Category: Blog

We are only ever a footstep away from chaos. We spend so much time trying to smooth our edges, tying up loose ends as though life were a shoelace forever coming undone, stitching our seams so the loose change of our thoughts doesn’t fall through.

And then we type, or draw, or make, and we notice that to reach the places that are truly interesting, we have to open the door and let disorder in. To enter the Mysterium, the Land of Never Before, the Place Where Ideas Are Free To Find Us, we must let the starburst of inspiration rise like a supernova and explode across the page in a mess of ink, and words, and half-formed phrases that swell, and collapse, and rise again like a soft soufflé.

We must surrender, if only momentarily, to a beautiful pandemonium that is part of our inherent design.

And then we see it: all this effort spent polishing our edges was just a holding pattern for a necessary undoing. That it’s the chaos, the disorder, the bits where we allow things to fall apart so they can then come back together that turns out to be important ingredients for the thing that capture our hearts.

So many wonders- the Milky Way, the people you love, the birds that arrive the instant you hang nectar feeders, the leaves that fall and return in spring, the fragile daffodil pushing through hard dirt (is it the most delicate thing you’ve seen, or the strongest?)- are all born of a kind of chaos you could never hope to understand, nor would you ever want to control.

Such is the carbonation of our experience, the fuel for all our stories. To create in a way that has a beginning, a middle and an end is to rest in a necessary jumble, a process of doing and undoing and doing all over again.

If you are involved in a creative project of any sort- one that requires you to show up and sustain (we are doing this in Creating Wild at the moment), then you need to pay attention to what you’re putting in your body. And by that, I mean specifically food (my husband filmed a documentary for the A&E department which has led me to be quite specific here. I’m most definitely not talking about “those types of things”).

As far as food goes, I’d describe myself as functional and reliable. I’m the cooking version of your local hardware store. Has what you need, satisfying enough but nothing fancy, occasionally disappointing, and you get the sense talking to the guy working there that they’d rather be outside.

My friend Tania on the other hand is what I would describe as a Culinary Wafter. She Wafts like a famous chef without a substance abuse problem- a little bit of this, a little bit of that- talking to the dog at the same time, quoting Shakespeare and managing to lead a zoom session, all while conjuring up things such as “green soup” which is bloody delicious (and despite having asked for the recipe many times, I still have no idea what goes in there).

I’ve tried. My green soup was more “bottom of the pond” colour and tasted a bit gritty.

Anyway, the point of me sharing all this with you is this: If you are to draw on creative resources, you need to make sure that your body is fuelled. Frankly, most of us are exhausted enough. The last thing we need is to become part of the problem by eating too much of the wrong thing or not eating enough at all. Creating and making consumes energy and if you’re out of it, you’ll quickly move into depletion.

I tend to fall into the camp of not eating enough and it can leave me like a two-week-old vase of flowers left out in the sun. It’s sounds like a ridiculous thing to point out (Eat! Drink well! You’ll feel better!) but most of us have demands pulling on us that can distract us from taking care of the basics.

Fuel up my friends. We need your stories and your creations so best be finding out about that green soup sooner rather than later.

xx Jane

I read a quote recently that I keep saying to myself on repeat, so I’m going to share it here:

“You probably aren’t a good enough writer to write so slowly. You’ll only learn by finishing. Make it a priority to get to the end.”

That’s not an exact quote, but a stitched-together version from fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson, offered as advice to first-time book writers.

These words are the ultimate kindness. They’re telling you to gallop. They’re telling you to go. They’re telling you to get those words down, to finish that first draft, to roll out of the gates and take off across the open plains.

And what they’re ultimately telling you is this:

Don’t let yourself fall into the ravine of the non-finisher. The world is full of them. If you want to make something exist, put your analytical mind aside (just for the moment) and go. Wind in the hair, a spritz of coolness hitting the cheeks, a smile as wide as the horizon.

Make your story exist, from start to end- no matter how shabby, incoherent, or seemingly nonsensical. That part, at this stage, is none of your business.

I have galloped through 10,000 words of a first draft this week, and yesterday I sat down to see if I could arrange them into some sort of form. I immediately felt myself react. My mind went to that familiar, headmistress-y place where she’d strike things out with a red pen and pay attention to the particulars.

