I published a novel a few years ago.

It got some good reviews, a couple of broadly positive reviews…

and one blisteringly vicious smackdown

…by a big name

…in a national newspaper.

By “big name”, I mean an author you’ve heard of – or if you haven’t, you’ve probably heard of his most famous novel, which was made into a film that a lot of people went to see (and no, I’m not naming him here or linking to the review, because dignity … and also paywall).

Anyway, this big-name author published, in the Irish newspaper of record, a review of my first novel that was so arse-explodingly negative that it caused palpable ripples in the Irish literary scene.

I happened to be in California when the review appeared, eight hours behind Ireland, so the first I knew of it was when I woke up to a slew of messages expressing outrage and support. My friends had read the piece and rallied around me while I slept.

Not just my personal friends, either. Several other well known Irish authors weighed in, on Twitter especially, to defend me and call out their colleague for having gone totally overboard.

Over the ensuing months, I went to several literary events where people came up and commiserated with me about the review, telling me how much they’d enjoyed my book and how many of their friends they’d recommended it to.

One novelist told me she’d joined Twitter especially to come to my defence. Another announced that everybody should buy a copy of my book in protest.

Even at a book launch almost a year later, three of the four conversations I had with Irish authors made reference to what had happened.

I’m anything but blasé about this experience, by the way. It still hurts, when I poke at the memory. No doubt, when I’ve been at this game a bit longer and have a few more artistic utterances under my belt, it’ll feel more humdrum, but from here it’s still a fairly big deal.

Here are three things I took away from the experience:

First: It’s nothing to do with me.

I’ve no idea what the reviewer’s thoughts were as he wrote that piece and turned it in. He may now think he laid it on a bit thick, or he may stand by every word.

I never read the review myself, by the way. I didn’t want the visual memory, so I got my husband to read it to me, lying in bed with our arms around each other.

(Then I had to go and chill out in the beautiful onsite swimming pool and hot tub with my lovely children all through the glorious California morning to recover. My life: really not so hard.)

It was funny, as I recall. Wittily and deftly put together. It borrowed an element from my novel for its punchline.

But that’s beside the point. I am separate from it. I permit no tendril of influence to snake from it, or from its author, to me. Why he wrote it the way he did is, strictly, none of my business. It’s part of his journey, not mine.

Second: Well, I got a reaction, didn’t I?

Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying, “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

I didn’t write my book in order to move nobody, to slide under the radar. And look, it clearly got right up this famous man’s nose. I mean, he was riled.

I reckon that’s better than not affecting him at all.

Third: Connection!

I’m a huge loner, for all sorts of reasons (including introversion and long-running ill health). I am the least scene-y person on the planet. So to feel supported by the Irish writing community was as new as it was lovely.

I felt such a rush of warmth and connection every time someone offered their sympathy and encouragement that it genuinely eclipsed any worries I might have been having about the potential damage the review did me.

(We’ll never know, of course, but I do know that more than a handful of people bought my book as a direct result of reading the review.)

Free Bonus Fourth Thing

In the end, it’s very clear to me that the best revenge is to write well.

Working on that.

A while ago, I sat down to make a list entitled “Things That Are Screaming At Me Because I Haven’t Made More Progress On Them”.

(For “things”, here, read “creative projects”. Because I’m sorry to say, even though I do have a daily creative practice, that doesn’t mean all is rose-scented rainbows at unicorn mucking-out time. Sigh.)

It was a long list.

I made it because I was wound up to ninety, and braindumping the contents of my writhing mind seemed preferable to sitting there like a spare brick. I gave the headweasels free rein; they were not kind.

I think the weasels don’t really believe in progress

In their opinion, there are two acceptable states for a project:

1. conceived, but not started (hence, existing only in its Platonic ideal state);
2. finished, perfectly.

The part there in the middle, where I’m actually doing the work, makes them deeply uncomfortable. It’s like a wobbly rope bridge over the Chasm of Failure.

So every time I have an idea, they say, “Wait … is this really the best approach? Do we have exactly the right materials? Shouldn’t we research a bit more first? Maybe someone else has already done it better. Have you read so much as twelve books on the subject? Listen, let’s just hang back for a while, OK?”

And quite often, I listen to them for ages before shutting my eyes, gritting my teeth, and jumping in.

Then, every time I work on a project I’ve managed to begin, the cacophony strikes up: “Why isn’t this done already? Why haven’t we got further by now? Why aren’t we there yet? And why do we always take so long?”

