What if it all goes wrong?
On back-up plans and the creative life.
I live in two places. In the first I am, creatively, really getting there. I feel like I’m learning how to make things and enjoying the process and want to do more. It’s a really good place to be.
But also, I am in a constant state of worry and guilt. While I pleased myself, making something, I didn’t earn a lot of money and I also think my future potential to earn money is disappearing as fees shrink and freelance budgets are hacked down to nothing. It’s not a good place to be at all.
The madness of a creative career is the dissonance between a shop window full of abundance and a stockroom with nothing in it and it’s something I’ve always struggled with.
We can look busy and successful, but by the time you’re seeing the thing we made, we could have been twiddling our thumbs and scouring the job ads for weeks, convinced it’s the end of everything.
I won’t go into the ins and outs of money for art, but my most creatively happy time has coincided with me earning the least. I don’t think I’m unusual.
While I’ve been busy creating, the purse strings have slowly tightened at every place I go to for journalism work. Friends who work at newspapers are taking redundancy while they still can, foreseeing that the hybrid/digital model that’s replacing print is looking increasingly untenable.
I’ve always been freelance, never settling in one place, liking the freedom and surfing the uncertainty. Maybe part of me likes it, even though I would always describe myself as risk-averse. But mostly it’s that offices and meetings and labeled food in shared fridges have always made me want to lie down and die.
As a woman in her late-40s, I’ve mostly avoided all of that. But now, trying to imagine the future, I feel like I need to start thinking of a back-up. At a time when I’ve finally achieved the dream: a book in bookshops, reviewed, praised, celebrated, do I need to admit that writing is one day going to be just a hobby?
Some other people get paid a lot to write. In my 20s, I was churning out brainless quizzes for a website and pocketing the most money I’d ever earned. Now, I’m getting raves in The Observer and have little but a warm glow to show for it.
So what’s my back-up? What would I do if I couldn’t make writing pay anymore? I think about it a lot because it doesn’t feel so much like magical thinking now. It feels like a practical consideration for the times to come. It’s hard to tell how near the need is, because I am prone to panic. But the curve of the graph is definitely downward. I’d have to be blind not to see it.
There are no patrons of the arts who’ll throw me a few thousand a year to create. No universal basic income that I can buy food with while I dream up the next book. And I’m married to a freelance creative too.
At least he’s kept his nose to the grindstone for the last 20 years while I had a baby, got run over by grief and took my eye off the ball. But the baby is nearly 16, the grief is a liveable burden and my work is, quite possibly, going to disappear.
I have been doing one thing for most of my life. But, I came to creativity (in the true sense of the word) late, in my mid-forties. And only then because I could afford the time to dedicate to a book. Making something up from scratch has given me a real and sustained high. I wish I’d started years ago but also, I think, in my worst moments, that I need to stop before it’s too late to switch to the back-up plan. Whatever that is.
I think of my dad at just a bit older than I am now, made redundant from his job in the NHS, early fifties, applying for literally hundreds of positions (I know because I used to type the application forms) and being rejected for every one because he was ‘too old’.
He was clever, qualified, experienced, well presented, had lived all over the world, seen so much of life and in the end it came down to a box of Just For Men hair colour and a white lie where his date of birth should be.
I thought this morning that I’d really like to be a tattoo artist. Except for the fact that I don’t have a steady hand or a particular talent for art. But how nice must it be to create something for someone, to embroider an image particular to them and have them keep it displayed on their skin forever? It must be so incredibly satisfying and you can charge a proper amount of money at the end of it.
The fees for it won’t diminish over time because “no one’s really looking at arms anymore”. It’s just a simple money for art transaction. True art. I mean, I guess some days someone asks you to do Garfield, but mostly it’s art. All of the tattooists I’ve met are artists. They still paint and sculpt and draw but they’ve found a way to monetise what they’re good at, on skin.
If my novel is my experimental canvas, the thing I did when I indulged my muse, what is my job? I used to know and now it feels like I’ve forgotten.
When I left university, I wanted to be a stage manager. Thinking about it now, that’s the least creative job in the building. I loved theatre with such a passion but knew I wasn’t an actor. And I think I secretly wanted to direct but I had no confidence and the director is the one everyone turns to for answers. You can’t do that job apologetically.
So, stage management seemed to be the best way to be adjacent to that heady rush of live performance. The darkened wings, nose buried in the prompt script, cans on, whispering cues to lighting and sound, that was where I felt absolutely at home.
I’d have enjoyed that life, I think. But now I can’t lift heavy things and the late nights would probably kill me.
It’s all very well having a back-up when you’re 25 or 35. I’m going to be 50 soon and I’m not sure this way of life can continue indefinitely.
For me anyway.
If you make things up for a living, what will you do if it all stops? Are we all thinking this or am I just disasterising for something to do?