A while back, I was queueing in a bookshop when a nice man I’d never seen before came up and greeted me warmly. He’d read my novel and wanted to tell me in person how much he’d enjoyed it.

(This being the twenty-first century, he’d already told me on Twitter. Obv. Additionally, this being Dublin, he was a former student of my mother’s.)

We exchanged a few words and went our separate ways, and the whole thing lifted me for the rest of the afternoon.

I tweeted about it later, how I’d been recognised in a shop – get me and my glitzy life – and I added “just like a Real Author”, because oh yeah, I am still subject to one of the stupidest and most pernicious lies we tell ourselves.

What lie, you ask?

It’s the one that goes like this:

It’s OK for other people, we say to ourselves, they’re allowed. But I’m not. Because they’re them, you see, and the trouble is, I’m me.

(Allowed what, though? Well, whatever it is we’re talking about. In this case, allowed to call themselves Real Authors.)

Wait, though.

I’ve published a novel, and I have substantial chunks of … let’s see, four others on my hard drive, in varying states of development and all very much on the path to completion.

You can buy my novel, for actual money, from actual booksellers, and real people have written reviews of it both online and in national print newspapers.

I even appeared on a panel at a book festival as my author self.

That all seems relatively squarely in the domain of the real, doesn’t it?

Interestingly, until my book hit the shops, the headweasels had no trouble with the idea that publishing a novel would constitute being a Real Author. At that time, they and I were working on the question of whether I was allowed to characterise myself as Real even before I had a book out. We went back and forth on the issue.

Alas, it now appears that the same headweasels have braved snow, rain, heat, gloom of night, etc., crept out onto the playing field, and shifted the goalposts.

(Their spokesweasel is at some pains to stress that they’re only doing their jobs.)

They currently estimate that I’ll need to have at least, oh, half a dozen more novels published, and ideally a fistful of glittering accolades (…although they concede that shabby-chic accolades would probably be acceptable, in these straitened times…), before I am a Really Real Author.

It’s like being a Real Princess, you see. The question is, can I discern the word “pea” through twenty repetitions of the word “mattress”?

Well, can I, punk?

Do you do this?

Does the value of the things you achieve plummet instantly and dramatically as soon as you achieve them? Does “Well, I did this, so it can’t have been very hard” feature in your self-talk?

I’m kind of half-hoping so, because then I won’t feel so alone.

But seriously: if you do this, please stop.

It’s nonsense.

Why would different rules apply to you than to everybody else?

Why shouldn’t you measure your own achievements by the same yardstick you apply to other people’s?

Why would you be singled out for harsher judgement than any other human on the planet?

Is your potential so dangerous, so full of unexploded lumps of pure peril, that it must be squished at all costs?

No.

You have exactly as much right to make stuff, be proud of it, and claim the appropriate descriptions as anybody else. Or to put it in terms even the most hardbitten headweasels will understand, dude, you’re probably not that special.

 

Thirty years, eh? It’s been a while.

I know where I was on the afternoon of 25 June 1990, and I’d bet cash money that a couple of million Irish people can say the same. Three decades on, I’m thinking about a very specific memory: a frozen moment that was plastered across the length and breadth of Ireland for months and years after the event in which it happened.

I’m thinking about that image and why it feels so enduringly important.

So, thirty years ago, on the afternoon of 25 June 1990, I was mostly…

…hiding behind my parents’ sofa.

Ireland was playing Romania in the round of sixteen at the World Cup, having first miraculously qualified for the tournament, and then ultra-miraculously got through the group stage.

The country was drunk on soccer.

(And – let’s be honest – in many cases, also booze. Not me, though: I was a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, who wouldn’t even try to get served in a pub for at least another year. I know, right? Look at my angelic face. Virtue is its own reward.)

I wasn’t particularly into football, actually, but the 1990 World Cup was a big deal in Ireland, and so I was watching this match. If we won, we’d advance to the quarter-finals.

It was nail-biting. The score after extra time stood at 0-0, which meant the match had to be decided by that cruel ordeal, the penalty shootout.

I hid behind our fat floral sofa, gripping a piped edge and peering out as each shot was taken.

