Creativity, Privilege, Ethics

That young woman was not a happy puppy.

At a reading of my play Cats in a Pipe, a young female actor in the audience asked why the characters were all male.  While I explained my creative decisions, her expression said I was another Man With Tits.  As soon as I stopped talking, she challenged me again.  The director jumped in and supported the gender choice.  The actor let it go, but the expression on her face didn’t change. 

I don’t find fault with her.  She wants the right to creative expression in a field where each minute that passes makes her less employable.  Dehumanising, to say the least, but I don’t back down from my creative choices for that play.  This is an And-Both situation.  A female actor should develop her craft through all age brackets and a female writer should write male characters.  But the former is not the case, so if I do the latter, do I stop another creative’s work?  If I don’t do the latter, do I stop mine?

Years ago, Paul Simon made an album in South Africa during apartheid.  What’s your initial reaction to that?  Did he exploit black South Africans, steal their music, make money from them?  Or did he give black South Africans an international stage?  Should art sidestep politics?  Can it?  At the time, Simon said that if Stevie Wonder had made the album, everyone would’ve cheered.  Now what’s your reaction? 

Last month in this blog, I wrote that we should metaphorically give the Rosa Parks of today a seat on the bus.  One of my good friends privately called this into question: in terms of using privilege to help, we may deny individuals the right to perform their own personal revolution.  Which isn’t to say privilege should never intervene but that we assess that intervention.  In the real world, a Rosa Park is more in need of support and protection for her revolution, than she is of being offered a seat. 

But in the creative world, are our decisions the same?  Am I responsible for female actors having more opportunities when my creativity develops in another direction?  Should Paul Simon have bankrolled a black musician to do what he wanted to creatively explore himself?  Do we have the right to censure other creatives for their choices? 

I don’t think we have the right to censure the creative choices of others, unless they move into illegal areas.  I do think it helps everyone to discuss these choices. 

I listened to both the actor and to my friend when they disagreed with me.  I thought about their perspectives but I thought about my friend’s perspective longer.  Certainly, because there was more at stake in a friendship than in an audience Q&A, but also because the actor didn’t appear to want to have a discussion. 

Maybe that's because I didn’t let her know that I heard her point of view.  Or maybe I actually didn't hear her point of view.

Her question was, as a female playwright, should I have written an all male cast.  When I didn't answer that question, what could she do, but challenge me again?  In effect, I silenced her. 

If instead of explaining myself, I’d asked her, 'Do you think a female writer should never write a male lead?' she may have entered into discussion with me.  She may have understood my creative decisions and I may have considered ways to develop creatively AND respect her need to create as well.

I missed my chance with her but today I’m saying to you, let’s have this discussion. What do you think about how creative development and social responsibility interact?  Even if we feel we're being silenced, let's not give up.  Let's discuss.

A Cock of My Own

In the first chapter of A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf walks around Oxbridge to formulate ideas for a talk on Women and Fiction.  She absently wanders off the gravel path and excites a black robed beadle to fly at her.  Grass is for men to walk on, as if women secrete acid from the soles of their feet.  Later she muses about Charles Lamb and Tennyson, goes to the library to check the manuscripts and is refused entry lest her female eyes burn the manly words from the page.  She has an opulent lunch in the men’s college, a miserly dinner in the women’s and concludes that the mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers of all women have squandered their resources so that their daughters and granddaughters and great granddaughters have dry biscuits after tea.

You have to love Virginia Woolf.

Virginia, not on the grass.

This week, the Butler and I finally got to see a play we’ve been hearing about for months, although it’s been around for a few years, both in the West End and on Broadway.  We had trouble booking two seats together but managed a place in the belfry.  I won’t mention the title, because it’s a bit of a Holy Grail and I didn’t like it.  Rather than a script, it was a collection of diatribes interspersed with the repetitive artifice of an educated person not understanding the English of a working class person.  The dramatic arc had the pitch of the fens before they were drained; the burden of sentimentality nearly made me turn down the offer of chocolate ice cream at interval.  Nearly, but not fully.

And I thought to myself in my luscious-biscuit deprived female brain, I am so tired of the reverence for the two-dimensionality of male writers.  It’s not a room of my own that I need as a female writer, but a cock of my own.

