Reclaiming our Individual Creativity - the disaster that is Creative Scotland.

Tanya and Stefan from my play Wormwood, about Chernobyl

It came like a bolt from the blue last week, while I was on a Zoom meeting with three fellow arts practitioners. Creative Scotland announced that they were closing the Open Fund, with almost immediate effect. That's the fund to which individual artists, writers etc can apply for a modicum of funding to support new and often experimental projects. Creative Scotland is the body set up to administer funds for the arts in Scotland, replacing the old Scottish Arts Council (a classic case of 'if it ain't broke, why are you fixing it?') The old Arts Council was smallish, responsive and largely responsible. It was also mostly run by arts practitioners, rather than highly paid arts administrators. 

Whether or not the closure of the Open Fund is aimed at prompting the government to come up with more cash, it is just one more example of the way in which support for the arts in Scotland (and to a great extent in England as well) has become focussed on larger groups, production companies, or those facilitating participation, rather than individual creators: artists, writers and other practitioners. There seems to be no acknowledgment that the creative arts are worth supporting for their own sake, and not as some hypothetical means to a fashionable end: wellbeing, community cohesion, inclusion and all the other buzz words and phrases demanded of applicants. Laudable aims for sure, but the fact that CS saw fit to cancel the only fund open to individual practitioners should tell us how little we’re valued.

Under the old SAC I was the recipient of a couple of awards as a young writer – small but very welcome sums that allowed me to work on particular writing projects. Before applying, I could and did contact the Literature Officer, a serious, mature writer who was incredibly helpful in allowing me to assess the focus and aims of my own work. Later, I sat on the literature committee myself, and saw just how effectively that committee – composed entirely of fellow practitioners - made what was essentially a small sum of money go a very long way in supporting individuals to develop their careers, without ever feeling that something extraneous to their creative practice was demanded of them in return. In short, they were never expected to be unqualified but cheap therapists. Committee members like myself did come cheap, because we felt that we were giving something back to an organisation that had supported us. We were paid expenses and had a great spread of interests from popular to literary, from urban to rural.  I sometimes saw myself as the 'rugged populist', willing to defend applicants from the less esoteric end of the arts spectrum.

Creativity was valued in and of itself. Not as a means to an end. 

The Literature Officer could also interact with applicants as a bridge between committee and applicant, telling them why a proposal might have been rejected, advising them about possible future applications.The sums of money were tiny in the grand scheme of things, but a struggling writer, probably doing another job or two to keep the wolf from the door, can make a little money go a very long way. I know I did. In fact I still do.

All that changed with CS and in the process we lost something precious. Badly done, Scottish government. The old SAC wasn’t perfect, and some wrong decisions were made. I remember them well. But it was a damn sight better than what we’re stuck with now. I applied to CS for one small grant to assist with a complicated book project over the ensuing years, at the request of my publisher. The whole process was a nightmare of unanswerable questions about timescales and budgets for a research and writing process that simply doesn’t work like that. I almost gave up, would certainly have done so if my then publisher hadn’t prompted me to keep going. 

I would never do it again. 

The Open Fund has had other problems. Earlier this year, it emerged that a huge sum of £84,555 had been awarded to a theatre director from the Open Fund for development of a show called Rein which - as it turned out - involved not just 'simulated sex' but the real thing. In her statement, the director said that the project was going to be an artistic film exploring themes of sexuality set in the Scottish landscape. 'The sexual elements were an integral part of the project's artistic vision. They would have challenged regressive and exploitative attitudes towards women and queer people.'All of which makes the addition of the Scottish landscape to the proposal seem like a particularly cynical box ticking exercise. 

Following public outcry, most of the money was taken back, but the subsequent stooshie, to use a good Scots word, involved mind boggling discussions about genital contact (presumably and uncomfortably in a Scottish landscape) and whether STI tests were 'industry standard'. Just what industry were they talking about? And if it's the one that instantly springs to mind, why the hell were they applying for public money? 

Call me a curmudgeon but I can't see any of my professional writer colleagues on any of those old Scottish Arts Council committees touching any such project with the proverbial bargepole. And frankly, they would have been right. I don't hold with censorship, but if you want to embark on such a project, why not find other sources of funding. It shouldn't be too difficult. 

Finally, I can see just how much practitioners at the start of their careers are let down by CS. But later career artists and writers like myself are also unsupported and I don't mean financially. I’ve had many conversations with fellow artists and writers about this. You hit a certain age and you suddenly become the unwilling recipient of patronising ‘wellbeing’ projects aimed at fending off your ‘loneliness’, even though you’re still a seasoned professional who might be looking for useful discussion about your work as much as, or even more than, financial support. 

