This post originally featured in Lane’s List in Winter 2014.
I’ve been dillying and dallying recently about whether or not to take up some paid work in a couple of months’ time. It’s good work with a reputable company but it’s not writing for me, it’s helping others to write.
I have no work in said future month.
Come to think of it, I have very little work much beyond that. Some of this tumbleweed-diary-situation is down to awaiting large applications on other projects to come good: the subsequent writing (if funded) will have to be done during this time.
This is clearly not a great situation to get into – ‘oooh how exciting will we get funded or will I be on the phone soon contacting everyone I know looking for something/anything to pay the mortgage next month?’.
Over a six-day week the job in question provides just under half the month’s required income. I am totally aware how incredibly lucky I am to be asked to do this – or any – type of job so closely related to theatre and writing. And to be paid a reasonable wage for it.
I am also aware that my family depend mainly on me at the moment to do the earning (an agreement we’ve come to together) and it’s not fair that they should be put at risk for… well, what I’m battling with now. It’s also a new relationship with a regionally-recognised company: who knows what might come of it later?
Grit your teeth Lane, it’s only a week.
But this work is pretty much the same sort of thing I always get asked to do, plus it’ll be a week away from home and my heavily pregnant wife and two-year old daughter. This stuff matters now more than ever and, paradoxically, it’s fuelling my desire to write more but is also economically the reason why I usually think strategically 24/7 rather than artistically 24/7. (Artistically for myself, that is – others get the benefit of my artistic thinking quite a lot of the time).
Here’s the really honest bit though – I’ve got to a stage in my career where I’m now starting to watch many people for whom I’ve led workshops, training courses, university modules, feedback, groups, tutorials and so on over the last twelve years getting to the point I’d love to be but have not yet reached with my own playwriting.
I am absolutely over the moon for them. They bloody deserve it. And in many cases because they focused solely on playwriting from the outset, and I got to that bit later whilst balancing academia and dramaturgy (initial ‘play-safe’ options that later turned out to be things I also loved doing and was quite good at) so maybe more fool me.
I find myself wondering: if I totalled up all the hours I’d spent dramaturging other people’s work over that time, what would I be doing now as a writer?
Which is a pointless question. The better question is:
What’s going to happen when I replace the future hours spent dramaturging other people’s work with my own writing time?
So this is why I’m now clearing time to write, writing my own applications for my own writing, and trying to honour what’s truthful at the heart of my creative endeavours.
I had an hour-long conversation with some very good theatre mentors to help with this – it was just for a coffee and to say hello – but it ended up being an unexpected and incredibly useful check-in with the self.
After reeling off for them the various projects with which I’ve been involved over the last couple of years, I then got into trying to explain this dilemma above – which in fact extends beyond the specific context of the job in question, and into:
Is it irresponsible of me to turn down work that I need on financial terms, just because I want to commit to building a career mainly as a playwright?
At some point this was said:
‘I think we [the organisation I was chatting with] just assume you’re always okay because you’re so busy and doing your thing, and everyone knows you and what you’re up to and you’re in work with new and different people all the time.’
This was a helpful comment to hear because then it hit me. Nobody had really offered up the space until that point to ask if I was okay – y’know, deep down okay – with what my work in theatre comprised.
Was it always really fulfilling me, or was it just for the bills? Was I being irresponsible in even generating that choice for myself?
They didn’t answer this for me, but what they did do was give me the permission to have the choice on the table.
In the last few days I’ve put this to others as well. Including my (brilliantly supportive) wife. They’ve all said the same thing.
Exactly what I’ve been doing for others for over a decade, I now need done to me.
So I’m turning the work down. I’ll find a way to write and pay the bills instead.
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