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. 

The Great Silence

Wormwood.

Last week, a good friend in a different area of creativity asked me why I had given up writing plays.

I suppose the answer is that I haven't, not completely, and if somebody asked me to write a play again I would certainly consider it, especially if it involved dramatising one of my own books. Still, the question gave me pause for thought.

Why did I give up?

Well, one of the main reasons was that I wanted to write fiction, and in fact I was writing fiction, lots of it. But because I was learning my craft, I didn't want to go back to dividing my time between the two. I wanted to live in the world of whatever book I was working on. So in a way, abandoning plays wasn't so much a conscious decision as a refocusing. And that was fine.


But there were other factors. Lots of women who were writing plays at the same time as me seem to have abandoned theatre as well, especially here in Scotland. Somebody speaking about women in theatre on a radio programme only the other week pointed out what a difficult place theatre was for women to get so much as a toehold in, back in the 1980s. Listening to her, I thought 'not just me then.'

It struck me that one of the other reasons why I gave up on theatre was that my life had changed significantly. I was living in the countryside, I had a child - and I couldn't any longer lurk in theatre bars making sure that those doing the commissioning remembered my existence. This may sound like a lame excuse - and the truth is that had I wanted it badly enough, I might well have done it - but the fact remains that I fell off their radar and at the time, I really didn't miss it.

Quartz

Back in the 80s, after writing 100+ hours of radio drama, some TV, community theatre, and a production at Edinburgh's Lyceum, I had two major and very well reviewed productions at the Traverse in Edinburgh: Wormwood (all about the Chernobyl disaster) and Quartz. I remember Michael Billington's complimentary review of Quartz and his hope that the theatre would go on to 'nurture' me.

Nurturing was never going to be on the agenda.

I had a brief resurgence with the wonderful David McLennan at Glasgow's Oran Mor, who produced three of my short plays, at least one of which - the Price of a Fish Supper - has gone on to have an excellent and successful life beyond its first production. But after David's sadly early death, I again entered what I have come to think of as The Great Silence.

I would send ideas, scripts, proposals to various theatre companies. Most of the time, they simply weren't acknowledged at all, although there was the occasional standard rejection. From that point on, nobody - except David, for that short time - treated me like a professional.

I was reminded of this recently, when I decided to explore the possibility of finding an agent. I have had agents in the past, including the late, great (but scary) Pat Kavanagh, who sold my first full length adult novel. It was sold to the Bodley Head, which was instantly taken over by one of the big publishing beasts and they tried to transform it into the fashionable beach bonkbuster it wasn't. My next novel had a Polish background. Pat loved it but couldn't sell it, and if she couldn't sell it, nobody could. We got a string of rejections saying that editors loved it but nobody was remotely interested in Poland. Nevertheless the single best piece of advice I have ever had about writing came from Pat.
'Only write something if you can't bear NOT to write it,' she told me.

My last agent disappeared without trace. I have no idea, not the foggiest notion, what became of him. He went AWOL and incommunicado and I've never heard from him since. Perhaps he too entered the Great Silence. Over the past year, with nine published novels under my belt, four of them still very much in print, and a brand new and well reviewed non-fiction book published in the summer, I contacted various agents who said they were looking for new clients, and who seemed like a good fit.

One responded pleasantly and personally. She was understandably too busy and told me so quite quickly, while also praising the work.
One turned me down immediately with a formal rejection letter. I doubt very much if my enquiry got beyond the intern employed to sift them.
One asked to see a PDF of a book and then - nothing.
The rest didn't respond at all. I had again entered the Great Silence.

Well -  I'm fine. I have an excellent publisher and exciting work to do, and I've given up on the notion of representation. In fact I've probably got enough interesting writing work to keep me busy for the next few years: work that I can't bear NOT to do. And that's a blessing in anybody's book.

But it does make me wonder about people just starting out. Apart from the lucky few, how do they get themselves noticed? How do they ever stand out from the crowd? And what about that old maxim that if you're 'good enough' you'll make it? So you just have to persevere? Because the successful people I know have persevered with the actual writing, for sure, but I suspect most of them have also taken matters into their own hands in some way.

I don't have any easy answers to this, but I do wonder what other writers, experienced or emerging, think about it.
How did you do it?
How do you plan to do it?