Tesselation and tomatoes

I'm not (just) a writer, you know...

This is going to come as quite a shock to some of you, I know, but… I’m not a writing machine. I know that writers are constantly exhorted to write something every day, but honestly, I don’t have the stamina or the motivation to write every day, let alone the time.

As I wrote recently, I write purely for pleasure. (Well, unless someone's paying me to do it, but you see what I mean.) I'm not trying to make a living out of writing fiction. I'm not even trying to get famous or build a following. It's just something I do because I enjoy it. And some days, I just don't feel like it.

I've tried forcing myself to write every day. I've tried telling myself come on, Matt, just one sentence. It works for a little while, but eventually it begins to feel like a chore, and then I don't enjoy it any more: I'm writing because I feel like I have to, not because I want to. And it shows: my writing sucks, I get depressed, and it makes me even less motivated to write.

One of the things I've learned from my extremely varied career is that turning my hobbies into a job usually has an unwanted side effect: they stop being fun, because they're now work. Being a game designer put me off playing games. Running an animation software company put me off making - and even watching - movies, because I just found myself thinking about camera angles, lighting, editing, and so on, instead of story. Running a publishing company meant that I stopped reading books for pleasure. So these days, I do my best not to mix work and pleasure.

I do try to do something creative every day, but I like to mix it up a little: it's not always writing.

Finished him at last. I’m quite happy with the way he came out.

As a rule, I like to have three projects on the go: One writing, one artistic (model-making, painting, music, etc), and one other (usually gardening, working on the house, or something practical, or else researching something new).

Part of the reason for having that mix is that I don’t get bored and can switch things around depending on my mood. And by limiting myself to just three, I don’t end up wasting time trying to decide what to do, or frittering away time doing lots of little projects that go nowhere.

But in addition, having non-writing projects gets me away from the screen: it's good to do things that don't involve sitting at a computer and typing. I do enough of that in my day job, thanks. (And, as an added bonus, it’s a great time to listen to music or audio dramas, because although my eyes and hands are fully occupied, my ears aren’t. For some reason, I keep finding myself listening to the Big Finish Doctor Who stories while I work in the garden. I haven’t liked the TV show since the middle of the Tennant era, and the old ones are just too dated, but the audio stories are great.)

This is one I drew some years ago. I painted it, but wasn’t happy with the colors.

Anyway, I've decided it's time to get back to visual art for a bit. I've always enjoyed designing mandalas and geometry, and I've always been fascinated by Islamic tessellations. A couple of years ago my wife got me a great book on Islamic design, so at long last I'm going to start working my way through that, learning how to construct some of the intricate geometric patterns you find on mosaics, rules, and ceilings throughout Spain, the Middle East, and other parts of the Muslim world.

The great thing about this book is that it doesn’t give you step by step instructions. It forces you to take the time to understand how the patterns are constructed. It gives you a set of basic gridlines based around four-fold, five-fold and six-fold symmetry, and then you need to figure out how to use them to create each of the designs. And, most importantly, the same sets of gridlines are used to create several different patterns, so you gradually learn to visualize the way different shapes interlock.

I find this kind of artwork deeply relaxing and meditative. It requires precision and calmness, and I end up in a magnificently tranquil flow state. I also get deep satisfaction from using compasses, rulers, pencils, brushes, inks and paper: it makes a nice change from modeling knives, files, putty, acrylics, airbrushes and plastic or resin.

Meanwhile, I’ll also be planning out this year's vegetable garden. Sowing season starts soon, the raised beds are already beginning to emerge from under the snow, and we need to be ready to start planting in a few weeks. That means preparing the ground, repairing the deer netting, planting out seedlings in indoor trays, and making sure we have enough steaks, trellises, and the like for whatever we decide to try and grow this year.

So where does that leave writing? Well, we'll see. Maybe a short story will hit me at 3am one morning and I’ll decide to write it down. Or maybe not. What would make me really happy, though, would be to get as far as changing all the names in Yellow Flowers and rewriting the first chapter.

I’m not going to put any intentional effort into it, but having Yellow Flowers as my “third project” will give the back of my brain something to think about while I’m drawing and digging. As with so many things, when I get stuck, the answer is to stop trying and just let things happen.