the psychedelic era
Children are psychedelic little creatures. I read somewhere that their brains look more like the brains of someone on LSD than they do normal adult brains. Maybe this is true; certainly it can often feel true.
Children are like creativity or creative work in that they are chaotic, unpredictable, formless, boundless, demanding, mercurial, unreliable, beautiful, gorgeous, the only thing worth living for, exhausting, surprising and financially very ill-advised.
When you are raising a child, you have no idea what kind of adult they will become. In some sense, you will never know what kind of adult they will become because parents are hopelessly blinded by love . . . love which sharpens attention but also warps perception. This is exactly like writing a book. No one will know your book better than you, no one will have slaved over every last beat, word, rhythm, plot point (I stopped the presses to add two words, two words to the book last month and spent all of the preceding week talking relentlessly to whomsoever would listen as to whether or not those two words were necessary . . .)
But you will never read your book. You will, obviously, but never like a reader.
Just like you will never see your child. You will, obviously, but never like another person in the world.
The other way childhood and creative work are similar is that you do not know what is on the other side. In true creative work, there is an element of submission, of surrender. In fiction, you start with a character – a person with a predicament – and then you invent some kind of process that deals with that predicament and then the character comes out the other side transformed in some way. It is a mystery, what is on the other side of that predicament. I think writers can sense what it might be, but they don’t know.
Like being a parent – you can sense what your child might be – but you can’t know. You have to submit to the inherent mystery of that – what is on the other side of this person’s psychedelic era (their childhood). It is a wonderful privilege, to get to wonder that.
But also: the reality of children, creative work and psychedelic experiences means you need a trip-sitter. To allow children to flourish, they need parents or caregivers to bracket off parts of the world in which they are free to be wild. Without boundaries, there is no freedom. This is why children adore stories set in schools – the tightly bound rule-based environment creates an immense feeling of safety which in turn allows them to explore darkness, fear, whatever – with the kind of depth they need to satisfy their endless curiosity. Without boundaries, children are too anxious to focus, to lose themselves in play, their attention becomes scattered over broad, nervy expanses, they cannot let themselves become truly emersed in whatever their relentless meaning-making craves to understand.
And it’s exactly the same in writing. It’s such a boring and tedious lesson to learn over and over, but depth and meaning and mystery and surprise are only to be discovered by the writer who understands how to trip-sit their own creativity. When I was writing this book, I experienced a very intense form of concentration . . . so much so that I sometimes felt dizzy and a bit unwell after a few hours work . . . but in a great way, I didn’t mind. I could never have achieved this level of focus without strict (for me) routine. Routine and discipline allow for meaning, depth, creative insight and, ultimately, something that feels very much like freedom.
The final evening of my writing course Present and Noticing ran last week; in it, we returned to the work of Patricia Highsmith – we began with her too. I admire her first novel Strangers on a Train which she wrote when she was only 27 or so. In it, she uses this pretty corny idea of having two unrelated people carry out murders for one another to pursue an inquiry into good & evil, madness & sanity. She writes in it:
“but love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil . . . All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive, the negative . . .nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it.”
Freedom and control; discovery and discipline, nothing can be without its opposite that is bound up with it. This is what I think about children and creativity.
some news
The Amendments
My novel, The Amendments is coming out next month. There will be two launch events, one in Kilkenny on April 18th, one in London on April 23rd. If you’d like to come to either or both, drop me a line. I’m also doing events at:
Phlox Books in East London on April 24th at 7pm
Blackwells Manchester on April 25th (evening, time TBC)
The West Kirby Bookshop on April 26th (evening, time TBC)
Bargain
Hearts and Bones is only 99p on Kindle this month.
Creative Writing Class
The third session of my creative writing series Present & Noticing starts again this Thursday at 7pm. If you’d like to come, you can get tickets here. Discount code COACHWITHNIAMH for €25 off.
You can also come to the first night for just €10, see if it’s for you and I can discount this off the cost of the full course if you’d like to continue.