It’s almost impossible to save a penalty. The goalie has to make a micro-second decision on which way to jump as the striker kicks. Guess right, and you’ve got a tiny chance of stopping the ball. Guess wrong, and you’re toast.

Goal after goal after goal, the score climbed to 4-4.

(“Me nerves!!!” exclaimed everyone in Ireland.)

Then the fifth Romanian player – Daniel Timofte, interjects Uncle Google helpfully – stepped up and took his shot, and the Irish goalie, Packie Bonner from Donegal, read it right, got his gloved hands to the ball, and pushed it away. David O’Leary then sent the final shot singing into the back of the net, clinching victory for Ireland.

So we won 5-4 on penalties and went on to the quarter-finals (and a 1-0 loss to Italy; oh well).

It’s difficult to overestimate the effect of this win on the Irish public.

“Euphoria” doesn’t begin to cover it. It was national delirium. You could even argue that it was among the catalysts of the economic and social transformation this country underwent in the 1990s. It opened something. In a very real sense, you had to be there.

(Mind you, if you just want to watch the penalty shootout, you can, because we are living in the future now and nothing is lost. My kids have seen it, although they weren’t even born in the same century as that match. They can sing “We’re All Part of Jackie’s Army”, too. It’s disconcerting.)

Dedicated Irish fans can tell the tale of the Romania match in loving detail. But even lukewarm supporters like me remember that save – that beautiful, impossible save.

Over in a split-second, it turned Packie Bonner into a national hero. By contrast, in 1991 I met some Romanian teenagers: his was the only Irish name they knew, and they spat it out like a curse.

The still image of the save featured later in a poster ad campaign for some bank (save, geddit?) – captured just as Bonner punches the ball clear: he lies horizontal in the air, a foot or two above the grass. Heroic. Gravity-defying. Breathtaking.

As I said, I’m not much of a football fan, and this clearly isn’t a sports blog. It’s a blog about creativity, the human impulse to make art.

So why am I writing about this?

It’s that image: Packie Bonner, suspended in mid-save.

Total commitment.

Total focus.

Total presence.

A human being flinging their whole self (here, literally) into what they’re doing. The sheer exuberant vulnerable humanity of it.

And here comes my point: That’s also the way to make good art.

And here comes my other point: Success or failure is irrelevant – the thing is to commit.

Because the other thing I remember is this:

Packie Bonner flung himself just as hard each time he failed.

We don’t see stills of him letting in the first four Romanian penalties, but if we did, they’d show him in the same aspect, lying sideways on thin air, hands outstretched, striving.

So I’m wondering, how can I fling myself more fully at what I want to enact in the world?

For that matter, how can you?

 

There is a truth about judgement that every creative person needs to bear in mind

You’re familiar with judgement, obviously. It’s a powerful human faculty. Good judgement – a quality linked to things like taste, discernment, and reliability – is something I think we all strive towards in one way or another. Poor judgement, meanwhile, can quickly get us into hot water.

So judgement is an important skill. It helps us use what we’ve learned in the past to take us into the future without messing up.

Judgement feels clear and solid and final. Grounded and safe.

Take it too far, though, and we run the risk of becoming  judgemental – letting judgement become an end in itself, rather than a useful cognitive instrument. The feeling of power that goes with judgement can be addictive, and sometimes we allow our strong opinions to delude us into thinking we’re entitled to comment when we’re really not.

I used to describe myself as “allergic” to judgement – it actually felt as though I’d oversensitised myself to it through many years of classic A-student hoop-jumping activities.

(“Grade me! Look at me! Evaluate and rank me!” – Lisa Simpson)

Nowadays, although I do recognise that judgement is an important skill, I think it’s overused, wheeled out in situations where it’s really not needed. I won’t lie to you: I’m more than a little leery of it.

I finally realised why

You see, judgement is incompatible with presence.

That’s important. I’m going to repeat it, in letters of bigness:

Judgement

is incompatible

with presence.

It places distance between the judging mind and the thing being judged. Which can be useful, but not in every circumstance.

Your creative work, by contrast, demands presence.

You cannot be fully creative if you are not fully present

You cannot write a great first-kiss scene while looking after your toddler. You cannot implement a great visual composition while doing your taxes. You cannot give a great musical performance while thinking about your relationship problems.

