I have been pretty useless at this lately. I’m sorry. Especially to my paid subscribers, I promise I’m working on some stuff for you.
My complete inability to write these posts is because I’m working on my next book. It’s taking a lot of space up, both physically (so much paper, a supply of pens that needs constant replenishing) and mentally (obviously).
The process felt not quite perfunctory but certainly sort of procedural for a while. I got to the studio, I looked at the list of what had to be drawn and I drew a few things each day to tick off that list. Character one in the kitchem, characters one and two on a park bench etc etc. It was straightforward. The text was with the publisher getting a read through (which would result in notes) and whilst that was happening all I could do was plough through the images (focusing on the ones I knew wouldn’t be on the chopping block). I worked through over a hundred pages of drawings like this. Show up, check the script, draw, go home.
And then, a couple of weeks ago, I got the mania.
To be clear this isn’t a medical mania, please done worry about me! It’s the good kind of mania, a propulsive, addictive feeling that, miraculously, seems to be attached to your own work. You can’t get enough of it, there are problems to solve, things to polish, tweak and tidy. There is work to be done and, unusually, you really can’t wait to do it.
The good-kind-of-mania is elusive. Or at least it is these days. I can’t manufacture the conditions under which it occurs, can’t predict, exactly, when it’ll come. Some projects can go start to finish without it ever happening, others are manic from start to finish (Alison, for example, was completed in a single compulsive burst).
I’m sat in a cafe in Camberwell and the song Just by Radiohead is playing (the cafe is on an early nineties guitar kick today). When I was in my teens I was a massive Radiohead fan. I read the message boards, visited a Radiohead News website every day, I spent ages fourteen to sixteen doing very poor Stanley Donwood rip-offs in my GCSE art class. When I got to university the obsession had passed it’s peak but I still found that putting on a Radiohead album when I was painting (usually OK Computer or Kid A or Amnesiac, if you’re asking) would fast-track me to a feeling a bit like flow.
FLOW is the, according to wikipedia, “the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity”. This is mostly unrelated but there’s a nice little Isy Suttie radio doc where she talks about ASMR feeling a bit like flow .
Listening to Radiohead as a student felt a bit like being in my teenage bedroom; an attic room whose walls I had covered with photos, flyers, postcards and print-outs to a level that makes me feel quite addled to think about now. I sat up there quite happily for days on end painting and drawing. I was annoyed whenever I had to get up (roughly every 45mins) to change the CD. I was fixated on what I was doing. If I put my headphones in the painting studio I found a route into my work that meant I could ignore the self-consciousness of working in a room with other people. It was like being at home.
In the early 2000s me and my friends were all loyal to Orange’s Five-free-text-messages-a-day offer. Which meant that as long as your phone was topped up every month you got five free texts each day. We only sent those five messages, rationing out the letters carefully. hi.how ru?c u @the field @6? Luv u xxxx (Seems like we were only saving the letters to use them as kisses at the end of the message). Anyway the texting was metered out carefully so the chances that your afternoon would be interrupted by your phone was minimal. What a novelty.
I know that I’m an adult because I occasionally pine for things I’ve definitely lost to youth (also because I’m 37 and no one has asked for my ID in years). This is the thing I miss, the one thing I would happily take back from my adolescence (you can keep your traumatic dentistry thank you very much). If I could sit in a room, uninterrupted, with all my CDs and shoeboxes filled with paint and brushes and somehow have the focus and concentration to noodle away for days I would be so very happy.
I think I reference this interview with writer Meg Mason quite often. Have I already mentioned it? It’s possible. In it she talks about writing in a shed in her garden and leaving her phone in the house. This isn’t meant to be a post about the evils of phones, I promise. What Mason says is that if you keep your phone on your desk then you stay…on the surface of the pool. The pool being, I guess, youre creative consciousness. The longer you spend on something the further into the pool you go. (I am realising that I’ve definitely mentioned this before). You want to get into those deep, murky, complex waters, not stay at the surface. Every time you check your phone or your email you float back to the top.
The mania, flow, whatever you want to call it, is all about getting to the deep, weird part of the pool. And I’ve felt that recently, hours passing drawing and drawing and not realising that you’ve been at it for a whole afternoom. It’s such a nice feeling.
I’m trying to visit the bottom of the pool as often as I can. I don’t get there everyday. I’m not good at turning off my phone and I like when I get a nice email to reply to but, if I allow myself, I can close once or twice a week. Which feels, frankly, miraculous.
Other things that have inspired a little light mania-
All Fours by Miranda July- adopt the brace position cos it’s an intense read but oh my god, so worth it.
Making a really wobbly quilt for my nephews first birthday (with a sewing machine that only works 50% of the time)
Susie Boyt- At the Freud Museum- Part of ongoing Boyt Mania. Read Loved and Missed!
Hamish Hawk- Big Cat Tattoo- You’ve all the upright strength of an infant’s neck? The most biting lyric of the year.
And, it’s pond season. If I’m not in the studio I’m in the pond. Which reminds me that I need to rinse my swimsuit so…see you soon!
Lizzy
P.S I was on this podcast about British Film talking about two adaptations of Up the Junction as well as the book by Nell Dunn.
P.P.S I’m going to shut my shop for the forseeable future. Accepting orders till Sunday of this week I think.
This is such a great read. I recently read Stephen King (‘On Writing’) comparing the creative process and trying to get to ‘flow’ as like taxi-ing before flying. I thought that was a good way to describe the transition from one state to the other and the feeling of hopeful /anxious waiting for it to kick in. It feels a comfort to know that it’s normal for projects to run this way. I gleefully say ‘I’ve gone obsessive’ about this flying in up into the ‘mania’. ‘The mania’ is my new favourite way to describe the state.