(Gosh, I wonder.)

These are the whys of fear and frustration, obviously, not the whys of curiosity. No matter how much progress I make, it isn’t enough, because it should have been finished ages ago.

Finished is safe – progress is risky

There’s a third dimension too, I now realise, which is that as I draw near to the completion of a project, the poor old headweasels start to panic, because it’s … just … never going to measure up to that original, perfect inspiration.

“Wait!” they exclaim. “You can’t be planning to leave it like this! It’s not finished! Not properly! Remember what you were going to do? This isn’t half what it could have been – in fact, should have been. Lookit. Tell you what. Why don’t you put it away in a drawer for a year or two, and maybe when you come back to it you’ll have become the person this project deserves, and you’ll be able to do it justice.”

The results of all these emotional gymnastics?

Shame. Aversion. Avoidance. Resistance. Paralysis.

Thanks a million, weasels.

So anyway, I wrote my list

I shared it with some of my onlinies, and along came my good friend Fi Bowman to wave her magic wand. Whoosh!

First, she kindly and firmly reminded me that all creative people have work in progress. Obviously. Not having finished everything yet is proof of nothing whatsoever.

Second, she unhooked my anxiety around the many pieces I’ve abandoned: “They’re now officially Samples. Again, it is important to have lots of Samples as evidence of your creative explorations, even the ones that are not worth taking to a Resolved Conclusion.”

All of which is blindingly obvious, of course, but it took someone else to point that out to me before I saw it.

(How? How could I be so resistant to having samples and experiments, even after all these years? It makes no sense!)

Anyway, in an instant, instead of a list of Unfinished Things bracket Aaaarrrrgggghhh bracket, I now had WIPs and samples. Real Artists, tee em, have such articles coming out their ears, so I can too. Right, weasels?

Headweasels: Mmff.

Progress! I think.

I was chatting to one of my onlinies about creativity and blocks, and she said something that made a little light go on in my brain.

“I looked at my writing,” says she, “the way I looked at a pre-schooler’s macaroni necklace, something that no one would ever pay me for…”

A pre-schooler’s macaroni necklace

Yes! This perfectly encapsulates one of the tangles I have in my relationship with art, particularly visual art. I am intensely twitchy about standing up and saying, “Hey, I made this, and I think it’s good.”

(It’s less of an issue with my writing, although it’s true that it did take me until age 37 to send an actual novel draft to an actual literary agent.)

Objectively, I can see that many of the pieces I make are at least as fully resolved and well crafted as some of the stuff that’s out there in the world with price-tags attached.

Yet somehow, to go from there to imagining my art for sale seems like a mighty, groin-straining kind of leap.

When I look at my work, to tell you the truth, the dominant emotion is often embarrassment – I feel anxious about what would happen if anybody saw this piece and knew that I thought it was good enough to sell.

As if I were some kind of professional.

Far safer to keep my art in the domain of hobby, diversion, innocent and sloppy self-expression.

Like the woman said. Macaroni necklace.

Much to chew on here. (Chewing on raw, grubby macaroni, yes. Let’s hope the paint is non-toxic, at least.)

So what’s my point?

As adults, we mostly act in areas where we pretty much know what we’re doing. Our skills have developed to the stage where we’re no longer making macaroni necklaces.

As artists, it’s easy to fall into the habit of getting good at something and staying there. It’s comfortable, knowing you can do what you set out to do.

It’s safe.

However, if we want to develop as artists, we need to explore territory where we’re no longer sure of ourselves. We need to be willing to make messes, to try something grand that may not come off.

Kids do this all the time. It’s beautiful to watch.

No wonder so many grown-up artists talk about trying to recapture the freedom of a child. They want to integrate their adult experience and expertise with the immediacy and confidence of a child’s creative energy.

In that context, the macaroni necklace takes on a new dimension.

Children learn by doing

They don’t learn how to make art before they make art.

So, for instance, my kids have always dived in and made books and songs and films and maps, often set in their intricately realised paracosms, and they’ve drawn comic strip series and built everything, ever, out of Plasticine and Lego.

I have learnt so much from them – about process, about creative risk. They have modelled for me the proposition that mistakes are an opportunity to explore, that failure is a milestone, not a thousand-foot drop.

As they’ve grown older, they’ve inevitably begun to adopt the prevalent attitude of our culture (mistakes are bad, mm’kay?), and started judging their macaroni necklaces by harsher criteria.

