You need to piss around more.

You don’t want to collapse like cheap camping chair so you need to take care of your brain. And a big part of that includes being unavailable. Inaccessible. Untouchable. Unf*ckwithable.

It involves 30 minutes where you park yourself on a pile of cushions under the table with coffee and a tea (You don’t have to choose! You’re an adult! On yer bike!), a big ol’ stack of paper, a pink and blue and yellow pencil (limited palette, less decisions!) where you’ve glued a photo of Santorini to the wall so you have a clear view of the sea.

It involves taking your phone putting it inside a small box, which you put inside another box, which you then wrap in an old dressing gown that you pulled out of the charity shop bag you’ve been meaning to take to the bin for ages and keep forgetting, and putting that inside a drawer that’s in a cupboard that you can lock and then bury the key in your garden underneath a tree.

It’s means saying no. No, thank you! Not at all. Nope! Not me! With the same intensity as a food motivated labrador devoted to their tea.

You don’t want an artist’s date, you want an artist’s break! A whaddevathehellyouwant space. A do-as-you please time. A time when your imagination is free to soar because it’s not cluttered with wondering how many points you have at the supermarket and if it’s enough already for the free saucepan, or if that email actually sent when the wheel of death had been spinning for five minutes, or if it actually would be a good idea to take that cat walking job to supplement your income, even though you’re not that keen on cats and are actually more of a runner.

That big beautiful brain of yours needs protecting with the ferocity of a 100 German Shepherds! Your creative heart with all her magnificent ideas needs to rest in a sunny room filled with 136 recently bloomed sunflowers!

Because the good news is: Pissing around is productive!

Put that on a T-shirt.

If you’ve noticed that all your good ideas come to you in the shower / when you’re walking / when you’re driving, it’s for a reason. It’s science! Gotta love her. Let’s bishbosh our way more into that side of things now.

You’re gonna have to dilly dally (or hustle culture might just snuff you out).

How to paint a bunch of flowers 💐

1. Sit down to write your newsletter. Give yourself an hour because at this point, you know yourself quite well and if you give yourself much longer it just goes on and on and on.

2. Ok, so an hour’s not long enough. What is even happening? You literally just had all the words! They were RIGHT THERE. There’s been some kind of problem at the lights. Brain and hand are not communicating. Welp. Why is there nothing coming? Where are you, all my words?!

3. I mean, you *have* written a lot today and it’s already 4pm. Maybe your word brain is really tired. Take a break.

4. No, you should absolutely sit here. DO NOT LEAVE. No breaks for you! It’s just avoidance, and we do not play that game. The words will come! Sit. This is a part you have to go through.

5. .

6. A painting of flowers.

7. Have a shower sometime later. Words appear when you are covered in soap and there is 100% no way of writing them down and now you have to wash the soap off and KEEP SAYING OUT LOUD that opening sentence over and over again so you don’t forget it and you don’t even moisturize because too risky, too much time, and you go into the kitchen and your husband is there and tries to talk and you say DO NOT TALK TO ME while flapping with your hand while you find some sort of paper WHERE IS THE PAPER and a pen that works WHY DO ALL THESE PENS NOT WORK and then you get your sentence down and thank god for that.

8. How also to write a newsletter.

As unsexy as it sounds, you’re an incubator.

To be creative in any way, your brain needs to incubate (it’s referred to in neuroscience as the incubation effect). As artists, this is something we need to be aware of.

And incubation requires three main things:

1. Raw material (you need something to work with)

2. Space (for ideas to roll around)

3. Attention (a reason that this matters; a curiosity or fascination)

Without those ingredients, you’ll find yourself in a constant ping pong of reacting, leaving you overwhelmed, blank and burning out. A shit feeling if I’m honest.

I kinda always knew this but it was learning to draw that brought it home.

You see, words have always been my ticket to ride. I only started drawing two years, five months and eleven days ago (give or take, depending when you read this), on Christmas Day, I’ll have you know, when I challenged myself to draw a bird. The initial result was bird like (we could call it bird adjacent) but more importantly, I discovered three Big Deal Things:

1. That I was completely out of control in an art shop. I brought 120% enthusiasm and -5% understanding of what I was actually buying (if you need something, I might have it. Call me.).

2. That I really, really loved to draw (which was WILD to me because for most of my adult life, I would have chosen a root canal over a pencil. I don’t know what it is about the don’t-fuck-with-me-forties but I’m really like her style).

3. That when I hit the wall with my writing, the answer always found me when I started drawing.

Endlessly drawing birds became an obsession. And even better: it made me a nicer person.

Actually, not nicer. That’s really the wrong word. I’m not nicer at all! It made me more available. To my own thoughts. My imagination. My artistry. I realised that drawing fed my words that fed my drawing, even if nothing about what I was doodling on the paper was related.

The other thing? I felt more… myself. I know. Sounds a bit wanky but I can’t help it. It was like when I picked up a pencil (and locked the door, pulled the blinds down and told the kids I was on a work call and the floor is now hot lava do not cross or you will die) that I was extracted and plonked into a different part of my brain.

When I emerged my perspective was just… different. Different better. Different new.

I might have said before that staying with it was the answer. And in some situations, that may be true. But I was well practiced in continuing on in the moments that it wasn’t (true, that is). Where I left Planet Stuckness and entered Planet Self-Flagellation. Those ol’ capitalist habits die hard! If there was one thing I was good at, it was keeping my bum stuck to the chair and pushing through.

Oh, the suffering artist.

Drawing showed me pushing through was utter twaddle.

The Land of Never Before.

A land where new ideas were free to find me.

As much as we think we might be, we aren’t always available: to new ideas, to fresh thoughts, to the parts of us we would consider as ‘creative’. Instead, we’re drowning. The constant input. The reacting. The pings and pop-up windows and “can you just’s” or “do you have a minute’s” (No, Valerie, we do not!). So many outside thoughts, opinions, requests, and never room to consider our own.

In short: There’s no opportunity for newness.

There’s no space for an idea to be thrown around the whitewash of your brain, to clash and jangle with your other thoughts until they split apart and explode and reunite like passionate lovers who live in a château just outside Paris and stay up ‘til 3am drinking wine (and other things) with literally zero hangovers whatsoever.

This is incubation. The process of one star colliding with enough to create a supernova. It’s the process that ends with the idea arriving in your brainspace with such alarming ferocity that you’ll happily knock over your ailing grandmother to get to your desk (you never even noticed she was there! She needs to advocate for herself, my son would say) and don’t stop to consider the carnage until you’ve spilled every available thought down with an pen that’s rapidly running out of ink on the back on an old phone bill that you just noticed you haven’t paid.

And what’s more: IT’S SO WORTH IT. The doctor said that grandma will be fine! She understands. She get’s it, good old gran!

Because incubation leaves you excited and delighted. It’s the feeling of walking in the creative desert and wondering if everyone else is hearing the same voices you are or is that just a sign of dehydration until halle-freaking-lujah, you’ve broken through!!!

You get it. The it of all it’s that was the necessary piece for the everything’s waiting to follow.

Which proves this:

Pissing around is the behaviour of a responsible artist.

90% of the creative process is either doing nothing or doing the kind of something that let’s your thoughts just roll around like lazy seals on hot sand.

Like SCIENTIFIC lazy seals (because: science).

We are waiting for your art and your words and your ideas so be off with you. Ramble. Dawdle. Pootle. Who doesn’t love a pootle?

Take your artistic duties seriously and for the love of your next interesting idea or inspiration of which we are the beneficiaries, please:

Just go and piss around.

Here, I even made a pass for you. Now take it.

xx Jane