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.

JG Ballard

I have known of JG Ballard for many years, ever since I took a girl to see Crash on a first date (by mistake, naturally). I was impressed by it, even as my amorous intentions were soundly doused.

But I also knew he wrote Empire of the Sun, and I just wasn't interested in that sort of story in those days. I didn't read much of anything in fact, I had embarked on an MSc in Computer Science and I was a totally IT focussed mofo.

Now, ten years on, drawn equally towards the Arts and Sciences, I have stumbled across him again, but this time as a literary figure. I bought his recently published in paperback short stories part 1 and it's great - full of imagination and crazy scientific ideas that half make sense and philosophical meanderings. Don't get me wrong, they are works from a writer-in-progress. But perhaps because that is where I find myself now, I like that, I take comfort in fact from that.

I like that he didn't seperate his love of science from his writing.

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...!

Multiple identities

I've been thinking about identity for a couple of years now, and this thinking has played an important role in my coming to think of myself as a writer.

The OU has some wonderful courses, and this week I finished the 'Identity' book of DD100: Introduction to Social Sciences. It basically says identity is a dynamic thing, it requires active engagement. It is the interaction between the individual and society. Some things are only partially in our control (our economic situation), some things are out of our control (disability), and some things are there for the changing (how we dress).

Now the same things that make up our identities, make up the identities of characters I write in stories. And if I want characters to flow from inside me, then I need to understand myself as much as possible. What makes up this collection of selves I present to the world, both consciously and unconsciously? My gender, my social class, my employment, the clothes I wear, the vocabulary I use, and on and on.

And even more interestingly, we have multiple identities - I am a writer, a software engineer, a father, a life partner, a student, a guitar-player... Some of these identities can be in conflict. How do I reconcile my writer with my musician for example? When I get a spare hour, do I write or practice guitar? When I am not in paid employment, am I still a software engineer? Am I unemployed? Am I middle class, working class, classless? It's all fascinating, and it's all grist to the character development mill.

What am I writing about?

About five years ago I was unhappy with the way my life was going. I started digging through self-help books for ways to change things - a classic mid-life crisis, but without the money to buy a flash car. Which helped, because I probably would have bought a flash car if we hadn't been dirt poor with a new-born baby. Think of the environment!

Now, I am a writer. I haven't been published, so some people take issue with my labelling myself a writer. but I think of myself as a writer because I write. I write short stories, poems and life writing. I have completed the Open University Creative Writing course, and I am about to finish the Advanced Creative Writing course.

It's taken an awfully long time to believe I was a writer. I don't think quality is a barrier, personally. There are good writers, bad writers and mediocre writers. But if you believe you are one, you are one. Other people don't come into it. They may try, but if they do, ask yourself - why do they want you to feel differently?

What do I write about? Whatever is fascinating me at the time. At the moment I'm thinking about the change process I've experienced over the last five years. I have reinvented myself, to myself.

The two OU courses have given me the skills I need to write something longer on that topic. Which is where I am today. Beginning. Perhaps some people who read this are on a similar journey of personal discovery. If you are, let me know :-)