportunity to real play with my materials.

Today I’ve been using Watercolor Postcards and Derwent Inktense water soluble pencils.

Assorted Postcards

There’s something quite liberating about drawing on surfaces as small as postcards. You can do a lot of them in a short period of time. If the one you’re working on doesn’t work out, move on to another.

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It was my 29th birthday yesterday. I’ve never been a ‘bucket list’ kind of guy but somehow the prospect of being one year off thirty made me acutely aware of all the things I haven’t done. The most random things too, like “I’ve never drank sake.”

I drove down the coast to Huskisson determined to do something different for my birthday. It was exactly what I needed too. The minute I stepped out of the car I was hit by the strong salty scent of the sea. Something about it just recharged my circuits. I guess I’ve lived near the sea for most of my life, there’s a connection there. I remember driving towards Canberra once (which is quite inland) and having this strange sense that something was wrong. It occurred to me that the thing I found so disconcerting was that there were no seagulls in the park I was in.

I had a custard and cream cannelloni and coffee for morning tea, and later salt and pepper squid for lunch. But by far the best thing was just walking along the beach – the glorious white sand – and taking in all the sights and sounds. I was grinning like a lunatic. I struggle to remember the last time I was so genuinely excited to be somewhere.

I took a photograph of myself on my birthday on Dailybooth and am working on a painting based on it. It’s a bit crude at the moment but it’s good to be painting again. Especially to be painting with acrylics again. The watercolours have been doing my head in, so it’s nice to return to something I know a little about.

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Well one of my new year’s resolutions came to past, I found my copy of The Artist’s Way. (It was hiding in a enclosed compartment on my bookshelf.) I know I talk about this book a lot but it is like a personal oracle to me. I can open to any page at random and find something that seems to help. Yesterday I came to a section on fear.

Julia Cameron writes:

Fear is the true name for what ails the blocked artist. It may be fear of failure or fear of success. Most frequently, it is fear of abandonment. This fear has roots in childhood reality. Most blocked artists tried to become artists against either their parents’ good wishes or their parents’ good judgment. For a youngster this is quite a conflict. To go squarely against your parents’ values means you’d better know what you’re doing. You’d better not just be an artist. You better be a great artist if you’re going to hurt your parents so much….

I want to hesitate for a moment to say that (as far as I am aware) my parents are mostly supportive of my various endeavours. But I have always had this sense that I am going against the grain. And that sense has often made me really driven, hopeful that if I’m brilliant in one area of life perhaps it will make up for my limitations in other parts.

But… it means I need a lot of support and feedback and encouragement. I tend to assume if I don’t get positive feedback that the work is terrible. [And there's clearly a difference between getting negative feedback and getting no feedback.] I constantly feel like the only way I can justify doing anything is to do it perfectly – which is difficult enough for seasoned artists, let alone the humble beginner I am.

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Today I am cleaning up. I am taking stock – in the most literal sense. I’ve concluded I have enough stationery supplies to last several lifetimes. I’ll have to reign myself in the next time I swing by OfficeWorks…

One of the things I came across in my travels was a book full of morning pages from earlier in the year. It’s funny I’ve never been the kind of person to keep a diary. The idea of recording the minutiae of my every day existence seems like an exercise in tedium (for the writer) that would lead to boredom (for the reader). But I am impressed by the contents of the morning pages I discovered because they’re not mindless lists of mundane tasks so much as explorations of my own most inner thoughts. I joke sometimes that I don’t know what I think until I’ve written it done and read it back, but an element of that is true. You need an opportunity to reflect and sometimes you reflect on the page. That’s the point of the exercise.

Clearly there’s a difference between ‘filling the well’ and filling the space. Part of my current efforts are really about cutting back on the things I own, trying to get back to a functional minimalism. Although I am enjoying painting I am sort of running out of space and am wondering how (and where) to store completed canvases and canvas boards. I’ve sort of stacked them together but even this is problematic since they haven’t been sprayed with fixative agent. (Some of the canvas boards – especially those with sculptural elements or dense layers of paint – can actually stick together, ocassionally ruining one or more pieces of work.) I feel like I need more room to work on my art but I have no idea where or how to arrange that either.

I’m trying to add some individual pieces of flair to the room too. I drink a lot of loose leaf jasmine green tea and the tins the tea come in are absolutely beautiful. I decided to use one to hold some of my ever growing collection of pencils. I also got a notebook printed up with a picture of a sea bird (that I had taken some years ago) on it. Sometimes it’s the small but personally meaningful things that help you take pride in your work.

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In The Artist’s Way Julia Cameron writes:

Your [creative] block doesn’t want you to see that. Its whole plan of attack is to make you irrationally afraid of some dire outcome you are too embarrassed to even mention. You know rationally that writing or painting shouldn’t be put off because of your silly fear, but because it is a silly fear, you don’t air it and the block stays intact. In this way, “You’re a bad speller” successfully overrides all computer spelling programs. You know it’s dumb to worry about spelling… so you don’t mention it. And since you don’t, it continues to block you from finding a solution.

