Creating On a Disabled Timeline

I used to ask myself, “What would I make if I were well?” I’ve stopped asking myself that question because it only has painful answers.

Computer Keyboard - Jamie Hale

The normative creative timeline and I are not friends, and yet I manage a job that involves creating. Somehow I’ve built a creative practice that aligns with my body, however divergent it appears.

Each commission arrives with a delivery date. The work has to be completed by this time, whether the commissioner is someone external or whether it’s been commissioned by CRIPtic, or even myself; the deadline stands. Not just for commissions of my own creative work, but also for working through and reviewing scripts (where the access needs of the person submitting the script may mean it arrives with me late), assessing work by people I’m mentoring, or giving a round of feedback for a project. When there is a deadline, it has to be done by then. This implicitly assumes that my body will be reliable between now and then, and that I will be able to complete the work bit by bit.

With many projects, my section of the work has to be completed for the next person to be able to complete theirs. Just as if I receive a script late, it causes problems with my practice, so too is it a fact that if I miss a deadline, it causes problems for the practice of the next person in the chain, who may themselves be disabled.

Working at the edge of my capacity

These timelines were never built for people with bodies like mine. I don’t say that out of self-pity, but just out of an acknowledgement that the creative world, and especially the world of theatre, operates on strict deadlines and, unfortunately, my body doesn’t.

I often find myself working on the very edge of my capacity. I don’t mean by that a romantic struggle to write, nor that I get my inspiration at 3am and produce pages of literature in that moment, but I mean an actual limit: a level of exhaustion where I cannot stay awake, and all I do is type one letter on the keyboard over and over as I fall asleep.

There is medication that turns my brain into sludge, slows me down, and replaces creativity with density. Fatigue and pain make concentration impossible, make sentences dissolve, and make me lose track of what work I have done. These all create a specific creative obstacle.

It is different from working while tired. It is not working when it is undesirable or working when it is difficult, but working when it is impossible. I have my tired days, I have my bad writing days, and I have days when my instrument is not available. I can push through a bad writing day, but actually there is no way of pushing through and producing on a day where I truly can’t.

Making work in fragments

One of the ways I get around this is making work in the in-between times. I find 15 minutes between emptying my catheter bag and being due medication. I find the chance to write a paragraph on the phone while I’m waiting in the waiting room at the doctor’s surgery. I write these blogs in bed, dictating to a computer screen, often with my eyes closed. I work on the libretto for an opera in those tiny windows that are open in which my brain actually allows me to create, because I know that if I don’t, I’ll never complete it.

I’m not trying to romanticise this. I’m just acknowledging that it’s the way that I have to work, and it’s the way that my work is made.

What gets lost?

There is a lot that gets lost when working that way. There is ambition: the piece that I wanted to be writing versus the piece that I am actually producing on that day. There is the range of my work: an argument that needed hours for me to fully develop, instead being pulled together in windows of 20 minutes where I could. There is revision, and the fact that many drafts need another pass that never came. And there is the long thought, the kind that requires you to think uninterrupted, from a beginning to an end.

Some work just doesn’t get made, and that is a loss I cannot resolve.

Writing at speed

But there are advantages to working the way I work. I can work fast. A window in which I can be creative may open suddenly and close without warning, and so I have learned to react when it appears and to work as quickly and thoroughly as I can in those moments that are mine.

Writing at speed is also a distinct mode of writing; it is not just a compromise. It involves less self-editing and less second-guessing. I am getting my thoughts down on the page before, rather than after, my internal critic arrives. It is one of the reasons that I can create blogs quickly, because I am able to dictate them and the first sentence will just come out whole. I do not have the time to negotiate and edit and rewrite.

This urgency strips out the decorative. It leaves me to write the essential thing, and it means that my work is sometimes more honest, because pieces written fast are more direct and less managed. There is less self-censorship. Drafts like these can sometimes surprise me, leading me somewhere I was not planning to go because there was no time to plan the work. I can work fast because I trust my thinking: I know it, and I will write it.

Writing in deep time

The other side of this is writing slowly, and the advantages that deep time has. Long periods of low capacity force a different relationship with a piece, one where I am thinking about it constantly and not acting on it. I am living with an idea for weeks or months before I can write it, and I see what that process of incubation does. In the background, an argument develops while I am doing other things or while I am doing nothing.

When I come back to a draft after a long time away from it, I can see it clearly for the first time. Slowness can be a way of pressure-testing work. The ideas that have survived weeks of low-level thinking are the ideas that hold. Sometimes slow work feels like fast work: sentences that arrive fully formed after days of inactivity because, actually, they were developing in my brain.

When non-disabled writers move too fast through development, they miss the time that a piece needs to sit before it can be finished, brewing like a cup of tea. Crip time, working both fast and slowly, is a creative methodology; it is not just an access requirement for me.

