This is an announcement post: I have some work to share. And also some comments on what and why, together with some dreadful shibboleths that will be familiar to most creatives.
When I imagined, as a young man, what my work would be, it was fiction. I imagined myself making narrative fiction films, not documentaries. All my first, diffident, hilariously incompetent efforts were fictional drama; although I liked documentaries and thought the form important, I imagined that non-fiction would be an occasional, worthy digression in an otherwise expanding catalogue of fiction. I did not yet perceive the distinction between my work and the product of my work.
The product of my work, when it came, was documentary; this is what stumbled from me and into the world. I spent first years and then, recently, decades tirelessly producing documentaries, paid-for and paid-out in the necessity cycle of production and consumption. Some of this work was the subject of praise, some of derision, some even of envy – a close friend once came back to my office after a night descending through the drunk levels from joyful to morose. He took a swig from his sixth-too-many, rolled his eyes around the darkened reception area and said “you’ve got it sorted, haven’t you? Fucking sorted. And what have I got?”, and I remember thinking, “what on earth does he mean? I haven’t been able to accomplish a single piece of work, my real work.”
But the concept of the real work was, like the real work itself, a product of the imaginative realm, and forever trapped there. The time will come, I reassured myself, I just need to earn enough to achieve complete emancipation from any demands on my time whatsoever and then I will be able to embark, immaculately, on the real work.
This is a common creative affliction: living imaginatively in all senses, world-building your life, suspended in potential, filling libraries in your mind in which all the stacked pages are merely vaporous impressions, dreams which struggle to remember themselves, labyrinths unnavigable by you or anyone else, work with no product. Unreal work.
A few years ago I discovered Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a ball of string in the labyrinth. I would recommend it as essential reading for anyone wanting to embark on a creative project - read it every year, and make weekly pilgrimages to Steven’s admirable content-repurposing operation at stevenpressfield.com
The War of Art showed me how to appreciate my real accomplishments, rather than compare them unfavourably to my unreal work, and it provided instructions on how to transmute the unreal to real - here come the forbidding shibboleths: there is no perfect time; there’s never a perfect time; you are your own worst enemy; it will never be right; no-one wants to read your shit; you are what you do; sit down and do the work.
I concluded that if I couldn’t scale the massive barriers in time and treasure required to make fiction films, I could at least write fiction, which, after all, is costless and some time can always be found somewhere.
Of course, this is a war without armistice and so I quickly sprinted back into the labyrinth and started assembling archives of notes, fragments, half-finished chapters and unread stories. Pressfield is right, I affirmed, I must set the ideal conditions in which to accept that there are no ideal conditions and then complete the real work.
Last year I turned a corner and my foot hit the ball of string again. The most important thing, I reminded myself, is to do the work and that means completing and publishing it; it means having the product of work, just as I have had throughout my career - which has been the real work. So I started this newsletter, the newsletter without any readers, and started publishing lots of non-fiction. But I also wrote the first piece of fiction that I’d ever shown to anyone, the product of work. It was published in the literary magazine, Bull, at the beginning of this year.
Now that some time has elapsed and that story has had its run in Bull, I can share it here. And so the announcement is that having recently completed a lengthy non-fiction series, I’m going to get on with some fiction, which will become part of Aftershocks alongside the essays and creator notes.
Fiction was what I first imagined my work would be, I intend to do the work, I hope you enjoy the stories.