As soon as I felt her come into the room, I attached an ankle bracelet to her and placed her on house arrest. Not yet, I said gleefully, laced up my shoes full of words, and streaked off like the BFG towards the horizon.

Go fast. Go faster than your mind can catch you.

We can get to the other stuff later.

I’ve been dithering around this morning, thinking about what to write to you and convincing myself that I have nothing interesting to say. This is, indeed, a curiosity to me because I am a person who speaks at a thousand miles an hour and is not short on ideas, and yet on occasion, when faced with the blinking cursor and the blank page, I find that words all my words have gone and hidden in various corners of the room.

They frustratingly escape me.

The very small words- the ones I use for fillers (although naturally I try to avoid them) and probably the pronouns too- are giggling behind the legs of my desk, all crouched round together. They remind me of my boys when I announce that it is bedtime.

The others- the ones that make up the main sentences have decided that despite the frost, they are going to pack themselves a picnic and go off to the beach. I just watched them trail out the door and open the front gate, arguing about which one of them will carry the food.

As you can see, this morning is a lot.

You might assume that seeing as though I live in an out of the way place, that I cannot rely on my people to help me find a way through, but I would gleefully like to tell you that you’re mistaken. My people are everywhere.

Many of my people don’t even know that they’re my people. And what’s more, some of them are dead.

A little while back, I picked up a book about birds and exclaimed shortly after the first paragraph, into the thin air, ‘you are my people!’.

Last week, I stumbled upon a Portuguese illustrator whose enthusiasm and skill are second to none and I claimed him as my people too. In fact, I shot him to the top. He’s an excellent people to have.

In mornings such as these, I draw on my people quite a lot. I open the book or click play on the video and I let their energy magic into existence something in me that I can only describe as ‘possibility’.

I let them convince me that it’s possible to write or draw or make. Something. Anything.

Stop pissing around, they tell me affectionately. Just make something exist.

Our creative selves do not exist in isolation- nor are they meant to. We get to piggyback off the brilliant, artistic, wordy unicorns we’ve chosen for ourselves, who gift us with remembering things are possible simply by showing up themselves.

So, in case you need this too, in the most loving tone I can muster, please stop pissing around and make something.

There’s someone out there who needs to piggy back off you.

xx Jane

I like to think of creativity as the ability to find new and unique solutions to problems, or innovative ways to express a story that’s already been told.

When I think of creativity this way, I get excited. It becomes less about skill or a technique and more about, what is my unique viewpoint on this? How might I approach this in a different way?

Giving yourself permission to approach something creativity is permission to stray. If the fundamental premise is to be different, to show a different way, then the ideas that you may initially have doubted become seeds of possibility to be expanded on and developed.

Having supported myself in my own business since forever- something I consider to be a very creative act- I’m an unhinged enough to believe the creative projects that I am yet to develop the skills and expertise around are possible.

I know that with play, practice and learning, mastery comes. It’s just a matter of consistently showing up for yourself and giving yourself permission before anyone else does.

Throwing myself into visual art as an adult has started to unpick some of the rigid habits I have developed in my writing. If there are twenty different ways to draw this tree, with countless different materials, what are the twenty different ways to tell this story?

I realized, because of drawing and painting, how fixed my writing processes have become. And when I let myself go off the wall in the early stages, I end up with something far more interesting- and yes, creative- than I would have if I’d stuck to the previous rules I imposed for myself.

This weekend, I put on some tunes, surrounded myself with paints and pencils and markers and wax crayons and asked myself, what happens if I use this? And then what happens if I overlay that?

To give myself the opportunity to make mistakes and open doors I never could have considered if I’d just sat and thought about it.

And I tell you, I felt so happy.

We don’t often think of creative practices as movement in the same way we do other activities that mobilise the body but they absolutely are. Taking your pen to the page to write or draw, knitting, sewing, sculpting, all of these involve motor patterns. All of them are forms of physical movement.

When I first started drawing, it was during a time when my mind felt scattered. Despite my best efforts to steer myself elsewhere, I was steeped in anxiety. Drawing became a kind of refuge.

On a neurological level, engaging in activities that coordinate the eyes and hands, especially in rhythmic or patterned ways, literally helps reorganise a scrambled brain.

