Thanks to Martina Mulhall / Gold Star Careers and Laois Today for including an extended interview with an unemployable wastrel like myself in a series on career paths and choices.
In all honesty, I’m really impressed that the arts are given a voice in this larger discussion, especially as they are often overlooked or underestimated when it comes to the challenge of providing, first, meaningful lives and sometimes even viable livelihoods for people.
This is clearly a series of interviews that takes a much more holistic view to the paths we choose or, as in my case, almost accidentally find ourselves on.
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Q6: What does a typical day look like in your role—or is there no such thing?
I don’t really have a typical working day, as such. That said, there are maybe four or five modules (think Lego pieces) that can be assembled in different combinations to make up any 24-hour period.
In fact I think this is one of the reasons why the so-called ‘creative life’ may not for everyone.
Working for yourself, often entirely alone, and often for days or weeks or months on end, requires an ability to ‘keep it fresh’, to depend on a successful routine but to vary it enough that you don’t get bored of your own company or distracted by something beyond your window.
Ask most taxi drivers: the novelty of being your own boss wears off quickly.
One of my solutions has been to blur the line between my ordinary life (which happens to be one of the basic subjects of my writing anyway) and my working life, so that when I go out for the daily walk with the dog, for instance, I don’t think of that as a break but as an essential part not of my time off but of my working day.
I’m either listening to something, playing back something I’ve been trying to work out in my head, or recording rough ideas on my phone or in a notebook as I go along.
Even when I’m determinedly not thinking about anything at all (trying to unscramble what’s left of my brain after spending too long on a particular problem) that too I think is part of the working process.
Equally when I might seem to others to be working hard (poring over a manuscript or sat up into the wee hours editing a film) that often feels to me like time off, like the highlight of my day.
Even when it’s tiring and not going how I’d like, it doesn’t do it justice to call it ‘work’. In many ways, the artistic life (not to make too much of it) is all about changing your attitude to the world of work. Otherwise the excuses take over and, without a boss asking where are today’s results, nothing gets done.
I like the fact that when ‘working’ musicians are performing on stage, for instance, we say that they are ‘playing’. Writing doesn’t feel like ‘playing’ all the time, of course; if only it did.
It can be frustrating and exhausting to spend an age at something, only to find that it’s going nowhere, that not only will no one else care, but you don’t even really care yourself.
But when it’s going well, when it’s like a wave and you’re the surfer on it, when it’s a cave and you get to be the first person to go in with nothing but a flashlamp in your hand, ‘playing’ is as good a word as any.
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