MJ Walters

Do I want to be a code poet? No!

I'm a software developer (sometimes I say engineer, but really? An engineer?!). I'm also a creative writer with my pause button pressed. I should be playing, but I'm not.

I came across a phrase today that made me shout 'Yes!', before I brought my hands down in a confused hairy muddle. Another software developer engineer person described themselves on their website as a code poet. A code poet! I love that. It captures something about the joy of coding, but it's also wrong, deep down in my soul wrong.

Of course I'm over-reacting, that's what I do when my mental patterns are on automatic.

A poet has something to express, expresses it in words and imagery, then keeps expressing it through the editing process until the poem is finished, both emotionally and structurally.

A coder takes a specification or set of requirements and produces a piece of software that is easy-to-use, intuitive, fast, and easy to maintain/change/add to.

The parallel that works for me is the reworking to achieve some sort of beauty of form, of elegance, of great design. Poets and coders both do that. But is calling myself a code poet an attempt to pretend writing code is like writing poetry? Saving me from taking the risk of writing real poetry? Of expressing my feelings and having the world read them?

Code is all about logic, and code poetry is elegance and simplicity of logic. It's working on a function, not a feeling. At this stage in my life, I want to work on my feelings. To avoid this work is wrong wrong wrong for me.

Maybe I'm not over-reacting. It is deep down in my soul wrong. Perhaps I'm confusing my 'mental patterns on automatic' with intuition.

Making a living, improvising and creative writing

Creative writing * is hard. Doing it for a living is even harder and, to make it worse, romanticised into something it isn't.

At the end of Romancing the Stone, Kathleen Turner types the last page of her novel straight onto a typewriter (with no editing!), crying her eyes out at the beauty of it, before going outside to climb onboard an enormous yacht to kiss Michael Douglas. This is unrealistic.

Many people strive to write creatively for a living, but proportionally hardly anyone manages it. So why do people bother? I often imagine an idealised writers life - a study with a big desk, views over a garden, books on high shelves all around me, peace and quiet, etc. It's never going to happen. I have realised I only do this when I am not writing.The fundamental activity of creating anything is improvisation. Improvising means starting, and starting is very hard.

Improvising/starting is hard because it is painful to make something from inside ourselves, and for it to be not very good. And 99% of it will be average or awful, at least in the beginning, because that's natural selection in action, creativity in it's purest form. The skill is knowing a good idea when it comes and not throwing it away with the rest. Ruthlessness is a key artistic quality.

But another key quality is compassion. You need to allow yourself to improvise the average and the awful to get at the diamonds that come along every now and then.

Of course, if expressing yourself is your focus, there are other ways - sculpting, dancing, or singing. It's better to express yourself in, say, painting, or acting/role play, than to feel stuck because you haven't got the time/energy/ability to write something 'worthwhile' (that deadly, awful word). Better to try a new medium, realise how much you suck, and come back to writing later, rejuvenated.

Improvising isn't about 'worthwhile', it's about letting yourself be human in all your messiness, and making tiny decisions on the fly. Becoming skilled at expressing how you feel requires learning to improvise, I think, and trusting your intuition. Making it beautiful comes afterwards. And 'worthwhile' is for others to judge, not us. As artists we serve ourselves first.

So, back to making a living. I can make a living as a craftsperson, an engineer, making beautiful things for other people. I can put my energy and attention into a piece of software, a wooden table, a piece of advertising copy, but always it is for someone else's purpose.

I could design a chair that is elegant, simple, comfortable, functional and beautiful, but that wouldn't serve my inner need to (for example!) put spikes on the seat and arms. In art there is an extra layer of meaning beyond the functional, and I think that meaning comes from inside the artist, expresses something the artist feels very strongly.

The artists work involves improvising, reflecting on it, improvising again with the new insights in mind, reflecting on it, and repeating until the energy is gone. That is when a piece is finished.

The only people who get paid for working on themselves are artists and psychotherapists (I'll explore that in another post). So if you are an artist/writer and you can't get paid for your work, what is the best way of making a living?

* For clarity, my definition of creative writing here is poetry, fiction, life writing, or drama.

Image by Diana Blackwell, via Flickr, under the Creative Commons license.

Repairing cracks in the creative pipework (part 2)

My creative pipework was cracked and fragmented. I had a rule in my head that said 'if you produce a piece of art, then you can feel good', which also means 'if you don't produce a piece of art, you will feel bad'. So, naturally, I pushed hard to create a piece of art.

But artistic work will not be pushed (not art that changes the artist in any meaningful way), so all the pushing did was to try to get more water down the same broken pipe, and I ended up wallowing in self-inflicted misery at my ineptness. I judged myself on the quality and quantity of artistic work I produced, so when I couldn't produce anything I felt like a failure.

Fortunately (naturally!) my unconscious was very clever. I have two writing states: art-making and reflective. I had been pushing myself to make art, and making myself miserable in the process, but I had also been journalling, thinking about what's going on, noting my dreams and my feelings, making montages, drawing conceptual diagrams, and so on. By consciously focussing on the glamorous work, my unconscious selves were able to slip into my journal and begin to repair the damage.

