tomwrightdreamer

You may have noticed that there’s been a hiatus in blog posts of nearly three years! It’s been very interesting returning to it and thinking about how crucial my experience with the Artist’s Way in 2012 was to turning my life back on track.

This blog is about my creative journey as an artist, as opposed to my career as a director. For those of you who want to know more about that side of my work please visit www.tomwrightdirector.com or sign for my theatre newsletter here.

I’ve just posted my round-up of the year there, in which I describe the six remarkable and diverse projects I’ve worked on in 2017. Looking back at my posts from 2012 I see that I was indeed, as Julia Cameron says, in need of ‘artistic recovery.’ I was broke, and scared and stuck. The ideas I internalised during the (longer than) 12-week process of the Artist’s Way really helped me. Especially the idea that the universe wants me to be creative and that if I commit to the work (or ‘showing up at the page’) the creative force inherent in the universe (which as a Buddhist, I would think of as Buddhahood, and which Julia calls God) will support me in unexpected ways.

I have really found that to be true, and the work I on myself did then is why I was able to work on such exciting projects now.

This year, I decided that on top of my work as a director, I really wanted to ensure that I made space to develop my own creativity. So much of what I do as a director is about facilitating the creativity of others; weeding out my own ego and need to control, and instead empowering others to trust their own instincts. As Rufus Norris, Artistic Director, once said to me, ‘the director is the person who recognises the best idea in the room, not necessarily the person who has it.’ In fact, I’d go further these days, and say that when I direct, I try to be the person who enables everyone else to have the best ideas. Part of that has definitely been by using Julia Cameron’s techniques for quietening the inner critic, long enough to allow those ideas to start flowing.

But in the midst of supporting others to do that, I realised that I was running the risk of neglecting that quiet whispering voice in my own head which says, ‘I want to play too!’ So I made some time for that voice this year. In February I took part in in the brilliant 28 Plays Later where I wrote a short play every day in February, which was intense as I was in rehearsal for Handbagged at the time.

This competition is simple enough – you all contribute £19.28 to a pot, and then submit a play each day, which can be as short or as long as you like, on a topic set the day before by our leader in speed writing, Sebastian. If you fail to make the deadline on any day you forfeit your money, and the remainder is divided amongst the winners – the last people standing at the end of the month – minus a contribution for admin. As a result of the drop out I made a staggering 36p profit. But, far greater than that, was the value I got from being forced to write every day.

Lily, one of my sisters, put me on to it and we both approached the challenge in very different ways. I could only spare a bit of time each day, so I would start a 45 minute timer and would just bash through with no prep, research or editing. Lily was up till 1am every morning honing tiny masterpieces. It’s perhaps telling that all that love and graft led to one of those plays becoming an excellent production just a few months later.

I didn’t create any masterpieces, but I did fall back in love with spending time with just me and my creativity. And the advantage of having a crazy-tight deadline, and a miniscule financial incentive, is that it didn’t give my inner critic any time to engage, so I was able to write from a quick, clear place I haven’t accessed for years. Looking back over them a few months later, none fill me with the desire to put them on stage, necessarily, but they do serve as a good expression of where I was emotionally back then. And two of them fed in very directly to my next challenge!

In November, because I felt writing 28 short plays was too easy, I put myself through National Novel Writing Month and wrote a 53,000 word first draft of a story I’ve been carrying in my head for years. But that’s for another blog post!

This coming year I am going to post here fortnightly with plays, extracts of the novel, and reviews of creativity books and aids, so stay tuned! And remember, if you want to keep up to date with my theatre productions please see www.tomwrightdirector.com, where you can find out about my busy year ahead, including being artistic director for Generation Hope, an event supported by SGI-UK, a society dedicated to Buddhism in action for Peace, taking place for 6,000 guests across three cities using satellite broadcasts to link the venues on 17^th March, aiming to inspire young people with the confidence to change the world.

As closing treats: here’s a video of me explaining Buddhism at Bettakulcha, an evening of presentations where everyone delivers a talk with 20 slides pre-programmed to change every 15 seconds! This was a few years ago, but I realised I never got around to putting it on the blog. I was speaking at breakneck speed and you can’t see me because I’m so tall my head was in the light, but it might be worth five minutes of your time!

At the other end of the spiritual spectrum, I’ve achieved my life-time ambition of being on a podcast! Poet and theatre maker, Jack Dean recorded this with me and Amie George who was the Yeti in Jack’s Horace and the Yeti. He gets his collaborators sufficiently drunk, then makes them play a storytelling impro game from the 80s. We had a lot of fun making it! However, be warned, it features both obscene language and, well. . . obscene things. Please don’t listen if you are of a delicate disposition, or, in fact, you want to be able to look me in the eye next time we meet.

I hope 2018 is a year of brilliant achievements for you, whether that’s in your work, relationships, or in making the world a better place, and thanks for following me on my journey in to having an even more creative year!