A book birthday, a heat wave boundary and an ode to Sir Michael Palin

Feel free to suggest alternatives, but if I had to show the aliens the best of humanity I think I’d start by exhibiting Michael Palin.

You would say that, you might say. You’re a creative confidence coach. You work with jigsaw careers. You help people develop professional and personal happiness through unearthing all the interests currently on their page/in their world, and those yet to be part of the picture. Michael Palin (you might say) personifies the value of a jigsaw career. Acting, writing, presenting and traveling the world (with a predilection for its most difficult bits) aren’t obvious links for every person who does any one of those things, any more than having clients who range in age from six to eighty is normal for every coach. It’s about knowing who you are and not thinking you have to choose between the aspects of your identity, but celebrating the entirety.

Well, yes. 

But, more importantly, no.

It’s the ‘nice’ thing. 

Or, rather, it’s the misunderstandings about niceness and what niceness (when there’s clarity beneath it) allows him to create.

In case you don’t know (though you almost inevitably do), the first thing people say about Michael Palin isn’t the BAFTA or the knighthood; it isn’t even Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Around the World in Eighty Days. It’s how nice he is.

But here’s the thing about ‘nice’. There’s what it is – and then there’s what it really is. 

Why I would make Michael Palin ambassador for my species is I believe his niceness is the antithesis of the ‘I don’t mind, it doesn’t matter’ pseudo-niceness, the one that leaves us waiting politely for the world to guess what we need and want. The one that leaves us living in the gap between who we are inside and who we want to be in the world. 

As I think about Michael Palin and the life lesson he’s been to me, I’m reminded of what was told to me as an anecdote but lives in me as a cautionary tale. A former teacher who was a massive role model to me had a number of catchphrases she’d inherited from her own adults, one of which was ‘I want don’t get’. Years after I’d left school and was studying for my PhD, she shared with me that when her father found out she would have liked to do more further study herself, he asked why she hadn’t said anything. Her answer – which she even didn’t say aloud to him then – was because that phrase was his phrase and she’d believed it.

Gratitude is not the opposite of vision. It’s not the opposite of ambition. For ourselves, or for the change we can make in our world. But our minds can make assumptions that keep us small; keep us waiting for something that doesn’t know we’re there. Or, that doesn’t exist until we initiate it and make it exist. 

Putting together a jigsaw career doesn’t come from the kind the pseudo-nice of waiting to be summoned, or doing what we’ve internalised we ‘should’ do and not looking at the distant, still-vague horizons of our possibilities. Michael Palin’s niceness is not that of waiting politely on life’s corner but of moving through its water. His awareness of what’s around him, his appreciation of people, places, art and life is not instead of being the engine, seeing what you want to create and putting your strength behind creating it, but because of it.

Last Monday evening I saw Palin speak at a private venue in London. One of the things he talked about was the greatly-beloved Knights who say Ni scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: how physically uncomfortable filming was; how convinced he was – as his woolly armour stuck to him in the unpleasant weather and got heavier with every take – that it wouldn’t be worth it. It wouldn’t be funny. 

Even as he spoke of it he instinctively did the voice of ‘Ni’, and while no one in the audience joined in you could feel us all doing so in our heads. There is so much love for that scene and concept. But the point in telling the story was he really thought it wasn’t going to be funny. Not worth the discomfort. He was laughing at himself when he told the story, but it brought up a question for me which I asked at the end. He’d pushed back on the Knights Who Say Ni because of personal discomfort first and thinking it wasn’t funny second. And he’d been wrong. But what about when he’d been right? What happens in writing partnerships when you see something really is going the wrong way? Where’s the line between peace and politeness on one side, and the right thing for the work on the other?

As I expected, he didn’t really answer directly – although he was (unsurprisingly) lovely in talking about it. I don’t think this was conscious avoidance; I think this is one we genuinely don’t know until we’re in the moment. Because even when you have been nice for a living, including through the most difficult bits of the world, it doesn’t mean you’re a pushover. ‘I don’t mind’ doesn’t create art, or life. Having a sense of what we want to create does. Being nice is how to work with and appreciate people as we consistently do the work of creating the art, work and life we want. That’s the real power of nice. 

Another thing Palin mentioned on Monday that is great jigsaw-career advice: he was the fifth person to be asked to do Around The World in Eighty Days. Even now as second in the queue behind Attenborough as national treasure of travel, it’s important to remember that (also like Attenborough) there was no God-given decree. Just as Attenborough only ended up in front of the Zoo Quest camera when someone was ill, we do not know what our current circumstances could be Chapter One of, but creative confidence means asking ourselves how, not if, we take those circumstances forward.

---

My first short story collection, Beyond Glass, will be five years old this Wednesday 27 May. I’m running a daily Instagram giveaway in the UK with online options if you’re outside the UK. Join in here. 

---

Kindness has often been described as niceness with boundaries, and niceness as kindness without boundaries. Being kind to the work we’re creating means setting those boundaries, knowing our values and our direction of travel. It means creating a map of a land that isn’t only uncharted but doesn’t even exist yet, and won’t until we commit to creating it.