The things you don’t acknowledge tend to make you crazy, even outside of artistic endeavours. They seem to linger somewhere in the back of your psyche growing ever louder the more you pretend they don’t exist.

I discovered the most extraordinary book today. To be honest I didn’t quite grasp what it was when I first picked it up, or even when I bought it. Infact I’m still grappling with it. What impressed me was the imagery, the sketches, the paintings, the prose that fills it’s pages. This book is titled, “The Doyle Diary: The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery.” Let me quote from the inside cover to give you some sense of what it is exactly.

“Keep steadily in view that this Book is ascribed wholly to the produce of a MADMAN. Whereabouts would you say was the deficiency of Intellect? or depraved taste? If in the whole Book you can find a single evidence of either, mark it and record it against me.”

It is difficult to imagine a more poignant or disturbing opening to the bizarre and hauntingly beautiful sketchbook diary of Charles Altamont Doyle, father of Arthur Conan Doyle. The time of writing was 1889; the place, the dreary confines of “Sunnyside,” as Doyle called it, part of the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum in Scotland, where the 57-year-old Doyle, epileptic and ailing, was interned – “imprisoned,” he says, “under the most depressing restrictions.”

I don’t know if Charles Altamont Doyle was a mad man, though I wouldn’t guess it from looking at his work. There were fantastical creatures and fantasy themes, and even a preoccupation with mortality, but all in all the work seems to be quite thoughtful. In fact in places there appears to be a rich sense of humour. Over the course of a two page spread there are a collection of self-portraits. On the left page there are two self portraits. The first looks like a drowned rat, as though he had been caught out in the throes of a heavy rain. The second portrait features the same man though his hair and beard are sticking up on end. The caption reads, “I believe this is technically known as a ‘pick-me-up.’” Perhaps more interesting is the caption that is written across both pages, “These two pages induced by a tremendous headach[e].”

I’ve felt like something of a mad man lately myself. Life has felt like something that ‘happens’ to me almost despite my own actions or involvement. And yes, frankly, it often looks quite crazy too. One night when I was particularly despondent over a slew of “Your job application was unsuccessful” responses I took a page of newspaper classifieds and fashioned a dunce hat out of it. Because that was how I felt, and those job ads seemed to encapsulate the whole messy problematic job search process. I was toying with the idea of using those newspaper ads in an artwork but it didn’t come together. The next thing I knew I was wearing this dunce’s cap.

In a way I never expected, it did actually make me feel better. Because even though it wasn’t a particularly sophisticated expression it made a point I thought was too ‘silly’ to mention. Namely that cumulatively the rejections were getting to me, that I was feeling out of my element and that I felt it quite acutely.

What’s keeping you blocked? What do you have to acknowledge?

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I like to keep this blog as upbeat and positive as is possible but the truth is it isn’t always fun and games when it comes to art or life more generally. Somehow actually creating art gave way to not creating art and feeling very irritable and anxious. I’m sure I quote Julia Cameron too often on this blog, but since I couldn’t have said it any better myself…

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes:

Making a piece of art may feel a lot like telling a family secret. Secret telling, by its very nature, involves shame and fear. It asks the question “What will they think of me once they know this?” This is a frightening question, particularly if we have ever been made to feel ashamed for our curiosities and explorations – social, sexual, spiritual.

My art practice involves too many secrets. Things I don’t want to share with anyone, things I don’t even want to admit to myself. Even bringing myself to admit that I wanted to paint in the first instance took over a year. It’s one of the greatest ironies of my existence that while anyone who knows my name can throw it into a search engine and see everything I create and share online I am incredibly guarded with people I know in (quote-unquote) ‘real life.’

There have been breakdowns and breakthroughs this weekend though. I went for a walk through the escarpment, listening to Tori Amos. Listening to the Dakota Version of Hey Jupiter and really reflecting upon what that song meant gave me a way of accessing my own unarticulated sorrow. When I returned from my walk I wrote a poem, my first poem in probably seven years. I also, somewhat mysteriously, ‘found’ some lyrics to a song I wrote back in 2000. It seemed I was able to express things that I hadn’t been able to before. But looking back at them, realising they were fundamentally what I wanted and needed to say, I wasn’t sure I was yet prepared to let those sentiments see the light of day. It’s this underlying tension in so much of what I do. I see it in my painting too – in the subjects I choose to paint, the way in which I choose to paint them – sometimes I’m sure they reveal more than I intend them to.

It’s a terrible thing to spend so much time talking about cultivating a self to ‘express’ and then being fearful when you do. But in a lot of ways I have to exist in a world that doesn’t appreciate most of what I do, that doesn’t understand who I am, that is keen to criticise my rather fragile ego. I’m not sure I want to feel so exposed and vulnerable.

