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.
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.’
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.
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.
What Crowded House taught me about anxiety, choice and freedom
Before Zoom and I (and, probably, Zoom and you) were the close colleagues we became, I had a first impression that really stuck with me. Everyone in my Teaching Creative PGCert was invited to bring an object along to the introductions. The result was not just a group of strangers, but a group of implied stories.
This was mine:
A ship in a bottle (or, as Crowded House mean I see it, a small boat made of china going nowhere on the mantelpiece – with big implications for how and where I go myself…)
Its true story isn’t what makes it so special (although, now I think about it, that too meant something about stories: I stuck up for it when it was being purchased for a theatre set, against a bigger and cheaper version. I offered to pay the difference and while it’s been borrowed back for another theatre outing since, we’ve been together almost as long as I’d been alive when it was purchased).
What makes it special for me is something I first verbalised in hearing these lyrics:
Well there’s a small boat made of china, it’s going nowhere on the mantelpiece / Well do I lie like a lounge-room lizard, or do I sing like a bird released?
Weather With You, Crowded House
The question mark is important bit for me. In our worst times, when things are at their most hopeless and overwhelming, we tend to feel least like we have choice. My most hopeless and overwhelmed moments have tended to be very lonely ones. In them, I’d seek external approval. Which often meant sinking further, because if the external opinions differed or didn’t sit right, I felt more alone and with more decision paralysis than I began. But there is a choice, and it’s not a dangerous or terrible thing that I’m the only one who can truly make it for myself. That’s why I love the question mark at the end of that. It reminds me that choice is always there, swimming beneath the surface of whatever’s going on right now. It’s why such questions as these are so powerful:
‘If I knew what I chose would work out absolutely fine, what would I do next?’.
We are not, the song reminds me, inanimate objects, which means who we are today is not the same form of us as yesterday or tomorrow.
It also means our stories aren’t set in stone (or china).
Which leaves me this question:
“Where in my life might my fear or anger be getting in the way of my curiosity…”
… about what I might be assuming about people or situations?
…about my own ability (or lack of ability) to be part of closer connection?
…about my own ability (or lack of ability) to be part of or positive change?
“If that assumption weren’t true, what would I do next?”
As I listened to the implied stories of the rest of my group, it struck me that objects we love relate to stories that are reminders of moments we realised, consciously or unconsciously, we could be more ourselves than we thought we could. When we stepped out of a narrower version of who we felt able to be, into a more expansive one. I’m thinking about that a lot as it’s the message of Passover — what does freedom mean to you and how can you be part of there being more of it for yourself and those around you? — but it’s the one I want to keep checking in with all year. So you might see that boat in my zoom background: it may be going nowhere on the mantelpiece, but it’s my reminder each of is here to go somewhere unique.