Boundaries around our time (for being not at work in some of our cases; for showing up for our writing in others) actually gets better results for our friends and family, clients and colleagues not to mention ourselves, than having no boundaries at all – which leaves us unfulfilled, tired and permanently in the waiting room for work to call us in. The things Palin has said no to as much as the things he’s said yes to are how he gets to do what’s most important to be done.

That’s what I want the aliens to know. What we do is important. But how we do it, and how wholeheartedly we choose what we do and (see photo of me in the heatwave) don’tdo, can be more important still.

---

Think on the Page…

1. If there’s a phrase you’ve inherited, what is it? Whose voice do you hear it in?
2. In what ways do you agree, and disagree, with that phrase now?
3. How do your circumstances or values differ from the person who said it?
4. If that phrase weren’t true anymore, what words could be true instead?

---

InkCouragement is the newsletter of Rachel Knightley Coaching and The Writers’ Gym podcast and membership, online and in London.

Writing the circumstances of writing.

Behind my desk is a bookshelf. 

Either side of that bookshelf is a wall. 

If I were to turn around and knock on the wall, I would be reassured of its wall-ness.

I’ll come back to the wall in a moment.

A lot of people looking to find their voice – and their time – and their writing life – start by saying ‘I don’t have enough time.’

More often than not, the belief is something like this:

The amount of time I have in my life will need to get bigger before I can give any of it to the thing that I have come to you saying I want to do.’

It took me a PhD and a decade before I came close to shaking my own version of that belief (or accepting I had it in the first place). Which is why I do what I do now. Writing is important. I do a lot of that. But freeing writers to write is important too. A block is a block is a block, even when it’s one of permission.

So when I meet this, or something related to it, I sometimes go and knock on one of those walls. 

When we put time around our writing, the boundary that exists around that time needs to be as real to us as to that wall. 

That wall isn’t a wall because someone tells me it’s okay for it to be a wall.

It’s a wall. I can’t walk through it and neither can you.

That belief (or perhaps we could call it a realisation?) doesn’t begin with it being real to everyone else in my family, friendship group and work life. 

The reality begins with me, if it is to become real to anyone else.

We design the wall. We build the wall. We can do it in seconds. Except usually it’s taken us years to realise we can do it in seconds.

This is my time. This is my writing’s time. So that my writing exists, my time exists. And it’s mine.

So when someone says ‘Can you do this at this time?’ the answer doesn’t need to be a nasty no; it can be a very loving and (if necessary) repetitive declaration of fact. I’m not free at that time. How about this other time…

I need to be able to believe in my no. Which doesn’t start by having solid feelings of my own permission. 

It starts by committing to a behaviour.

Creating a reality.

Repeating and stabilising the reality.

Until that’s the real story.

Not a bad warm-up for the actual writing you’ve created it for…

Adapted from this week’s InkCouragement with Dr Rachel Knightley on The Writers’ Gym Podcast. Listen on Apple, Spotify, Podbean or wherever you get your podcasts.

Visit RachelKnightleyCoaching.com for more.

An interview with Doug Naylor this week, and a theatre car park in Hayes in 1995

I learnt about DNA at school. Probably. I also probably learnt about viruses, evolution and life and death. But school science lessons involved a LOT of copying down sentences from the board while not feeling anywhere near confident (or anywhere near engaged) enough to follow, let alone enjoy and connect. Home life, on the other hand, involved the far clearer teachings of the gestalt entity Grant Naylor. 

Rob Grant and Doug Naylor formed their writing partnership as students, prior to working on Spitting Image (yes, including The Chicken Song), the Ten Percenters and Red Dwarf. Realising they were on the wrong educational course for who they were was an important learning experience, as was taking control of their own direction to go somewhere very different. They called themselves a gestalt entity because – as Legion would illustrate – the whole was greater than the sum of its parts (although, their bio in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers stressed, for tax reasons they had completely separate wives). Doug’s interview with me on the Writers’ Gym this week pays tribute to Rob, whose death was announced the day before we were due to record. Doug is enormously generous about sharing what working closely with someone truly means, and how the lonelier aspects of writing – particularly our old friend Imposter Syndrome – don’t get smaller just because the spotlight gets bigger.

‘In space no one can hear you cha-cha-cha.’

One of my favourite Red Dwarf quotes was spoken by a virus turned humanoid, tap-dancing on the walkway of the edge of the Jupiter Mining Corporation spaceship while Lister tried to focus on fixing it: It’s such a neat reworking of the even by then clichéd science fiction line, a great example of the point Grant Naylor always made of not giving you the science fiction tick-boxes you expected (Doug talks about the one exception he pushed back on being Kryten). But it also, as a figment of Lister’s imagination, reflects the through line of what I really feel Red Dwarf taught me (see also anxiety, choice and freedom) is what Lister’s survival and even enjoyment of his life as the last human, three million years from home reflects all along: no amount of ‘why’ is going to improve the situation. It’s the ‘what next’ and the ‘how’.