A study on drawing and doodling from Harvard University notes:

“Spontaneous drawings may also relieve psychological distress, making it easier to attend to things. We like to make sense of our lives by making up coherent stories, but sometimes there are gaps that cannot be filled, no matter how hard we try. Doodles fill these gaps, possibly by activating the brain’s ‘time travel machine,’ allowing it to find lost puzzle pieces of memories, bringing them to the present, and making the picture of our lives more whole again. With this greater sense of self and meaning, we may be able to feel more relaxed and concentrate more.”

Creativity isn’t just expression, it’s regulation.

I’ve come to realize that following my creative impulses and making time for my art actually makes me more available- and more capable- for everything else. Not following those impulses is a deadening of vitality.

Creativity isn’t just a survival act; it’s also an act of thriving

I woke up this morning to so much loveliness, to attempt to capture it in words is like blowing a dandelion clock into the breeze and doing your best to collect all the pieces back again shortly after.

Members of my drawing group had posted many of their things. There’s been sunflowers and periwinkles and thistles of the kind that grow in Canada, a glorious shiny pumpkin that has been sitting majestically in a kitchen far away, a pot plant named after peace, and doodles of a very peaceful dog, stretched out and sleeping on the floor.

And as I uncurled my eyes, I understood the loveliness that someone else had seen and translated through their fingers, in lands very far away, now seen through my own eyes, and I got to imagine the sunflowers blooming and the very particular spot in the garden where the periwinkle might grow.

I was reminded of the funny way my horses try to eat a thistle, and even though we call them a weed, how beautiful they are if we just let them be what they are without any other label, and I felt grateful.

This is the power of art and creating. Not the works of “professionals” who have spent years honing their craft upon the page (which is undoubtedly gorgeous too) , but simple lines and colours of someone who for a few moments paid attention and decided to capture it on the page. And here I was, the other side of the world, smiling first thing in the morning and resolving that very shortly, I shall attempt to do the same.

And then as if my heart could handle any more (hearts are amazing like that, they grow and grow and grow), Sara Santa Clara, who belongs to the periwinkles, wrote in an essay she just posted:

“Jane has a way of talking and telling you everyone can draw that makes you want to believe her and make it so.”

Which made me wonder, at what point did we ever believe the opposite? And in the unbelieving of this, imagine what other loveliness might flow?

Making and creating is magic. It makes changes in the world

For most of my life, I’ve understood myself as a wordy person and then when I also realized I was a drawing person too, a few things were revealed to me that putting words down on the page had never shown. For instance:

Last night, I sat down to paint and draw a glorious bunch of flowers that I had seen at my local café earlier that day. As it happens, I don’t usually find myself in such luxurious positions on weekday, but our car had broken down the week prior (the delights!) and now two of us were required to go and pick it up from car hospital.

On the way back, the lure of cake was overwhelming and so both Giles and I felt obligated to stop and eat as much lemon drizzle cake with cream as possible within the 20-minute window afforded to us. This has nothing to do with the purpose of writing what I’m sharing here except to highlight the fact that cake is always relevant.

Anyway: Sat around the kitchen table last night with a puppy chewing on my trouser leg, the boys animated shrieks ringing in my ears, I decided to paint the flowers I’d seen earlier (part of a visual journaling practice I commit to every day).

When I first started drawing and painting, what I made was quite meticulous and detailed, but of late, I’ve noticed myself move into a wild experimentation phase. This permission slip I’ve given myself to play has come, in part, from watching so many other drawing and painting people draw and paint and seeing them go through the “ugly phase” of their art.

“Christ alive,” I say to myself sometimes, when I see their pre-pubescent piece turn into a supermodel.

“Wot a miracle”.

A process which has clearly planted something in my brain. Because now I also allow the same thing to happen to me.

Last night, when painting, I declared prophetically to my family, “the trick is not to quit too early”.

And it’s true. Most of the time, it’s just a matter of continuing.

In visual art, this is so much more obvious- at least to me- than work involved to language. Perhaps it’s because language is tied to school, perhaps we are just so familiar with it that the lessons it shows us aren’t so clear… who knows.

But drawing and painting have showed me that to create anything I like, I have to keep going through the ugly bits, a lesson that carries over to every other part of my life.

All that to say: here are the said flowers.

From a drawing and wordy person’s heart to you.