There's a Difference Between Being a Writer and Being an Artist

I’ve written all my life. I guess everybody has. You learn to write in school and then you don’t really stop; filling out forms, taking notes, scribbling down phone numbers on the back of envelopes and writing shopping lists in dog-eared notepads.

On reflection, perhaps the smartphone has killed off even that last bastion of human pen-to-paper activity. When was the last time you had to physically write anything down?

I am a writer. Not a jotter of numbers or a scribbler of lists, but a writing man. I can admit it now.

One of my earliest memories was making a book at school, binding small pieces of paper together and giving it to a friend. When I was a young teen, I tapped away on Microsoft Word every time I had access to a computer. I put pen to paper to write out farcical sci-fi stories that I kept in binders in my tiny, childhood bedroom. Later, I put together a semi-regular 4 page magazine with friends, full of Private Eye style satire called ‘The Fifth Columnist’ that became a samizdat publication in our school. I wrote blog post after blog post on various topics on various platforms as the millennium both came and went.

I have done nothing consistently in my life but write.

It took the longest time to realise I am a writer. I didn’t stop and think about it, I was too busy wading into anxious waters about life, the universe and everything.

But it’s always been there, the compulsion to put down words in a particular order, to communicate to a faceless audience I will never know or meet, the need to express and share the thoughts in my head for some particular reason I’ve never quite pinpointed.

Perhaps because I can’t draw and I’m a mediocre musician at best, it was predictable my outlet had to weave its way onto paper, or at least onto white pixels that glow in the half-light of a 1am morning when I should be asleep.

Yet a strange thing has happened since I've accepted the moniker of writer. First came the feast, an inevitable outpouring of words. I had found my groove, after all.

Then came the famine. The more I wrote, the more concise I became. The more I leaned into brevity and the more plain and logical my words grew.

There is a beauty to pointlessly flowery language, a poetry to meandering sentences that corkscrew their way through the pages like winding garden paths that go round in circles and lead to overgrown dead-ends or nowhere in particular.

My creative outpouring was mostly done on Medium and Vocal, turning out short-form posts for information, explanation and most of all, the financial reward of clicks.

The consequences of my actions have been unforgiving from an artistic perspective. I have become a jabbering, prescriptive textbook, a plain-spoken nobody with the mystic and romanticism of a shop receipt.

In 2020 I vowed to write authentically, but in the process of trying to extrapolate my thoughts into words, I have forgotten that there is more to writing than translation.

One of my favourite books to dip in and out of is ‘The Book of Disquiet’ by Portuguese writer and poet Fernando Pessoa. It is a compilation of his works collected from notebooks and papers scattered throughout his apartment and kept in a domed, wooden chest.

Pessoa was a Van Gogh style figure, a tortured artist, frustrated by his genius and much as he was liberated by it, barely recognised in his lifetime and celebrated emphatically after his death.

Even though he never completed or edited it before his death, Pessoa branded his ambitious 'The Book of Disquiet’ as his “faceless autobiography" - essentially he was writing it for the sake of it. There is no story as such, just the thoughts and empty events in a life connected together by pages bound in a book. A fitting metaphor for living, perhaps.

I have not yet finished the book. I read sections every now and again, when the sun has gone down and the roads have grown quiet. It is more reference material to the beauty of writing than it is a story or a novel. Every passage is stand-alone beautiful, it is a tome of writing for the sake of it, existing because it can, not for prescription or instruction but to bathe in the joy of words and emotions, to be human, to be a God.

The truth is I always saw myself as an artist, not necessarily a writer, but someone in possession of an artistic soul.

Does that sound vulgar, facetious or embarrassing? Is such a thing taboo to say? Can one be so blatant about personality without sounding delusional or pretentious? Claiming artistic sentiment without creating anything of recognised value feels like a messiah complex.

Well, come sail your ships around me and bring me your sick, for I know who I am. I do not claim talent, nor genius, I'm just old enough to know how I have been built. My mind leans towards artistic sentiment over dry logic or practicality.

The sheer joy of creating for the sake of it is our rebellious cry against corporatism and conformity, free by its mere frivolous existence. Which is why I have grown disillusioned so with my writing, my words. I am not a prescriptive machine. I don't want a perfect score on Grammarly. I want that god-forsaken box-ticking website to burn itself up on my tautologies and sentence fragments.

I am an artist. That's my authenticity, that's my frivolous existence and it's high time I stopped worrying about lengthy prose and 1 cent mouse clicks and began to reconnect with who I am.

This is a manifesto.