‘Smoke me a kipper. I’ll be back for breakfast.’

Ace Rimmer. Oh God, Ace Rimmer. Chris Barrie, really. And the Ace wig. When I was in Year Eight we went to see Chris Barrie’s live show and while we were waiting in the foyer after the tannoy called out numberplate and we had to go outside as our car had been broken into. They’d taken nothing – our crappy cassette player was still in place – and I was absolutely in pieces that I wouldn’t get to meet Chris Barrie. But we went back in and we were in time and I’m not sure I managed three coherent words while my mum chatted to him about car insurance.

I digress. 

Doug and I talk on the podcast about how Rimmer doesn’t get the joke of the circumstances the way Lister does: from their opening conversation of The End (Red Dwarf’s beginning), Rimmer is already in a competition only he is playing, forsaking the potential to be truly loved and respected because everyone is the enemy, the competition. Whereas Lister, the one person lower down the pecking order than him, has friends and ethics and a sense of who he truly is, beyond who anyone tells him to be. Whereas the story Rimmer tells himself is his brothers got all the looks and all the breaks. Even when Rimmer meets another version of himself in Dimension Jump, he treats him not as a chance to learn but even more desperate competition.

Rimmer has always blamed his shortcomings on not having the breaks or looks his brothers had. When he meets an alternate version of himself — a hero — it’s because he got a break the other guy didn’t. Ace tells Lister, out of Rimmer’s hearing, what the one difference in their lives actually was: he was kept down a year at school and Rimmer wasn’t: 

Ace: By his terms, he got the break. But being kept down a year made me… made me buckle down. Made me fight back. And I’ve been fighting back ever since.

Lister: While he spent the rest of his life making excuses.

Rimmer: Maybe he’s right. Maybe I did get the lucky break.

The iconic quote Ace says instead of goodbye manages to be both silly and optimistic. For Ace, and for Lister, there’s always a next chapter and they’re not its victim or its subject; they’re its writer. 

‘A moon cannot make light, right? And yet there’s such a thing as moonlight… but the sun can’t make moonlight without the moon. And the moon can’t make moonlight without the sun. So who’s making the moonlight?… Even though a moon cannot make light, moonlight exists. Like you. Smeghead.’

In The Promised Land, which I reviewed for Starburst Magazine after my first interview with Doug, is one of the more undisguisedly moving, scientifically and emotionally accurate conversations in the Red Dwarf universes. 

A deep-dive on the same idea behind one of my favourite lyrics of all time, ‘I don’t stand in my own light’, which I’d also vote for as the best writing reminder of all time: you can’t show up perfect, but you can show up. And by simply being part of the infinite chorus of voices you’re doing more good than you ever get to find out about. On that, in case you need the reminder (and I know I do) I’ve had two people in my extended network tell me things I’ve written have really spoken to them this week. Did they press like? Did they share it with someone else? No. But the good was happening. Everything we write is moon or sun to someone or something. We might not see it from where we are, but that doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t. So keep writing, and trust there is moonlight.

Download Doug Naylor’s interview on The Writers’ Gym Podcast on Podbean, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Build creative confidence and explore the power of your stories online or in person at writersgym.com and rachelknightley.com

Book for Barnes Writers’ Gym, Coffee & Creativity or any of our other events here.

and how true confidence is the opposite of LOUD

I cannot overstate how tiny (or perfect) this cat is. 

Her body is tiny. Her meow is tiny. She is tiny.

And she is completely in charge.

I won’t share her name online, but if you live anywhere near me I won’t need to. Everyone is on first-name terms with her, because if she’s not your friend already then she’s a friend of a friend, who will have talked about her by name or will introduce her if you’re passing her territory in spring or summer. 

I’ve known her as long as I’ve lived here, which is getting on for a decade, and like the musicians and teachers of my youth there’s a part of me that believes she was born ancient and will continue, identically ancient, for all of time. 

Leading from your inner cat

But it struck me when I saw her the other day she’s my favourite local for other reasons too. She’s a role model. This tiny tortoiseshell senior cat also illustrates the qualities of healthy leadership: unfailingly welcoming to guests in her territory, expressing interest, communicating her wishes, making friends. 

While at no point does she, or anyone else, forget this is her territory.

We all have moments of feeling like a small creature in a big world. But those tend to register when we care about the result of what we’re trying to say or do. 

And while there’s no way of guaranteeing the result, there is one true route out of overwhelm and into authenticity. It’s remembering you’re you and no one else is. And if you don’t say or do it, it won’t be said or done at all.

Perfect is impossible (unless you’re a cat, obviously). But unique is always in our power. 

Writing from your inner cat

Doing something worth doing, or creating something that deserves to be in the world, means one of the familiar side effects is ‘Who am I to…’, or ‘What if I seem too…’, mind-reading the audience we might not have even fully created yet.

So next time the overwhelm kicks in, let’s remember this furry little goddess.

Confidence is not about being right every time.

Clarity is not about knowing everything.

True authority doesn’t need to shout. It’s about knowing who you are and what you want. And that you have every right to be exactly who and where you are.