After the curtain call, one of the actors gave an appeal for another actor who'd played his role previously.  The man in question had suffered a stroke, couldn’t walk or speak, his pittance of allotted medical treatment expired and the only way he could have more was by the cast begging us to contribute to his care.  This, in the week where Cameron said he could do nothing about the proposed £7500 pay increase for MPs.  I thought I might vomit, had it not been the chocolate ice cream that would be sacrificed for the sake of outrage.  How do we consider ourselves civilised?  We should not.

The upside of all this – and there will be an upside because it’s me writing, rather than Virginia Woolf who believed that truth always wins out in fiction, while I tend to like a bit of self delusion.  So the upside of this is that the juxtaposition of my misandry with the neglect of the stroke victim made me, in good Catholic fashion, examine my sin; I’d forgotten that we’re in this together.

The Butler teaching Calypso to cook in his absence.

Down the Appalachian boreen to the room of my own now.  I write at home in front of a bay window, a display for the villagers who pass on their way to buy a paper.  The Butler calls me for lunch on the days he’s not working, does odd jobs, takes Big Nose for a walk and is greatly unappreciated, for the most part.  Once when he pointed this out to me, I, who am the repository of impeccable logic said to him, if the room of my own were outside the house, he wouldn’t feel his arguments had merit.  A few days later, the Butler found me emptying the dryer during the day and said if I worked outside the home, I couldn’t empty the dryer, so get back to work.  It’s amazing that living with a cock of his calibre, I can manage even a quiver of misandry.  I’m gifted, I suppose.

The point being, when we don’t get what we need, we sometimes fall into the trap of saying it’s because someone else has better biscuits.  And that’s what keeps the imbalance of it all going.  You hear the story of the stroke victim and say, isn’t it great that immigrants are going to be charged £1000 so they’re no longer drains to the NHS!  You don’t think that immigrants can only be in this country to work or study.  The workers pay taxes.  The students pay tuition fees.  You just think, the actor can’t get what he needs because someone else has taken it.

The Butler butling.

I’m not saying inequity doesn’t exist.  It’s all around us in everything we do.  Women may be able to walk on the grass in Oxbridge now, menstruating at will; I hardly know.  But you have to be totally deaf, dumb and blind, perhaps on some very lovely drugs if you think women writers are treated equally to men.  Or Black writers to White.  Or Muslim writers to Christian.  Or gay writers to straight.  What I’m saying is that it doesn’t solve the problem if women take from men, Blacks from Chinese, Muslim from Jews, Gays from straights. 

There was an article making the Twitter rounds this week, written about cuts to the arts.  The writer figured that cuts should reflect the ‘fact’ that the primary audiences for theatre were in London.  Up here in the north, people didn’t take that attitude lying down and rightly so.  In the comments to the article, someone wrote that he wasn’t going to cry because the government wouldn’t fund people to have fun.  The arts are frivolous, I reckon, and that person obviously never benefited from a book or a TV program or movie.

Both the writer of the article, however, and the person who commented on it, made value judgements which said, I am better than you are.  I am in London, so I deserve more money than Northerners.  I have a serious job that contributes in a quantifiable manner to society, so I deserve more money than the arts.

Neither said, these are our tax pounds.  Stop building duck houses on someone’s private property at the cost of a four digit figure.  Stop waging war.  Educate.  Provide medical treatment.  Create wonder.  Take care of all of us, not just the group I belong to.

You and I, we are both human, which means we’re prone to human frailty.  But we are also people of the arts.  Even if you don’t write or act or dance or sing, you are creative.  And that’s what’s needed.  Not self advocacy.  Not more interest groups.  Not a cock of my own, but creativity.  Creative solutions to the problems our frailties have caused.  Let’s no longer silence voices, be it through lack of funding or lack of medical care after a stroke.  Let’s see our commonalities rather than our differences.

The Butler creating wonder.

