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Performance provides us with ‘factory conditions’ to understand our own reality.

Internationally best-selling author, artist, journalist and speaker John-Paul Flintoff trained in improvisation with Keith Johnstone. He designs today’s word-count workout alongside Rachel Knightley as they discuss the benefits of stagecraft on communication, and how performance provides ‘factory conditions’ for understanding your own character motivation offstage as much as on it.

John-Paul’s books include the internationally bestselling How to Change the World, and A Modest Book on How to Make an Adequate Speech.  John-Paul will also be joining the Writer’s Gym’s Green Ink Sponsored Write for Macmillan Cancer Support on 14 October 2023. To receive your world-exclusive anthology of new writing 48 hours after the event ends, click here.

https://rachel3t472.substack.com/p/connection-through-imperfection?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2#details

I first read this on the wall of the @whitehartclinic, just after lockdown. 

It was the first appointment of the next stage of my physical recovery and was exactly what I needed to see and hear, which I suppose is why my mind let me see and hear it when I did.

Today I filmed this brook on an impromptu walk through central Barnes to pick up a prescription and walk home again. My partner came with me for moral support and exercise. While I would have just walked home the short way and gone back to work, he suggested the long way home. Neither of us would have had this wonderful break in the day without the other. And neither of us would have had the opportunity if I hadn’t made the leaps of faith to fully invest in my writing and coaching back then, when I read that quote on that wall.

I’m so grateful to the me who saw and read that writing on the wall, for keeping faith with the physical and mental health habits that allow me to see how much power I have over my day, my time, my choices. To put the ‘creative’ in ‘writer’: creating the life and art you want. 

That’s how and why I’m writing more, and the reason I’m launching The Creative Writer: to creating the art, work and life we want. 

Applications open until 28 June: click the bio for more information on my books, this course and other events, or DM a question right here ✍️

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Performance provides us with ‘factory conditions’ to understand our own reality – with John-Paul Flintoff

https://open.substack.com/pub/rachel3t472/p/connection-through-imperfection?r=nvknj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

“What’s the writing advice that really pisses you off?” was my favourite question to ask award-winning author and editor Dan Coxon. Originally we were speaking of the module I’m convening at Roehampton University, The Business of Writing. But it’s a phrase so much part of every freelance wordsmith’s life and career and such an important reminder in itself that I knew it had to be part of this month’s word-count workout at the Writers’ Gym:

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I am standing in a wood, at the edge of a pool. I drop a pebble into the water, watch the rings dissipate. When they do, I drop the next pebble. Like anywhere I go in my head, I’m more aware of the place than I am of me. It’s the pebbles, not myself, I’m here for. I don’t drop the next pebble until those rings have faded to stillness. Then, in goes the next.

I’ve been using this pool for as long as I can remember. Rather than race through your lines (if you’re acting) or information (if you’re giving a speech or being interviewed) or offering all the multiple directions a conversation could go (if you’re interviewing someone else), drop one thing into the silence, let the rings dissipate around that. The space between is where the thinking happens.  

This wasn’t necessarily how I experienced my earliest performances (say, The Wicked Fairy, aged 6, at primary school), It was how I was thinking by the end of Youth Theatre (Hilda, the Ugly Duckling’s sister, aged 18) but the most important place I used this wasn’t on a stage. It was beside one. The place the penny (not just the pebble) dropped about how communication and performance fit together was the first time I knew I needed to play myself.

That place was one of the first primary schools where I ran drama clubs. I was standing at the side of the hall, listening to the head teacher introduce me. I’d recently left university and, if I’m honest, felt closer to being one of those identically uniformed and identically poker-faced, cross-legged children staring up from the floor, than to being one the smattering of adults seated around the edges of the (suddenly enormous) room. What was going on in my head went along the lines of “Oh God, what if no one wants to do drama club? What if they don’t like me? What if they realise I shouldn’t be here?” and all the other things impostor syndrome screams so eloquently as we stand at the edges of our comfort zone. Then it was time to start walking. It was also the moment I thought, “What if… I get to choose who I am and what this is?”

Read the rest here: https://rachel3t472.substack.com/p/playing-yourself

I often joke (the way you do about things that aren’t jokes at all but absolutely true) the two belief systems I grew up within were Judaism and, ever so slightly beneath that, Star Trek. 

I say two; really, I experienced them as a continuum. Not because Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry was Jewish, or even because the symbolism of the Vulcan salute Leonard Nimoy created for his character, Mr Spock, was drawn from having seen the shape of the Hebrew letter shin formed with the hand as part of an orthodox service when he was a child. It was because Star Trek – while not literally, presently real – was about potential. Here was an imagined version of humanity in which we had survived the worst things about ourselves. We had become a force in the universe not for self-destruction but for exploration, outward and inward. We were motivated not by personal gain but by personal betterment, connection, and curiosity. That was the agenda from which we boldly went where we hadn’t been before. It was not a statement of who we were, but who we had it in us to be… Read the full article for free on my Substack

A thought on Impostor Syndrome (and why I’d rather be with it than without it).

On Friday, as you might have seen from Saturday’s video, my partner thought a bunch of people at the professional writers’ meet-up he came with me to for the first time weren’t actually writers.

Because that’s what they said about themselves.

(My partner works in the film industry. Where, as you can imagine, NOBODY says “Oh, I’m not really a filmmaker…”. Ever.)

This afternoon, I joined two of my colleagues and two of our MA students to be filmed discussing our courses. I caught myself thinking whether I shouldn’t mention the exercises we’re using that were based on my own book.

Nobody censored me, other than me.

Here is what I want to do about it. Feel free to join me if it resonates with you too:

I will value, discuss and celebrate my work of itself.

I will enjoy when people are surprised I have a PhD, an ISBN number, or anything else. Because I’m changing what those things look like to those people. It’s not about me. It’s about them.

I will notice (not judge, but notice) when I think “but so and so wrote that which is much more established/impressive/famous etc” and acknowledge how irrelevant comparison is. No one else in time and space can write what I can. Letting comparison and self-consciousness have the final word means everybody loses.

I will name the “who does she think she is” voices in my head. I know who they are. They’re just an echo, of something that didn’t matter in the first place.

I will remember everything I write is imperfect and everything you write is imperfect and everything everyone has ever written is imperfect — but real, in the world. Because it got better with every draft so the message made its way into the world. I will remember perfectionism never gets around to connecting with anyone — but authentic does.

Here are three books I love and am proud I wrote. Here’s to the ones that will follow.

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I’m so happy to be launching the Writers’ Gym Podcast. Each episode explores an author’s unique mix of memory, imagination, observations and questions about the world, and how that translates into their unique stories. There may be only seven basic plots but there are infinite original voices — come and unleash yours as you develop your creative curiosity, build your focus and explore the goals, exercises, tools and techniques to discover what you really want from your writing — and what your writing really needs from you.

A painter doesn’t need permission to mix any colours they like. Yet, as writers, our memories, imagination, observations and questions about the world and ourselves come with “not supposed to go there” stamped all over them. How can we give ourselves permission to beat those blocks? Multi-award-winning author Jennifer Steil joins me to talk about about what kept her writing through kidnap, cancer treatment and everyday life in the three countries she calls home. Join us here.