So I have arrived at a rather lovely scary place. A putting myself out there and drawing a line in the sand sort of place.

Every day from this point forward I am going to make something from inside myself, and I am also going to reflect on that making in my journal. I will not go to bed until I have written from both states.

My time of solely working on the pipe is coming to an end. All that creative juice, that elixir, that I thought had been seeping away has actually been repairing the holes and faultlines in my creative process.

So. Onwards!

Repairing cracks in the creative pipework (part 1)

When I sit down to write a story I am already thinking about finishing it, of experiencing the thrill of handing a finely honed piece of work to someone to read.

There is a problem with this. Because it is written into my childhood patterns that if I do something I do it perfectly or not at all, very often I choose not at all so the imaginary figure is not disappointed. The pressure to create something beautiful and important and moving becomes so immense I divert my energy into online shopping or reading the news to the nth level of useless detail. There is no fun in this process. It is joyless.

It's a terribly painful state to be in, where every word produced is compared to some impossible standard and discarded as not good enough. For me, creative writing courses heighten this pain even further. Tutors know what works and why, and since I am incredibly sensitive to criticism, waiting for feedback and the all-important mark would freeze me for weeks. Thinking about word counts and deadlines, with a judgement at the end? Agony.

Paradoxically, the creative writing courses also made me into a writer. I think for me the process had to be painful. My emotional patterns couldn't have it any other way. But by submitting my work to professional writers for feedback I was held to a higher standard, and by doing the course exercises, and writing in my journal about them, I finally unpicked my block on writing.

The deadlines and promise of feedback pulled me upwards, but also scared the hell out of me, and it was in my make-up to torture myself the whole time I was studying. Reading that sentence back makes me very sad.

I finished the course in May, and this past summer I have been wrestling with the absence of deadlines and exercises and feedback. My writing has been personal, not for potential publication or other readers. Noticing this has given me the insights I need to start to write stories again, this time without the artificial framework of a course of study.

I now see I was working on the cracks in my creative process pipework.

Losing a comfort blanket

This month I signed up for a Maths course, did the preparation pack, submitted the first of two warm-up exercises – and stopped.

It wasn't for me. I enjoyed getting back into Maths – I did Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Kent back in the mists of time. I didn't have a plan. But I knew science and astronomy wanted back in to my life. The Maths course wasn't the way forward though. I'm a writer. If I'm doing Maths I'm not writing. Sounds obvious now, huh?

Perhaps I had to try it to know it. This last few weeks I have been reading New Scientist again and having a blast. I still have a fantasy of going back and redoing my degree when I'm retired. In like 30 years. Astrophysics will have gone a long way by then and it'll be totally fresh. It will keep my aging brain in tip-top shape too. Of course that fantasy is nostalgic, old pattern, wishful thinking, but I really do love Physics and Astronomy. It's just at this point in my life I have other fish to pickle.

But what fish?

I asked the OU if they had any spaces on the Level 1 Arts course AA100, but they are full. Must be the economy, the rumoured glut of 18-year-olds who can't get jobs so are holing up in higher education until the storm blows over. So for the first October in three years I am not studying. And that's pretty scary to me. Courses are a comfort blanket – I love deadlines, feedback, marks, books, mind maps, the whole thing – but now I have to find another way.

I could write something? Am I a creative writing journeyman, or am I not?

Changing my goals

After an extended break in South Wales, I return to my real life with a fresh perspective and some new ideas.

Bodywork - I'm going to concentrate on my fitness and strength, and eat more healthily.

Writing - the voices will become characters will become scenes will become plots will become stories will become a novel - relax and begin.

Literature and film - the BA(Hons) Literature with the OU allows me to survey novels and poetry, but as the free choice course I want to choose Film History to supplement my story knowledge - screenplays and film-making are always at the back of my mind.

House - we are moving, and soon, so I want to get the rooms right for our first few years before the big project to renovate and extend it :-)

Software - when I am in work I will be in work - when I am not I will not! - so no thinking about software or technology outside of work hours, including surfing tech news sites, learning new languages, etc.

Exciting times. I can't wait to work on these things over the next six months. I'll review it all at Xmas, but for now I'm going to write in my journal and find some inspiring role models...

A new journal

I have been keeping a journal on and off for 15 years, but it took a more serious turn in 2004 when I explored psychotherapy as a way to get through a period of stuckness in my life. I started writing down my dreams and analysing them - beginning a conversation with my unconscious that continues today.

When I started doing creative writing courses with the Open University, the first thing I learnt was to keep a journal of fragments, snippets and details to use in my writing. This was confusing - I already had a journal that worked very well for me, and when I started putting my writing in there too it got confused and muddled. So I started a second book, a parallel journal for creative writing.

Pretty soon I got annoyed at lugging these two A4 journals around everywhere. I tried leaving one at home, both at home, smaller journals, going back to one journal, and expanding up to three journals at one point. When the courses ended I had an A4 journal for my current piece of work and an A5 journal for my daily emotional work.

