'I'm an aaaartist, darling!'
Every month, I spend about five days wanting to crawl out of my own skin. Inexplicably sad, monstrously irritable, even more impatient than usual, and always one cancelled train away from collapsing into a tearful heap. We all know what causes this cyclical misery. But maddeningly, knowing that it’s inevitable, biological, and above all, temporary, rarely makes me feel any better. I do try. When I feel the tides of loathing for both myself and everyone around me start to rise, I try and think, ‘oh, this again. It’ll be over in a few days’ – but more often than not, those words are drowned out by the banshee howls of hormonal distress. Accepting that you’re just going to feel like a walking calamity for a while and deciding to have faith that it will pass is difficult. It’s less mind over matter and more mind versus itself.
Now, I don’t want to besmirch the characters of the writers, musicians, artists and creatives-at-large I know personally, but they all have a few things in common. Namely: a need for control, a tendency towards strong emotions, a knack for self-loathing, and a keen awareness of their own inner contradictions. Not to mention personal lives that tend towards the dramatic, but that’s another discussion entirely.
I’ve just finished reading John Yorke’s excellent Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them – which, while it’s mainly aimed at screenwriters, I’ve found really useful. It picks apart story structure in minute detail and, as I have no formal training in writing fiction yet am bold enough to think I can write a novel, it’s shed some much-needed light on the essentials of storytelling.
What makes a story, then? Well, conflict, whether internal or external, and ideally both. So maybe what makes a writer/creative-at-large (I’m running with that phrase now) is being more conflicted, and more aware of your own internal conflicts, than most other people. You’re overly self-critical because you’re sensitive, and that sensitivity makes the world’s utter randomness feel almost intolerable – so you create order. You are au fait with conflict – it’s there in your head all the time, what you are versus what you think you could be, both better and worse: will you succumb to your worst traits or embody your best ones? – so you turn to art, whatever your art is, to solve it. And you never think what you create is good enough, because it matters to you. If it didn’t matter, you’d do a slapdash job and walk away. Or you’d give it up and retrain as an accountant, or a butcher.
In Emma Jane Unsworth’s episode of the In Writing podcast, she talks of trying to adopt an attitude she gleaned from sculptor Claire Lambe: ‘the self-loathing is part of the process’. If you accept that feeling shit about yourself and your ability to create is a key part of what drives you to create in the first place, then… well, it’s a start.
The tortured artist is a cliché and a bore. But at the heart of the trope lies a small truth: none of us would ever have written a word, played a note, set foot near a stage, if we weren’t trying to fix something, in ourselves and in the world. We wouldn’t be working so hard to conjure narratives from chaos if it didn’t satisfy something, if it didn’t scratch the sweet spot in our itchy brains, if the chase wasn’t such a slow yet steady thrill.
The conflict is the curse, but it’s also the cause.
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