On the Importance of Being Pure

I will always maintain that there is a significant difference between being an artist and being a business person. It’s incredibly lucky to be able to make a living from your art and some incredible artists do have a knack for making smart business decisions but they are artists first and foremost and not business people who use art as a tool and whose work has the primary purpose of making money through wide popular appeal. And that’s not to say that something having wide popular appeal negates its artistic value. I think it really comes down to the process. And for something to have real artistic value, it has to be pure.

What do I mean by that? I can only talk about my personal experience, and for me, something I create is pure if it is true. And I write fiction so I don’t mean that the story really happened, what I mean is that I really mean it, I’ve inhabited the feelings, fully realised and imagined the psychology of my protagonist so that everything is real. When I talk about being eaten alive by lust or stewing in bitter jealousy, or feeling like I’m being lit up from the inside by all the streetlamps of a city at night, these are all feelings I’ve experienced, sensations I’ve sat with and reflected on, turning them over and over on my tongue until I can recall the taste at whim. And for me a novel is really a collection of these kinds of moments, a six-course-meal of human experience knit together in a story. I don’t have much choice over what I write either, if I had a proper business sense I’d write procedural crime or a romance but I don’t. I belong to the muses, I’m a slave, the idea comes and then the characters and the places and it all unfolds and I’m just the scribe. I can’t tell you how much more difficult I make things for myself because I can’t stick to a genre or because it’s hard to find comps for my work. But they’re pure. I can’t change and I won’t. I have to really mean it.

It takes a while for me sometimes to get in touch with myself, to find the right state of mind, to access the purity deep down. For a few wonderful months at various times in my life I was there, living in it, writing poetry all day, dreaming up stories. I have never been happier than in those times and I have never needed anything else less and I couldn’t have cared less if I had to eat bread and water for the rest of my life and never owned a thing because I felt like the richest girl on earth. I was writing, making real art that sang out with truth and made my arms prickle with goosebumps.

It’s harder now, that I’m older and everything is somewhat dulled from what it was, to get into that frame of mind but there are ways. It’s easier when the business of being alive feels less strained, without the worries of bills and other uninteresting but troubling things of that nature hanging over your head. It’s easier when you feel a part of something, when you discover a book, a writer, a poet, a singer, an artist, an idea that makes you feel less alone. If there are others like you, then it’s worth creating, contributing. When you are reminded of what can be achieved, when you’re touched by the words of a stranger you feel your own heart swell with potential. It’s easier when you remind yourself of your power in curating your life, of selecting things that reflect your soul to be part of your daily life, to see yourself in your home, your clothes, your books, your perfume, your food. To feel like yourself and understand yourself, what speaks to you, to sharpen your sense of personal taste, for me this has always been instrumental in finding my way back to a state of purity.

And finally, it has always been important for me to live accustomed to my own personal rhythm and I would always encourage any artist to prioritise this. We are like small nations with seasons, the flower can’t always be in bloom. Sometimes it’s necessary to draw inward and nourish yourself, what worked once can’t work all the time because every work of art is something different. We don’t always have something to say, sometimes we just need to exist, to breathe, to feel, to travel somewhere new. I don’t always feel like translating my soul into words, sometimes it feels like cutting pieces of myself off and pasting them onto paper, do it too often and there’s nothing left.

Above all, recognise when it’s time to stop rushing forward but to turn around and make the pilgrimage back to the well of purity where you’ll find your own reflection looking up at you from the inky depths. Truths are waiting under the water to be discovered, a deeper sense of knowing and inspiration.