Certainly, in its current incarnation, CS isn’t fit for purpose. It spends a vast amount of money on  salaries such as the Head of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, earning £48 - £52K, with the Literature Officer considerably less at £25,000 per year. This again should tell you something about the value Scotland puts on its literature.* Not a lot. Perhaps our government should start again, and build something where the practitioners themselves are central to the system. And where people who seem to have a modicum of understanding and experience are in charge of steering through our current choppy creative waters, without falling over so far backwards in an effort to be seen as inclusive that their brains fall out. Not holding my breath, though. Are you?

* Just checked online. The Lit Officer is a part time position. (Why?) So yet again, salaries of which full time practitioners could only dream. 

Historical Fiction Five: Starting a New Project

Burns's walk at Ellisland

For the last of these posts on historical fiction, I want to say a bit about staring a new project. In the last few months I've been starting work on a new historical novel. Until a little while ago, I was in researching, (with some welcome assistance from Creative Scotland) but also very much in thinking and daydreaming mode. Gearing up to write but not quite there yet. Thinking, too, about the voice in which this story will be told. How to get into it. How to get inside the mind of the main character who is a real, historical person: Jean Armour, wife of the poet Robert Burns. 

And how to tell her story.

Once again, it’s about immersion. So it might be useful to some writers – and interesting to some readers – to hear about the kind of things I do when I’m getting started on a new project in parallel, of course, with all the necessary research. First I daydream, but then, I clear the decks, mentally and physically. In this case, it meant sorting out the study, the place where I work, which earlier this year was much too cluttered for comfort. I don’t mind clutter, but it has to be reasonably tidy clutter, so that I know where everything is, otherwise my brain can’t cope. I spent a couple of energetic weeks hauling down folders and files, sorting out drawers, disposing of some of my vast hoard of books and generally relieving some of the congestion. There is something very therapeutic in all kinds of ways, about this kind of process and I also find it very therapeutic where writing is concerned. I think we’re clearing mental (and perhaps even spiritual, if you’re that way inclined) spaces, making room for something new. Every time I take a bag or box of unwanted items to the charity shop or the saleroom, every time I make another trip to the recycling centre or list another few items on eBay, I wonder why I kept them for so long. What on earth were we keeping those very old, but not old enough to be interesting, computers and other pieces of electronic kit for? Why was I hanging onto so much out of date paperwork? Why was I keeping not very good paperbacks that I know for a fact I will never want to read again because I didn’t even finish them the first time round? I’m by no means minimalist by inclination, but sometimes you just have to let things go, and I generally find that when I do, I can breathe more easily, and the ideas just come flooding in.

But once I’ve done this, cleared the decks and the desk to make a new start, I surround myself with more stuff. Except that it has to be the right stuff. I’m looking for all kinds of things to help the process of immersion in a time and place. I find this works for all my fiction and even for plays, whether historical or contemporary. I go hunting for all kinds of things – images, artworks, photographs, some inspirational objects, and as much appropriate music as I can find. The music is important. Roz Morris hosts an excellent series of blog posts on the ‘soundtrack’ of various pieces of fiction and I always find that my fiction has a soundtrack. I may not listen to it when I’m writing. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I just want silence. Or as much silence as the jackdaws on the roof will allow me. But sometimes I need a soundtrack of appropriate music. With The Amber Heart it involved Polish folk music, Chopin, other composers. The Curiosity Cabinet and another novel, more contemporary, were both written to Scottish and Irish traditional music. Ice Dancing involved a steady beat of love songs interspersed with hockey songs: Queen, the Sugababes, Cher. The Physic Garden needed more traditional music and so will this new project, which is set in eighteenth century lowland Scotland.

Apart from the music, I’ve put up old pictures and postcards, surrounding my desk with them. And on this occasion, rather a lot of very old books which I seem to have managed to acquire over the past year, mainly on eBay. They aren’t in the greatest condition, which explains why I managed to buy them for a song. But a two hundred year old book – even when it’s a bit ragged around the edges – is a treasure when it comes to trying to immerse yourself in the past. You can imagine it new, pristine, beautiful. You can imagine the people who handled it, what they felt like, what their thoughts might have been. You can above all imagine their words. When I was writing the Physic Garden I had other things to look at, including a Georgian embroidered christening cape like the one in the book.

Ellisland Farm

I also try to spend time in the places where each novel is set, allowing myself plenty of time for daydreaming, plenty of time for impressions and ideas to come wandering in. Sometimes I take notes, but they’re very short, very cryptic. Sometimes I don’t even do that. As long as I’ve allowed myself the time, I know I can remember whenever I need to. In this instance, it meant spending time not just in Alloway, but - for example - at Ellisland where Jean and the poet lived for a while,  a magical place, as yet unspoiled by over-interpretation. Long may it continue.

