There’s an old adage that you know when you’re an real X-er when you can’t help but do X and for some reason I’ve been coming across it a lot recently. A real writer can’t help but write, a real cartoonist can’t help but draw, a real musician can’t help but make music, that sort of thing.
As I was procrastinating this morning by checking out the first episode of David Mamet‘s TV show The Unit (not bad but not brilliant) and cleaning our incredibly dirty living room windows when I should have been writing or taking photos or setting up weblogs or doing something else creative I wondered if there was anything I can’t help but do and nothing specific came to mind.
Is this something I should be worried about? Or is it that a real dilettante can’t help but do an infinite number of creative endeavors at a superficial level?
The following is just my humble op:
The only thing you should worry about is whether you have your basic needs fulfilled, you’re happy and have the things that are likely to keep you happy in the future. Hopefully this will be stuff like friends, some worthwhile shit to be getting on with, good food, music and company, decent mental health and a decent set of values, which you apply. The rest is a distraction. But once you’ve got the base-line sorted, you’re free to let yourself get a bit distracted from time to time? ;o) I don’t think a bit of TV’ll do you any harm considering your usual prolificy and levels of activity. Besides, I happen to think you’re a f*cking good writer and that you have, over the course of this blog, achieved ever-increasing levels of excellence. It’s the only blog I’ve managed to stick with (apart from Jeremy Dennis’s) purely for entertainment rather than for research purposes.
(NB: Christopher Marlowe didn’t write all the time. He had to do some living too so he had shit to write about. I expect you to blog about your dirty living room in your next entry.)
Maybe you can’t help but procrastinate.
(Pot, kettle… I know, I know…)
I don’t believe it stops you being a ‘real’ writer. Look at Douglas Adams.
Like Matthew B, I’ve stuck with your blog for years and no-one else’s. This is partly because you write about stuff I’m interested in, but mainly because you write it honestly, bravely and well. I see both your writing and your actions which you write about as examples of your curiosity for the world around you and a testing of the beliefs you’ve developed, if that’s not a real writer I don’t know what is.
All of the above. I read because I respect your courage to get out there and explore, then your courage to come back in and publicly describe the experience in a way that make me feel like I’ve lived it a little. It’s enjoyable, vicarious living.
What struck me was that although that’s what I’m experiencing again at the moment, I could describe it no better than ‘a malaise’. Now, I find that no matter how much honest praise I receive when I’m like this, I will pretty much feel like a fraud and a dilettante anyway, so I might as well ignore until I get over it, as it’s not useful to me.
But in your case it looks like just by thinking about it, you’ve grown. You’ve taken the temperature of life at the moment, found it jars with your idea about yourself and that’s left you feeling unsettled. So you’ve accurately examined your feelings, then written about them in an honest and enlightening way. Seems you can’t help doing that. Congratulate yourself and move along. Nothing to worry about here.
BTW, I think what Matthew B said is nice breakdown of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. ie. Once you get the basics sorted, it’s time to self-actualize. That’s got to be the hardest part about honest-to-yourself living, but from what I’ve read, you certainly seem to fulfill half of the categories already:
1.They embrace the facts and realities of the world (including themselves) rather than denying or avoiding them.
2. They are spontaneous in their ideas and actions.
3. They are creative.
4. They are interested in solving problems.
Hey Pete.
You do a hell of a lot more productive work than I do. Everyone has their own threshold of work-related guilt. It seems to be a very Western (not to mention puritanical!) precept, which, as Matthew B rightly points out, springs from our relative levels of comfort and security, leaving us with a ‘what now?’ dilemma almost daily. In your case, the low-responsiblity temping is both a boon and a bondage for your ever-ticking mindtank. But as someone who lives with you and sees how incredibly seriously and diligently you tackle the projects you set yourself, you should also give yourself some time to slack off. Yes, TV is often evil, preposterous and inane. Most often it is all these things at once. But, as with any medium, the important decision is which parts you CHOOSE to take on board. In that sense at least, despite its passive nature, it has as much to do with your subjective analysis as any other ‘artform’, as proved by your reviews from this week’s Sunday night tellyfest. I’m really not sure where all this is going, except to say RELAX! Sometimes the worst thing in the world is to believe everything your brain tells you.
A lot of “hi-falootin” talk there when the answer is obvious.
A real cleaner, cleans.. how is your living room anyway?
Seriously though, I think I’d rather be a dilettante, it’s far more fun and allows you to follow, and drop, ideas at your whim. Far more satisfying than being a slave to your endeavours, no?
You can’t help doing this blog, obviously.
(Like me with the early comics website)
Drawing is more of a slog for me, because the result never comes up to my expectations, but without it I feel even worse.
TV is great if you carefully choose what to watch and switch off when it’s rubbish. Just saw a doc about a 12 year old science wunderkind from India. Turns out he was *too* focused and needed to relax a bit, not just for his mental health, but to actually improve his mental capabilities.
I’m a Real Idiot :)
There’s times when creativity takes hard graft, but I always think you can tell if someone’s enjoyed themselves when they’ve been doing something creative. A bit of energy and exhuberance are always great for a piece of work, and if you’re not feeling particularly energetic on any given day, then that’s going to show itself in your writing. This is not a general excuse for putting off work over a long period of time, but for a lad like you who has an impressive work rate, it’s not going to harm you to switch off your brain and watch crap once in a while.
Don’t worry about the times when you don’t do anything, it’s about what you achieve when you do get around to doing something. And you can learn as much from a bad example as you can from a good example, so think of watching bad telly as research.
“A real writer can’t help but write”
As a person who started writing her first novel at the age of 29 having never written anything before, I suffered really badly from this insecurity, even after my first attempt was actually published an’ everyfink.
It was compounded by the fact that my mum is a published writer, and in the blurbs on the backs of her books it tell this little tale about how she’s a natural storyteller and used to make up stories for the kids in the playground and wrote her first book at the age of 15… and I would think what a charlatan I was and clearly not a proper writer.
But the proof of the pudding and all that. If you write, you’re a writer. Doesn’t matter how, when, where or why. If you do, you do.
And as for the procrastination thing… anybody who Xes and doesn’t at times come up with any excuse imaginable to avoid Xing what they’re supposed to be Xing… well, if you ask me, they’re not a real Xer.