A long time ago in a Catholic Church far away, a priest said that hell was a banquet where guests sat at a long table covered with the finest foods and drinks, but they couldn’t bend their elbows to reach their mouths.  Heaven was also a banquet where guests sat at a long table covered with the finest foods and drinks, and couldn’t bend their elbows.  The difference was that in heaven, people reached across the table and fed the person in front of them.  Let’s try making a little bit of heaven, if just for today.  Reach across the table to the person in front of you, whomever it might be, and feed them what’s on your plate.  If we each do that, the solution for all of us begins.

Ditch the Snake Oil

In order to be accepted as the creative genius that we are, we have to prove ourselves a top notch snake oil salesperson first.  Marketing, on the other hand, silences the writing demons.  It’s counter-intuitive to the work, yet, if a writer has a problem with using all her fingers and toes to create, network, market and have a personal life, there’s something wrong with her.  

For fecksake, of course there’s something wrong with me.  I spend nine hours a day writing to an invisible ‘friend’.  Disparagement isn’t much of a deterrent to me pointing out that the emperor is in the buff and his butt cheeks sag. 

Ever go to one of those Meet the Agent gigs?  A group of us were taken to London but before we went, our sponsor gave us a type of Writer’s Deportment Class.  I dutifully learned the Elevator Pitch, kept my doubts to myself.

We go to London, are crushed into an historic but down-in-the-heel pub with unlimited drinks and no food.  I stood helplessly by while one of my colleagues marched up to an agent, introduced herself and gave her pitch.  The agent’s smile took on a bit of rigor mortis, eyes rolled back in her head.  As soon as my colleague paused for breath, the agent turned to me.  I hadn’t a clue what to say but I certainly wasn’t going to give my pitch.  The agent wandered off to join a clutch of other agents with their backs to the writers in the room.

The evening progressed with agents in retreat, writers getting drunk.  When I did manage to talk with an agent, I went into therapist mode, asked how they got into their field, what it was like, what they were looking for in a book.  If they mentioned a genre that one of my colleagues wrote in, I introduced them.  I ended the evening with ten queries and never once had to expose a bit of my dramatic arc.

I suppose my problem with this system is that I used to have a normal job.  I went to uni, got several degrees, passed the licensing exam, did my CPD’s, developed a specialty, took home a pay cheque.  Nobody waited until I had an internet following before they took a chance with me.  When I was still green, they threw me into the deep end.  Sink or swim, off you go, the psyches of the traumatised in my care.  If I screwed up, a client’s suicide could be a very real consequence.

If a writer screws up, it’s bad reviews, poor audience turn out, low book sales.  Pft!  As if that were on a par with a client’s death.  But as a writer, I have to prove myself a hundred times more than I did as a trauma therapist because we’ve put the money people in charge of the creativity. 

When I worked in mental health, my boss was someone with a degree in mental health.  The finance people were kept in an office with a bar across the outside of the door.  They didn’t make the big decisions.  They balanced the books and moaned a lot.

However, until our creative people take charge of the money or our society values the creative arts as much as we do paying the expenses of our politicians, this is the system we operate in.  So, here’s my advice:

•           Do what we do best.  Communicate with honesty.  Someone once asked what I wrote and I said, in the Nobody-Wants-To-Publish-It genre.  I was the eighth person in the group to be asked that question; my publishing credits wouldn’t have been remembered.  My honesty was.
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•            Be a huckster with people skills.  Not manipulation.  People skills.  You’ve been observing people all your life.  Writing about them, creating them, putting them in tight spots, getting them out.  You know how people want to be treated.  Treat them that way. 
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•           Expect to be treated with respect yourself.  Evaluate your rejections.  Don’t interact with people who don’t respect you.  I once had a  session with an agent whom I found so rude, I wondered why he’d been allowed to live.  At the end of our meeting, he asked me to submit something.  When I did, he wrote the most scathing rejection of my thirty year writing experience. 
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•           Surround yourself with writers who support you.  Writers, mentors, tutors who read your work only so you’ll read theirs (or worse, never read yours), tell you that what you write is too mad to be in print, are intimidated by your work, steal your ideas, who have no sense of humour, are not going to help you no matter how much prestige they have in your literary community.  Dump their sorry asses.

When I was a trauma therapist, my most important tool was myself.  The writer’s most important tool is the same.  You’re not selling snake oil.  You’re a creative genius with an honest core.  Hold it as precious.