MJ Walters

Software and me - a history

1979, Moon Cresta, Donkey Kong Jr, fruit machines, little black handheld space invaders with red dots, ZX Spectrum, Manic Miner, Jetpac, typing listings from magazines, The Hobbit, Snowball, Lurking Horror, failing to write my own games, Commodore 64, swapping tapes, Atari ST, swapping disks.

1989, University, Fortran, copying someone else and getting caught, an old PC, word processing, writing bad stories, solitaire.

1998, Pascal, Delphi, software engineering, databases, artificial intelligence, websites, email, first PC of my own, HTML, Quake, Flash, ColdFusion, Javascript, big teams, user interfaces, intimidating Java guys.

2003, Powerbook, PHP, MySQL, Apache, SQL, ColdFusion again, project management, web development, business processes, process re-engineering, marketing, content management systems, maintainability.

Now, ColdFusion, Oracle, PL/SQL, requirements, database redesign and data imports.

Where did the fun go?

Facebook - yikes!

I ummed. I ahhed. Then I did it. I joined Facebook.

I have strong mixed feelings about doing this. Working in IT, I'm as aware as anyone of the myriad of databases that hold our personal data - shopping preferences, bank statements, browser histories, credit histories, mobile phone logs, email logs - and as many times as people tell us our data will only be used for [whatever] purpose, it's still there. And forever if companies don't do as they should and stick to data protection policies.

And I'm uncomfortable with the way it walls off a large part of the Internet to a privately-funded enclave through which, at some point, investors are going to want to make some serious money. All  of that personal data will be there to lure us with marketing bait.

On the other hand, everyone is doing it, and I would love to try it :-) I feel like a starved child, my face against the expensive restaurant window glass, watching fat couples in evening dress eating chicken and dribbling juice down their chins.

But enough of my fantasies.

Facebook - I am yours! Let's see if you are worth the sacrifice...

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?!

Incremental life changes

I have just finished reading a book that has knocked me off my axis by a couple of degrees: Art and Fear, by Bayles/Orland. That doesn't happen very often. I need to absorb some new information...!

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?

Sleep deprivation

I have always felt most energised when I have eight hours sleep in the bag.

Our daughter is three weeks old. Today I am working. Last night I had five hours, broken into three chunks of 2, 2, 1. This morning I could surf a wave of caffeine. but this afternoon my head hurts and I have no patience with anyone around me.

I am now going to sleep under my desk.

Unsettled, exciting times

The last month has been totally crazy - waiting for labour to begin, a baby daughter, sleepless nights, the end of my creative writing course, going back to work sleep-deprived, etc. We are also quickly realising how little space we have, so moving house is on the cards too.

So, as I gather myself and try to regain some creative composure (because isn't that what this site is about for me?), please be patient. Whoever you are :-) or are not.

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.

Artist, designer, craftsman

Creative writing is a tool to express myself, and through re-drafting, understand myself. Essay-writing can have a similar function if the subject fascinates me, but more often it is about understanding ideas and integrating them into my thought processes and deeper memory.

The act of writing for me is both expressive (the first draft) and reflective (the following x drafts). Sometimes I have an idea in mind before I begin, sometimes I discover the idea as I splurge my emotions and ideas into my journal, and sometimes I have to write the first draft before I see what the piece is really about.

I say these things because the act of writing something original requires three parts of me: the craftsman, the designer and the artist. These parts of me are intertwined in some tasks and separate in others. When I'm generating without thinking then I'm in artist mode, with a touch of craftsman. When I'm writing a second draft, I'm equal parts all three. When I'm looking at the over-arching structure, I'm designer only. And so on.

All of these parts of me are creative - they all have access to my unconscious mind. An artist needs to come up with a vision that stimulates me to grow. The designer needs to solve the problems of fulfilling that vision. The craftsman needs to make the second by second decisions that make up the choice of words in a paragraph. Intuitive decision-making is hard-wired into the whole process.

So: art and design. I looked up some definitions in the dictionary. To design is to imagine how something could be made and then to plan how to do it. Art isn't even a verb - I can only "make art". The closest I could get was an artist as someone who creates things with great skill and imagination. That sounds the same as a designer to me.

I think there is another step to this line of thought, but I can't quite see it yet... something about how all this relates to my writing and my software engineering skills...