So why am I posting this?

I have changed things again. It's been a full-on couple of months with a new baby and lack of sleep, but my unconscious has been chugging away in the background trying to work out how to move forward now that I have no courses and no deadlines. I've changed the rules of engagement with my A4 'creative work' notebook. It's going to be more 'da Vinci', more sketchy, more free-form. I'm going to care less what I put in it, so I can make more creative mistakes. I'm going to stick more things in, use more colour, and generally try new things with it.

Not so different? For me this is a radical change. It's a change of attitude as much as anything. A journal is just a journal until something is put into it. And so what if I want to learn to draw at 36-years-old...? If not now, when?!

Artist, designer, craftsman - part 2

I haven't been able to let this go. I felt there was something else in there that I wasn't quite getting...

The original problem I was exploring was this: what are the differences and similarities between artists, craftspeople, and designers? I was confused at my desires to be all of these things, but when I leave out the artist I am not satisfied. Why doesn't making software fulfil me in the same way writing a story does?

I think I have found an answer that works for me. Something can be beautifully designed, amazingly engineered, perfectly crafted, and yet not be artistic. The magic ingredient is self-expression, or symbolism. There are extra layers of meaning to a work of art.

A Mac is a beautifully designed object, but is not a work of art.

A Mac with a hammer through the screen, mounted on my wall, is art. It is art because you can interpret it, you can put meaning on it, you can wonder at what I was intending by it and what it means in relation to other cultural objects. The artist has given it meaning. It is one-of-a-kind, from my individual unconscious with some extra work to polish it up.

I'll leave copies of art for another day :-)

So the things about my creative work that I love are the meaning I put into it, what I learnt about myself from making it, and the infinite meanings that can be found in it (which I didn't intend!) when it emerges blinking into the light of shared culture.

An artist has to be a designer, or craftsperson, or engineer. But it doesn't have to be the case the other way around.

So - how can I be more the artist?

Who can tell me who I am? Anyone?

Last week I read "Who is it that can tell me who I am?", by Jane Haynes, a London-based psychotherapist. I bought it after reading an interview she gave in the Guardian. Part of me wanted to answer the question with "I can! Your name's on the cover! And sort out your grammar!" But then later I felt a bit silly when she said it was a quote from King Lear.

You don't often see the therapists point-of-view in books, fiction or non-fiction, and since there is a psychotherapist in my next piece of writing, it was both research and a visit to my past.

To me the psychodynamic psychotherapy process is remarkable in many ways. If you have a therapist who is a good match to you and your problems, you can embark on an inner journey that can unlock parts of yourself you didn't suspect were even there. If you can uncover your natural skill at interpreting symbols and metaphors (we all do it to some degree, through watching films, reading books, etc), you will have the tools to understand your deepest feelings. If you keep a journal and patiently work through your dreams and fantasies, you'll discover all sorts of things about yourself, both painful and joyful.

Reading the accounts of people in this book, on both sides of the consulting room, has reminded me of how far I have come in the last five years. I have found the process of changing my experience of the world exhilarating and frequently very difficult. I am a different person and the same person. Change has been slow (five years!) and quick (I've rewired my brain!).

The book? It's well written, but the author's exploration of her own therapy was much less interesting than the case studies she presents in the second half. There are many fascinating insights throughout though. It reveals the power of two people talking in a room, over many months and years, within a particular power dynamic, to bring out hidden patterns of thinking so they can be reflected on and understood. And from this self-understanding, behaviour can be changed and attitudes transformed.

Literary theory

Now that I'm coming to the end of my creative writing courses, I have choices to make. Do I write the novel I've always told myself I want to write? Or do I keep generating the poems and short stories that I've proven so good at? Or do I switch back to learning the piano and singing, with the eventual aim of being a singer-songwriter?

I could do some more OU courses in the Autumn/Winter: Arts Past and Present; Design thinking - creativity in the 21st Century; Understanding Music. I'm drawn to the structure of these, and the carrot of a degree in Literature and Music at the end. They are also stimulating (and expensive!).

But I also want to slow down and rest.

I picked up Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction from the library last week and I devoured it. I have been thinking about the meaning of literature and the other objects I see in culture (paintings, songs, theatre). Where do my stories and poems fit into the network of art that already exists? Do I want to keep on writing literature, or do I want to create in a different medium? Why do I want to create anything anyway?!

There were some wonderful new ways of looking at these questions in the book. I especially like the idea of 'theory' as being behind everything, linking cultural objects from across disciplines, so literature is explored in terms of psychoanalysis, paintings are thought of in terms of narrative, and so on. It made me see the futility of trying to get to the bottom of things, to try and master knowledge. There is no end to knowledge. To engage with questions of meaning is to set out on an infinite path.

Meaning is bound by context, but context is boundless :-) How liberating!

I have decided that as an artist (and in my definition a writer is an artist) I can express something from inside myself with skill and technique. If I do that, I am successful. I cannot control what other people will like. I won't choose my next project on anything other than personal fascination.