Perhaps, later on, they will work to regain the artistic freedom of their childhood.

(Or, you know, they could become alienated, emotionally frozen, right-wing stockbrokers and keep me in my old age.)

But for a little while more, I still get to enjoy the gorgeous tide of creative work as it rises around me.

And try to do likewise.

A while ago I did a couple of workshops at a weekend textile conference, one in beading and another in wire sculpture.

The workshops were fairly advanced, in that there wasn’t a set path to follow: the teachers introduced techniques and gave guidance, but it was up to us to decide what to make.

I had a similar experience in both workshops, which might resonate with some of you.

Beady Doodles

(Boody deedles. Deedy boodles. Dudely beadles. Needy poodles. Hey, cut it out, brain. Do you see any of the other brains behaving like this?)

The first thing I made in the beading workshop is pictured above: I took a piece of black velvet, sewed the middle bead on and started doodling around it, circle by circle, without any kind of plan. I liked the encrusted sort of look I was getting. The teacher suggested muting the purple sequins by sewing spokes over them, which I think worked well.

“Now,” she said, when I finished the sequins and paused to look at the piece, “that’s beautiful.” She paused and grinned. “Put it away, and make a mess.”

So in the last half-hour of the workshop, I made this:

“Ooh!” said my fellow beaders. “That’s lovely!”

“Hm,” I said. Because I really didn’t know what to make of that.

I quite liked how the piece looked. But I found myself unsettled by the idea that it might be … any good.

Something there about effort and intention, and in particular, the concept of a “resolved” piece. More to explore.

The Wire

Next day, the wire sculpture workshop began with introductions, and we all said what we were hoping to make. I explained what had happened the previous day and said I wanted encouragement to go big and make a mess.

I started with some knitting. I made a small rectangle and scrunched it into a shape that I thought might be the basis for an animal of some sort (a sheep, I was thinking, on account of the knitting).

The teacher travelled slowly around the room, commenting on people’s work. When she got to mine, she exclaimed, “Gosh, that’s tiny!”

She was not wrong. Here it is with a thimble for scale:

We laughed.

“I bet you can go a bit bigger and messier than that. What do you think?”

So I put my little wodge of knitted wire aside, and struck out into the unknown.

Here’s what I made:

Well. I think this qualifies as a mess, all right. (But no messiah.)

It’s rough. It’s wonky.

It’s … how can I put this? … a beaded wire teapot … which is kind of playful, no? (I’m not terribly comfortable with playful, so this aspect appeals to me.)

Much to my surprise, there are bits of this piece that I really like. The handle and the underside of the spout please me enormously. The flexible, coloured wire that I used to lace the beads on comes from inside a modem cable, which in itself makes me smile.

More importantly, it feels as though making it opened up something for me. It’s not a beautiful piece of finished work. It’s not even useful. (Maybe I should make a version in chocolate?) But I made it anyway – and in the process figured out some techniques that I might well use again later.

Or possibly not. But they’re there if I want them.

That’s quite an expansive feeling.

Back to the part about similarity

I notice that in both workshops, I started out with a relatively careful, small, cramped piece, and had to be nudged into pushing that envelope.

It reminds me of a remark a cousin of my father’s made to me a long time ago. She was doing some art outreach workshops with schools in deprived areas. She said her first job was invariably to get the kids to allow themselves to draw pictures that filled up the whole page.

It’s about entitlement to occupy space.

Non-trivial, in other words. And kind of resonant, too – you’ll find it pops up all over the place once you start thinking about it.

In my case, also at stake is my entitlement to make things even if they’re not beautiful and successful. That’s a tough one for me. It runs deep.

(How deep? Very. Very deep, is how.)

My sense is that I hedged my bets in both of these workshops by starting small, because then at least if I made (objectively, you know) ugly failures, I wouldn’t have –

[arruga! arruga!]
OMG W-A-S-T-E-D

– too much space or materials on them.

Ahahaha.

You know what?

Fuck. That. Noise.

So. I’m not saying that I’m going to go about, like, wrapping Dublin City Hall in a hand-pieced metal quilt featuring beaded teapots (… hmmm … not this year, anyway). But I’ll definitely be paying more attention to how I feel about size, scale, entitlement to use materials and to occupy space with my work.

I may look specifically at pushing the embiggenation envelope a bit harder, too.

Fair warning.