Can you write creatively in any situation?

As readers may know, I’ve been publishing videos on my YouTube channel for about 30 months. The videos I make are about writing and about becoming an author in my Third Age of life. Sometimes, not often, the subject of a video comes to me easily. And sometimes, even less often, the videos are quick and easy to produce. Usually, though, the process takes time and effort and somewhere in the middle of the production process, I’m likely to have an existential crisis and wonder why I’m wasting my time.

However, in all these months I’ve published more than 50 videos and the number of my subscribers recently passed 500. Over the lifetime of the channel, my videos have been viewed well over 17,000 times and viewers have watched for more than a thousand hours. Anyone who knows YouTube will know those are very modest figures, but they give me encouragement. (When I’m not folded in on myself in my existential crisis corner.)

A year ago last summer, when I was having difficulties finding a topic for a new video, I saw several of the YouTubers I follow making videos about challenges and thought, that might be something for me. The challenge videos I saw were along the lines of: I walked 20,000 steps a day for a month, you won’t believe what happened! Or: Can I read a book a day for 30 days? Watch me try! None were really related to writing, so I decided to invent my own.

My starting point was an interview that Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish author and Nobel Laureate, gave to the YouTube channel of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Among much else of interest, Pamuk claimed to be able to write anywhere, in any situation.

So there was my challenge:
Can I write creatively for 30 days in any situation?

Over a month I would try out writing in different environments, film myself and see what happened.

Problems happened.

The first was that I did not have a clear month to work on the challenge. I was starting sometime in June, but coming up were days and even a couple of weeks when I just wouldn’t be able to give the project any time at all. OK, I thought, thirty days spread over the whole summer.

I split the project into four parts. Seven days in familiar locales, seven in noisy urban settings, seven in quiet rural surroundings, seven in odd places where I’d never written before. Plus an introductory day, and a day for conclusions and reflection.

I think, now, I should probably have made a short video for each of the four parts, and followed that up with a concluding video summarising the results. But that’s not what I did. Oh no. I tried to make a single video with everything included.

Do I need to tell you that the video never got made?

I certainly filmed parts of it. I have several hours of footage. And that was another of the problems. Even without completing the challenge, I ended up with far too many hours of film. The reviewing, let alone the editing, felt insurmountable.

For the familiar settings, I filmed myself writing at home at the kitchen table, in front of my desktop computer, sitting with my laptop in bed. The last thirty minutes of that footage includes a ten-minute stretch of film in which I nod off to sleep and wake with a start just in time to catch the laptop from sliding off my lap.

Let me tell you, there is nothing intrinsically or visually interesting in watching someone write. It’s up there with watching paint dry. (Mind you, the moment when I catch the falling laptop does count as briefly dramatic.)

For the urban environments, I filmed myself at a bus stop, at a crossroads, at a ferry stop in the harbour. The advantage of those clips is the number of other people and movement around me. The disadvantage, while I was filming, was being constantly worried someone would see the camera and maybe knock it over, or walk off with it.

Finding rural settings was strangely even more difficult, probably because for the filming I had to carry a lot of paraphernalia – the camera, extra batteries, a tripod, a microphone and sound recording equipment along with my pad and my laptop. But also because the weather changed and we had a rather windy period, and now I was worried the tripod would topple over and the camera would break. I ended up filming by the sea, in a forest and in a couple of local parks.

For the ‘odd’ places, I filmed myself in the rain outside a café (with the camera under an awning), in a hotel lobby in Kiel, in a library in Östersund, on the train to Stockholm, in a storage room in Gothenburg (though it could be anywhere). In some ways those were the least problematic. Perhaps I’d got used to doing it by then. I still found it was very difficult to write creatively while I was worrying about where the camera was and whether I was in shot, though.

In retrospect, I think I’d have done better if I could have just focussed on the challenge and not tried to film myself. But then the object of the exercise was to create ‘content’ for my video channel, was it not? If a tree falls in a forest – or a writer writes a paragraph – and there’s no one there to film it and put it on the Internet, has the tree fallen? Has the paragraph been written?

Returning from the Stockholm Writers’ Festival at the beginning of last September, I tripped on the platform of Stockholm railway station, fell badly and broke a rib. That put paid to a lot of work. I managed to make and publish my video about the Festival, but that was about all I did for four months. All my footage from the Challenge has been resting on my hard discs and SD cards since then. Perhaps now I’ve written this, I might be able to revisit it and make something of it.

Watch this space!

Various Links

• Writing, Retiring, Recording: My First Year on YouTube
• My own YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@JohnDudleyAuthor-xo4ip
• The Louisiana Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@thelouisianachannel
• The Orhan Pamuk interview: https://youtu.be/9ESxaekQT_c
• If you liked this post, why not read Michael’s post on The Surprising Value of Reviewing Books,
• Or guest blogger Adrian Tennant on Writing – A Way of Life.