Amusingly the poem I wrote this weekend was about not feeling brave enough to write a poem. When I realised this was indeed what I had done, I laughed and felt strangely accomplished. Where there’s life, there’s hope.

[Mary made the observation that it had been some weeks since I last posted a video here. I do have one which I will post this week though I can't guarantee how regularly they will appear after that. There is some stuff (cryptic enough?) happening to this website behind the scenes that will ultimately make the site more enjoyable to the people who visit it but in the meanwhile I have to play catch up and work on some special secret projects. Watch this space!]

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This is just a quick note to let you know that Mur Lafferty and I Should Be Writing is going to be tackling The Artist’s Way creativity program as an online community. You can follow the group’s progress at the I Should Be Writing website (or subscribe via iTunes or at YouTube) and by joining the associated Facebook page.

I’ve never done the The Artist’s Way as part of a group before and am quite excited at the prospect.

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Your Inner Critic might, to the untrained eye, look like a fluffy adorable teddy bear… but we know better!

YouTube user CrazyMikala writes in the video description:

Don’t you just hate it sometimes when you are trying to figure something out and there is someone who keeps telling you to ‘GIVE UP!’?
That’s what this is about.
I honestly refuse to buy a new sewing machine.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron suggests creating your own ‘monster hall of fame’ out of your past creative enemies. She writes:

You may find it cathartic to draw a sketch of your old monster or to clip out an image that evokes the incident for you. Cartoon trashing your monster, or at least draw a nice red X through it.

Clearly, as CrazyMikala demonstrates above, stabbing a soft toy version of your creative monster works just as effectively.

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We tend to think, as a culture, that inaction – indeed sloth – is a bad thing. But what if it was necessary in the creation in art? Australian Playwright Michael Gow thinks this is the case. Here is an extract from his appearance on Radio National’s Spirit Of Things.

Michael Gow:

I work in what’s usually called the Arts. Like everyone else who works in this field, I’ve had the pleading, the blackmail, the parental fear – they don’t want their kids to work in such an uncertain profession. And we get all this negativity because doing what we do, means we might not work. We’ll do nothing, we won’t earn, eat, have a roof, provide for others. We’ll descend into permanent sloth.

But how about us doing nothing, really? Doesn’t everyone bang on nowadays about work-life balance, which means not being at work? Although that probably means spending time with the family, and doing something. But still, isn’t everyone on the treadmill secretly craving time out, quiet time, downtime. But nobody dares take it any more because as things get tougher, the only solution is to work harder, work longer, stave off the inevitable. Even our current Prime Minister we hear is a fanatical worker, no sleep, every minute accounted for, demanding everyone else work as hard, keep up. So from the top down, we get the message: laziness will send you to hell.

But then I look at the work I do. I write. I write plays and I write them because I have this overwhelming need to describe things as accurately as I can in the hope that someone else will experience what I’ve written and say ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s life’, or a little corner of it at least. I recognise that. Do I write all the time? Yes, even if it’s just a list of what I did today, or what I thought today, just to get it down and keep the words coming. But do I produce performable work all the time? No, I can’t. What I do write that gets put on, comes erratically and unpredictably, sometimes nothing for years. Ten years in fact. And then it might not be any good. And when that happens, what to do?

There’s this term ‘writer’s block’. Some people reject the whole idea, some people admit to it, a lot of us dread it. I think the people who deny its existence are rejecting what is really a cliché. People think of writer’s block as being some writer, poor bleary-eyed, unshaven if they’re a man, and maybe mascara-stained if they’re a woman, typing at a desk staring blankly at the terrifying white of a blank page. All over the floor are mounds of screwed up paper. There’s an empty Scotch bottle on the desk, and the writer is about to reach for the gun in the drawer to end this suffering. But that’s all it is, it’s a cliché.

Writer’s block, or whatever you want to call it – and it doesn’t just happen to writers, it happens to anyone who paints or composes or makes anything out of their own imaginations – is how you deal with there being nothing to put down at the moment. To use your imagination, you need those things I mentioned: downtime, quiet time, time out. When you use your imagination you literally empty your mind, and sometimes you need to fill it up again, you need to read, go to the pictures, listen to music, hike through Nepal, visit your friends you haven’t seen in months, or years. Basically you need to not work. But then that guilt kicks in. ‘I’m not working, nothing’s coming, I should be doing something. I have no worth if I don’t work, no value, no meaning. You’ll end up broke on the street. You should have got a job in a bank. You can’t even stack boxes’. On and on. And that understandably, produces panic, and panic is a sure-fire way to short circuit your mind and prevent any idea, thought, images, line of verse or melody, to come into your brain. And the more we panic, basically, the more we panic. It’s a terror that’s really hard to control.

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