Motherload

Thank you to Suzy Banks Baum, who very kindly asked if I would write something for her site, Laundry Line Divine .   Here's what I sent her. It's about the problem of combining creativity and discipline. I've also copied it below for ease of reading: The Language of Discipline I have had to learn whole new ways of speaking since becoming a mother. In my childfree life, I wrote about Marcel Proust and his obsession with time passing. For me, as for him, the obsession with time passing amounted to an obsession with self passing — how, as your life goes by, your identity shifts continually. Different parts of who you are come to rigidify or dissolve. What was once frozen with fear expands to airy liberation. Elements of yourself you thought you could never do without become redundant or obstructive and have to be jettisoned, like empty rocket boosters. The characteristics you held closest to your heart ossify and desiccate. For example, how, from uptight teenager, you l...

Daily ritual — absolutely crucial if you want to do any kind of creative work. The other ingredient? Self-belief. Here's what I know: 1. There's no such thing as writer's block. 2. Getting up early is the best way to marshal your wakening brain with your deepest energy. 3. Good coffee. 4. No alcohol. 5. No internet (doh). 6. Knowing what task you need to start on. 7. Only attempting one task. 8. Continually feeding your memory of yourself as in love with art. Galleries, books, films. And make notes on what you see. 9. Walk everywhere. 10. Never react to other people's messy excess. 11. Talk about your work with others who actually feed rather than crushing you. But don't talk about how hard it is to write (nothing is more boring either to say or to hear), just about how to solve the technical problem you're grappling with. Writing is both solitary and collaborative — after all, you're doing it to be read, aren't you? 12. List...

I was absolutely delighted to be asked to write a guest post for a blog I follow, on combining creativity and motherhood. The blog is called Studio Mothers : enjoy! The Sugar Log

I've been exercised about exactly what creativity is for some time now. Apparently while I've been exercised about this, others have been busy appropriating it. Which is odd, because I had the feeling that creative used to be what your mother hoped you weren't, so that you'd do well in your exams and get a good job. These days, creativity is a term that is linked more often with enterprise , innovation and collaboration than with drug-fuelled hippies, going off the rails, and lone artists in garrets. What's being stolen is the origin of creativity. It's being sold back to us as a commodity, something we can buy cheaply and easily, but which effaces the origins of the product, like brightly-lit supermarkets purveying white milk in plastic containers, rather than cows. Let me give an example. Jonah Lehrer is a clever young chap, who wrote a book called Proust was a Neuroscientist (by implication, I am not, I am a grumpy old woman). I read and enjoyed ...