Creative work demands your presence. It demands that you come and meet it, fully, in the moment, forsaking all else for the time being. That’s why it’s so tiring, and that’s also why it’s so satisfying.

But if you are judging, you are by definition not fully present. For judgement to take place, as I said, there has to be some gap, some space between the moment and the mind.

Therefore, learning to suspend judgement – temporarily! – is a practical prerequisite to the creative process.

Make first, judge later. (Or never.)

Here’s a question

How true is the above for you and for your creative practice?

You are, unavoidably, in relationship with the quality of judgement, and you have the power to manage that relationship in ways that are healthy for you.

So have a think about it, and see if there are any adjustments you want to make.

I’m slowly getting back to working on my novel draft at the moment, so I’ve been thinking about this writing metaphor I came up with many years ago. I use it to describe the difference between drafting and editing — to try to pin down why the skills required for these two activities are so different, and why drafting can be so very hard.

Maybe it’ll resonate for you too.

(I suppose the metaphor might also apply to sketching, sampling, prototyping, workshopping, and other analogous techniques, but I mostly find it useful in thinking about writing. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that, if you think it speaks to your particular discipline.)

Here’s how it goes.

You head to the quarry in the morning to cut your stone. You work hard through the heat of the day, digging and blasting, wedging and splitting, sweat dripping unheeded from your brow and running salty channels down your dust-filmed skin.

(Get a load of you and your sun-bronzed, taut-muscled body, there. Mmmm.)

At the end of your labours, you have extracted a lump of stone, roughly shaped, roughly sized, unfinished.

You drag it back to your studio and you stumble, exhausted, into your bed.

That lump of stone?

That’s your draft.

Next morning, in your studio, you set to work with your chisels and your hammers, your drills and your picks, chipping and grinding, rounding and polishing, standing back to see the effect of the light on your work, darting in again to make an adjustment.

That’s the editing process, and it is a very different undertaking from the production of the draft.

Different tools, different methods, different challenges. (I have a whole different metaphor for it, too, which I’ll explore in another post.)

These tasks have an optimal order.

With the best will in the world, you can’t carve a piece of stone that hasn’t been quarried yet.

Moreover, there’s not much point in working detail into your lump when it’s still only halfway out of the mountainside.

And for goodness sake, please don’t use dynamite in the studio, or you’ll never hear the end of it from the Elfin Safety.

The takeaway here: quarry first, then carve.

Personally, I much prefer editing to drafting.

Having material in front of me to work with feels far easier than making something appear where nothing was before.

So when I draft, I have to use sneaky tactics to stop myself from drifting into the chiselling and polishing parts of the work and keep myself focused on that bloody mountainside.

Here are some tactics I use, for anyone who may be interested:

• Working out of order, on whatever scene most excites me right now.
• Drawing up scenes in bullet points before drafting them.
• Working in timed sessions, typing as fast as I can, without stopping.
• Using dictation software, and working with my eyes closed.
• Leaving curly-bracketed notes for myself when I need to research something, rather than breaking off to look it up there and then.
• Using a spreadsheet to track my progress and motivate myself to keep at it.

It’s not a perfect metaphor, obviously.

Drafting a long piece of fiction can involve rewriting the same material many times, for instance, or completely rearranging the structure, or adding large chunks that weren’t in the original lump at all. Harder to do that with stone.

Also, sometimes it feels like the quarry is not a mountainside, precisely, but rather your guts, into which you’re digging with a rusty spoon.

But there’s definitely something there.

Something about the rhythm of the work — it’s good to let yourself build up momentum by quieting that second-guessing editor voice and just thumping away until you dislodge something usable from your brain.

This is where many writers find that they surprise themselves: fresh, sparky ideas emerge in the moment that they didn’t consciously invent.

That sort of magic can only happen if you get out of your own way and let your fiction-quarrying tools swing freely in the breeze.

The attitude is the important part.

When you’re drafting, do drafting.

Let the work come as it comes, in a rough-hewn lump, rudely hauled out of the mountain.

Leave the editing until later, when you know what you’re dealing with.

At the very least, you’ll save yourself a lot of pain.