The interplay between slowness and speed

Working fast and working slow aren’t opposite modes in my writing; they’re different phases of the same practice. A piece might be drafted at speed during a good window, left for weeks of slow thinking while I’m unwell, and then revised in another fast window. Knowing both slow and fast modes gives me more resources in my toolkit than a writer who only has one.

I’ve learned to recognise which mode I’m in and to use it, rather than fighting it and trying to be a different kind of writer. The non-disabled writer assumes that more clock time equals better work, and I don’t think that’s correct. I think sometimes less clock time, with a real focus on one element of a piece of work or another, is far more effective.

I’ve tried to create quality work, and I hope my practice evidences the idea that quality and continuity are not always the same thing.

What comes to replace what I’ve lost

What does my work have as a result of how I write? It has compression: when I only have 15 minutes, I cut to the core of what I am trying to get to. It has precision: every word costs something, so I spend them carefully. It has necessity: pieces that I felt I had to write, that couldn’t wait for a better day, have a quality of urgency. And it has expansiveness: work dictated rather than typed has a way of reaching out to and connecting with its audience that typed work just doesn’t. It has a voice to it, and that voice is something people respond well to. Many of these blogs are dictated, and reflect how I speak, building a bridge to the reader that written work can sometimes struggle to do. The work is also edited better - the editing done in my head before I put keyboard to finger, because there is no time for me to write badly first.

I am also reimagining my relationship with perfectionism. I cannot afford to be a perfectionist in the way I want, and my work is sometimes better for being done than for being perfect. Some of the work I am most proud of I created very quickly. This does not mean it is worthless or was easier to create; it just means that I created in the only way I can.

Practical structures

I have a lot in place to try and ensure that I am able to do the work I need to. Some of this is basic stuff. I take my calendar and time-block it so that I know what time I have allocated and intended for each piece of work, which allows me to build in contingencies, so I know that if I am unwell in the first block of time, I have another block available to complete the work.

I make sure I have talked to collaborators about my capacity and what it means. I am clear with them about what I will be able to do and what I won’t, and if necessary I identify colleagues who would be able to take over on a project if I couldn’t.

Deadlines always have to be negotiated. I need to ask for what I require, and if what I am given is not feasible, I have learned that I have to say no. It is not fair on me, my mind, or my body to commit to a piece of work I cannot deliver.

My creative practice is very fluid. It moves between art forms, and it can go dormant and restart rather than requiring continuity. For the elements where that is true, I can afford to slow down. Other parts are less flexible, particularly when other people are depending on me during a timeline for a theatre production. In those instances, I have to rely on time blocking and the colleagues who could step in or handle parts of the work for me if needed.

I also keep notes, fragments, and half-sentences, constantly accumulating these bits in tabs within a Google Doc, alongside more and more blog post fragments, so that I can assemble later what I have written now. And finally, I have the infrastructure: I am surrounded by people who support me, either formally or informally, in order for me to be able to do the work that I do.

The sector’s role

But for me particularly, the theatre sector makes it far harder than it should be. There is an assumption that flexibility is a favour rather than an access requirement: that when I am struggling to complete something, it is viewed as the same as anybody else struggling to complete it, without any recognition of the fact that, as a disabled person, I was set something I could never achieve.

For this sector to change, we would need far longer development periods, more honest conversations about capacity, and funding and arrangements that do not penalise delay but recognise it as built into the development of work. A lot of this will benefit people far beyond disabled people. I sometimes feel like we are the canary in the coal mine with workload, and that the conditions that are breaking us at the moment will eventually break everyone. This problem cannot be solved for an individual with an individual solution.

A working relationship

There isn’t a resolution for this, and I’m sorry. I don’t have the perfect piece of advice for what it means to create at the edge of your capacity and what you can do about that. There is no solution; there is no solving it; there is only living with it.

It’s not a narrative of triumph. I haven’t found the secret for making it work so that I’m now able to meet every deadline confidently. The loss of work, the loss of time, and the loss of energy are real, and so is the cost of it. But that doesn’t make me despair. The work gets made, and some of it matters, and that’s enough.

Am I working at a different pace and in a different way to my peers? Yes. But actually, the modes I’m working in, both fast and slow, are the shape of my practice, not the absence of a practice. If my body can’t promise anything, then I can only keep making work regardless.

I used to ask myself, “What would I make if I were well?” I’ve stopped asking myself that question because it only has painful answers. Were I well, would I have built up the skill, the writing ability, and the practice that I have? Or would a well me have gone on to other challenges? I can’t actually answer that, so I won’t try.

What I will say is this: before you can work out how to meet deadlines, you need to know how to meet your body. You need to know what you require in order to work and how to get it. And you need to learn how to communicate these needs to partners and how to push for what you require from them.

Ultimately, the first step is to know yourself so that you can trust yourself and find your own individual voice. It will inevitably be shaped by disability, but it will also go far beyond that.