Endgames and Self-Therapy

Why do we write fiction? Why do we make music? Why do we do any of these creative things, in a world that values mainly visible opulence as a success metric?

This question has bothered me on and off for the last ten years, ever since my naïve dream of becoming a film composer faltered. I saw, then, that although success was possible, the game had changed vastly since the 1980’s. The paths one had previously been obliged to tread when climbing that mountain had been buried in the landslides and avalanches of commercialism, music streaming, and above all, a reduced price of entry.

In 2013 I returned to fiction writing after a long time away, this time with a strong purpose: to write an entire novel. With the help of a blended pot still whiskey called Writers’ Tears, I succeeded in finishing a 160,000-word first draft, which is further than most people usually get. But perhaps “first daft” is more apt. I love the story passionately, but the thing is an unholy mess, in need of serious edits and re-writes, and I’ve shelved it.

Like music production, fiction writing has become both easier and harder – easier because of the lower entry price (print-on-demand, social media marketing etc. make self publishing an obvious option), and harder because of the enormous competition.

Given those pressures and stresses, why would I write an entire novel? Why would I spend thousands on music software, attempting to emulate Hollywood A-list film composers? Surely, very unsound investments of time and money?

Well… no. The real reason someone in my position with a solid income from a day job enters that sort of brutal arena has nothing to do with consideration of financial or time costs. It may sound trite, but the rewards really are not financial but spiritual. If we do manage to obtain a small amount of financial return, then that’s gratifying of course because it indicates that our work is valued. But it’s a rare thing indeed to turn an actual profit as a small time creative these days.

As I’ve grown and moved through life, I’ve become more and more familiar with the things that really motivate me to carry on living, and undeniably, creativity is my core and motive force. It’s what originally made me choose software engineering as a career path. The funny thing about that is that, although I enjoy writing code every bit as much as I used to, this is true only when it’s a creative task. The sad truth is that software engineering in 2022 is a million miles away from what it was in 1989 when I got my first job working on accounting software written in DOS BASIC and UNIX C.

Back in those heady days the industry was young, and whizz kids such as (ahem) myself were treated like some kind of mysterious commodity, to be exploited rather than understood. As a result we were given a lot of free rein (at least at the companies I worked for) to be creative and come up with unexpected solutions. The result was a kind of fire hose of powerful chaos that drove an industry changing at breakneck speed. With a job like that, I didn’t need as much creativity in my personal life, and, being in my early twenties, I used my spare time to hang out with friends, get drunk, eat fine food, drive around in old cars exploring Hampshire, and generally let my hair down (something I really can’t do any more, but largely for anatomical reasons).

Nowadays it’s very different. Processes have been refined; good documentation is required; team practices like Agile or Kanban are used on projects; customer management is expected once you’re above a certain level; good testing is de rigeur. In short… the job is about five per cent creativity and the rest is “other stuff”.

Because of this, I’ve ended up being forced to create in my personal time, or I would have been driven insane. I played keyboards in a lot of different bands, and began making music at home as well. I also took up writing and photography, and even learned to sketch at one point. I’m never happy unless I’m making something new.

The thing is, not all my creative hobbies are financially equal. I have kept a spreadsheet since the early 2000’s, tracking what I’ve spent on music, photography and writing. I won’t shock you with the actual figures, but it’s about 63% on music, 32% on photography, and 5% on writing (and this includes convention trips).

Clearly, writing is way cheaper than the others, and this is one reason I love it so much. If I go away to stay somewhere with friends, or on a holiday of some kind, I can take my laptop with me and continue working on a book. While that’s also true of music and photography in these days of high-powered computers, it’s far more true of writing because you don’t need a Macbook Pro to do that. Scrivener runs perfectly well on my now slightly geriatric 2013 Macbook Air, which was far cheaper and has served me well in the last nine years.

Another reason I returned to writing in 2013 was that I had temporarily gone deaf (though it turned out to be just wax accumulation). It’s hard to explain just how terrifying that is for a music producer, and I had the idea that if it turned out to be a permanent condition I’d want something I could get equally enthused about that didn’t require ears. Writing was a good choice, and I quickly grew to love it. I’ve no doubt that time lapse and landscape photography would have worked pretty well as a substitute, but that has a lot more practical effort attached to it… walking up a mountain with a heavy tripod isn’t necessarily something I’ll be able to do very much soon, as I’m now the wrong side of fifty-five and not a particularly fit person (though I do all right, considering).

What I love to imagine is a future in which the need to make money to survive has been largely circumvented and people focus on what they’re passionate about. Yes, this is pretty much the “Star Trek Future”, and obviously it currently seems centuries away, at least to the pessimist in me. But I occasionally notice people who are describing ways we might try to achieve it as a global society, and it brings me a little glimmer of hope (which is why I’m writing optimistic, not Dystopian, science fiction). This Christmas holiday I’ve booked more time off than usual as I had a lot of leave allowance to use up, and it’s made me spend a lot of time just sitting in my house working on my book (I’m also planning to record some music before I return to work). For me, that’s a tantalising glimpse of what life could be like for all of us some day, if we make the right choices at last and climb out of the ditch we seem to be in, that is filled with the muddy water of exploitation and the weeds of hatred. I want us to walk up that trail and find that mountain peak, on which we can sit, freed from the daily grind of late stage capitalism, and occasionally look down in horror on the world that used to be. If we ever make it, we’ll wonder how on earth we could have been so stupid as to waste our time turning like cogs in a machine whose only purpose was to keep running – the Emmett Machine of Modern Life.

As Douglas Adams’s character Slartibartfast once put it, “the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it all and just keep yourself occupied”. I fully understand that sentiment, although I do think it’s also a good idea to fight for change if you can. But at least over this holiday season, I plan to just keep myself occupied.

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, have a happy solstice season, I wish you a good and satisfying 2023, and I’ll see you on that Star Trek mountain peak.