The other thing I’ve been doing obsessively is setting up a ‘secret’ Pinterest board to which I’ve pinned all sorts of images that are connected with the topic of my book. I use Pinterest quite a lot, although it can form wonderful displacement activity, so you have to use it with care. It’s all too easy to find an appropriate image and then find yourself tracking back through all kinds of beautiful boards and their associated websites, intrigued and moved by the variety of images on display. Topic boards on Pinterest can also be useful for helping cover artists and even your publisher, if you have one, to understand your thoughts about the book, your sources of inspiration, how you ‘see’ it and consequently how it might be marketed and to whom. 

Jean in old age with her much loved grand-daughter.

If all of this sounds a bit like uber displacement activity, it’s probably because it is. My husband calls it ‘pencil sharpening.’ Starting a new project is scary. It’s a bit like standing on the edge of a swimming pool daring yourself to dive in. You distract yourself with all these ‘necessary’ preparations. But I’ve come to see, over the years, that there is a sense in which they are necessary. And a necessary parallel to the meatiness of the research that you also have to do. They get you in the right frame of mind. And with historical fiction in particular, they arm you to some extent against the curse of presentism I wrote about in an earlier post. They remind you of when and where you are meant to be when you’re writing. They are a little like the Wardrobe – the route to Narnia. 

When they work well, they’re a doorway to the past. 

Mossgiel near Mauchline as it was in the poet's time.

Ellisland: the long road to a new novel.

Ellisland Farm

Last week, we headed south to Ellisland, near Dumfries, the farm where Robert Burns and Jean Armour spent some three years of their early married life and where he composed - among other memorable poems - Tam O' Shanter. 

The last time I visited this place, I was very young. Even then, I was so 'into' Burns, a fascination that has never really left me, that I was always persuading my mum and dad to drive about the countryside, visiting places with connections to the poet. It helped that we lived within walking distance of Burns Cottage in Alloway and I would wend my way there on fine spring and summer Saturdays, always hoping to see a ghost or two. Rab remained obdurately unwilling to manifest himself, even for such a fan as me. 

Later, much later, I wrote a couple of plays about Burns: one for BBC R4 about the writing of Tam o' Shanter, notable mainly for a stunning performance of the poem from Liam Brennan as Burns, with Gerda Stevenson as Jean and an early appearance by Billy Boyd (of later hobbit fame) who was an absolute joy to work with and made everyone laugh. 

Later, I wrote a play for Glasgow's Oran Mor, about the last few weeks of the poet's life down on the Solway coast. But in both of these plays, Jean Armour, the poet's long-suffering wife, figured largely, her voice more or less demanding to be heard. (Much as William's voice would not be denied in The Physic Garden!) 

Ever since then, I've wanted to write a novel about Jean. Not a piece of non-fiction, although like all my historical fiction it'll be well researched. But I've had this longing to crawl inside Jean's head and try to write her story. You've only to read a few accounts of the poet's life to see how easy it seems to have been for academics to dismiss Jean as 'not quite worthy of the bard.' Creative Scotland, it seems, agrees with me, because they have just awarded me a very welcome sum of money to research the novel and here I am, at the start of a longish road to a new book. 

Donald Pirie and Clare Waugh as Rab and Jean

Anyway, I loved Ellisland. And I loved it not least because it hasn't been overly interpreted. It remains one of those atmospheric places where nobody has got their hands on the displays, nobody has introduced sound and light effects with a hundred buttons for kids to press, and nobody has tried to tell you what you ought to think and feel. 

I don't know how long the Trust in charge of Ellisland will resist the temptation to revamp it, so I'm very glad I saw it as it is. It was a very fine day, there were house martins flying and calling about the old buildings and the walk along the Nith, where Rab is said to have composed Tam, was a green, shady pathway, fringed with wild flowers, dappled with sunshine. The curator, who lives in the cottage, was knowledgeable and helpful, and the exhibits - oh the exhibits were to treasure: Burns's sword, Jean Armour's much mended 'mutch' and the poet's wooden box, hewn from a single log, with his initials on the top. 

This is how these small museums used to be and sometimes I find myself wondering what it is about them that I enjoy so much and what it is about the new museums that - splendid and well thought out as they are - so irritates me sometimes. I can only conclude that where there is too much explanation and interpretation, there is no room at all for imagination. You are always being told what to feel and what to think. 

One of the tricks to writing historical fiction is to do just enough research. But then, you give yourself permission to make things up. And only then do you find out what you don't know, what you actually need to know. So you go back and find some answers. But if you do too much research to begin with, if you dot all the 'i's and cross all the 't's there's a good chance that you won't want to make anything up at all. 

Ellisland is open to the public and it's magic. If you're a Burns enthusiast, go and see it while it's still in it's wonderfully welcoming state. If you're not a Burns enthusiast, you may well have changed your mind by the time you come away!