No room for a hobby horse

The Arts Council is a strange organisation. It manages to appear progressive and vibrant whilst simultaneously falling over its own red tape. A bit like the building it lives in which, in a not-quite funky bit of Clerkenwell, is a labyrinth of narrow barebrick corridors and ineffective automatic doors that resulted in a friend and I recently becoming trapped in a stairwell.

Okay, so we weren’t there for any significant period of time - just long enough to feel slightly idiotic and for me to peer through the door’s glass pane at the exact same moment that she found the button to open it.

My nose still throbs a little.

I then ended up not quite doing what I thought I was going there to do – to be precise giving some feedback on my MA in terms of what wannabe professional writers should be doing once they’ve acquired those ultimately relatively useless letters after their name and how the Arts Council can help. Aside from simply showering giving us in money, that is.

I neglected to mention the sheer annoyance of life getting in the way that’s meant I’ve written next to nothing in the past two months and instead talked about having to get a crappy temp job that just about keeps my head above the water (provided the old landlord returns my deposit soon!) but does leave the head, once out of the water, in clean oxygen and with plenty of energy to think about other stuff.
It just so happens that the stuff I’ve been wasting time thinking about recently has more to do with broken hearts than unfinished pages.

Anyway, as usual, I digress.

We discussed, amongst other things, the differences between those who want to write professionally and those who just want a creative hobby and whether the MA genuinely attracted the former rather than the latter – I think in the main it did but at least one woman in the room was doing her utmost to persuade me otherwise.

“I used to think I wanted to be published,” she whined in a way that I found particularly grating, “but now it just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t seem important.” I’m going to be generous and pretend that she added “compared to just creating something”, but (whisper) she didn’t really.

If we take the invented version of her comments then there’s a half valid point somewhere. In many ways it’s quite a nice ideal to just have the urge to create something and for that to be sufficient. It doesn’t matter if no-one else ever reads/sees/listens/experiences it. It is enough for it to just exist, isolated from everything else, in a shoebox under the bed.

I’d disagree, though.

Something arrived in the post the other day. It was a little bit heavy, the ink smelt like freshly felled moss and it gave me a tiny shiver at the base of my spine. It was a book, a collection of short stories available to buy and everything and within its pages was my name. I held its dust-jacket up to my lips and inhaled before brushing it tenderly against my cheek.*

M’mmmm.

Because there is a point in being published/recorded/displayed/experienced. The only real purpose behind writing something down is to have someone else, anyone else, read it. The words are always more beautifully formed, more harmonious with each other, more hardworking, in our heads. When they’ve been burnt across the page even the greatest have lost some the potency they had when they first burst into life in our minds. So, the only reason for tainting them in such a way is for other people to read them. Virtually everyone who writes gets intense pleasure from reading and we live in hope that one day our own paltry efforts can give a little of that pleasure back to someone else, to people we know and those we never will.

But still...

I finger the book again.

Properly printed. On good quality paper.

I could get addicted to this.





*: Now seems as good an opportunity as ever to remind readers that not everything written on davidmarstonwrites should be taken literally. Not every weird-shit thing I describe myself doing really takes place. A lot of it does, granted, but not all of it.