Them's the Vagaries

I started this wee substack with the aim of sending the occasional dispatch from the writing front, dispatches from the typeface. My good intentions were stymied by prostate cancer, something that well-intentioned writing advice does not address.

I’m lucky. My cancer was early stage and treatable and, after treatment, my PSA is now undetectable. I’m delighted by that, but the aftermath of the judge sentencing me to life has not been what I expected either physically (and I’ll write about that across on my other substack) or for creativity.

My mantra for the past year or so has been that, in the face of a cancer diagnosis, creativity is resistance, a commitment to life in the face of presentiments of mortality. I made the effort to keep writing but it has been difficult. In part it is simply because the treatment (hormone implants and radiotherapy) were a major distraction; more significantly, the experience threw me out of the fictive world of my work in progress.

I have 50+ thousand words written and what I have since realised is that I carried the world I created, a version of 1930s Edinburgh, in my head as an alternate reality: I lived the characters and circumstances and writing was to some degree writing down the unfolding story that lived in my head. Cancer and the treatment evicted me from that world and it is surprisingly hard to get back into it, although I’m confident that I will as my notebook has once again begun to accumulate ideas and plot points.

Anyway, my point is this: writing and creativity are not mechanical exercises; they require presence and openness to the subconscious (which is why AI is useless and the antithesis of creativity.) Creativity is not simply a matter of settling onto a chaise longue with a pitcher of Martini and dictating great words to an amanuensis, secure in the knowledge that the Muse is safely snuggled in beside me with a tube of Pringles, sprinkling inspiration. The Muse does not just show up, you have to be in the right frame of mind to seek her out and understand what she is offering.

Onwards!