Delivered at TEDxATU Donegal, Letterkenny on 21 February 2024.
This is a story about trusting yourself. Mostly.
When I was growing up, creativity was my escape. It was a shield against a confusing, frightening world. I was a quiet, shy child, nervous of new places and people, but at home, I got lost in drawing cartoon strips, creating my own characters and adventures.
My favourite piece of work I ever did at primary school was when I was 6, and the teacher got us to write the Bible story Daniel in the Lion’s Den in our own words. I filled two whole pages of my workbook with words and illustrations. I added jokes, action and suspense, writing ‘to be continued…!’ at the bottom of the first page, and at the top of the next, ‘…right now!’
I got top marks, and the teacher said I was very good at writing stories. But, she made me rub out the ‘to be continued’ bit, because ‘it didn’t make sense,’ apparently. I was fuming. Of course it made sense! It was obviously a two-part story; the cliffhanger made it 100 times more exciting – it was the best bit! I’m still annoyed about it to this day. But, she was the teacher, so I had to do as I was told. I didn’t like my story after that. It felt like something someone else would write. And I didn’t want to write like someone else.
But I kept drawing, creating characters, making up stories, showing them only to close friends and maybe my family. Later I started at an all-boys grammar school; I knew nobody there. Somehow I latched on to a group of guys a couple of years above me, one of whom I recognised from primary school, who tolerated me hanging about with them in the playground.
But when they left school after GCSE, I was back to square one. Worse than square one, actually, because everyone else had already built up friendships over two years, whereas I was virtually silent in class and then disappeared off with the older lads at break and lunchtime.
I was still painfully shy, so there was no way I was going to just go up to someone and start a conversation. But, my family had recently got our first home computer, and I had started messing about with the word processor, writing things that made my old friends from primary school laugh, so I figured, maybe the boys in my year would like it too. And if not, well, they already didn’t speak to me, so I’d nothing to lose.
And so I wrote and printed what would become the first of many issues of ‘Dave Kinghan Muses on the Hopelessness of His Life and Existence’ –
[SLIDE:] IMAGE OF NEWSLETTER
– a sort of newsletter containing streams of consciousness, short stories, parodies, and generally the kind of immature nonsense you’d expect from a 14/15 year old boy. I mean, it was awful, embarrassing, cancelable stuff. But it was the turn of millennium, and people were still into that kind of thing.
The other boys liked it. I made friends. I was invited to house parties – at which, of course, I mainly hid because, well, if I’d been good at socialising, I wouldn’t have had to write a newsletter to interact with other teenagers. People I didn’t know came up and said they really laughed at this joke or that line.
It was a total revelation, that others would like the silly stuff I wrote and how I wrote it. My confidence in writing grew, and I wrote more. And then I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could just do this instead of having to get a job?
Predictably, my parents weren’t too enthusiastic about this idea. Especially because what little of my writing I allowed them to see probably didn’t look promising, since it featured characters named Henry the Intelligent Hip-Hop Camel, Annyetta the Abusive but Unsettlingly Attractive Antelope, and the Pipe-Smoking Alligator of Doom.
But, they let me get on with it, likely assuming that once I left school, the world would inevitably crush my dreams and strong-arm me into doing something much more sensible.
The trouble was, it didn’t. In fact, things went pretty well. I went to Queen’s University Belfast and joined the Writers’ Group there, where now-renowned writers and poets enjoyed my silly stories. At an open mic night, the late, great poet Ciaran Carson laughed loudly at an excerpt from a children’s book I was writing about a timid dragon, the European Union, and bananas.
I sent my novel about the Hip-Hop Camel to a small publishing house in London and they offered me a contract. They went out of business very soon after – coincidentally – and the book was never published, but it was for the best. And I met a guy at uni who wanted to be a theatre director, who started asking me to write plays, which he put on stage.
Up until this point, I’d basically been doing what I wanted: I wrote something, maybe showed or read it to a few people, and they either liked it or didn’t. But now, there were others involved in actually making my work, and other people, it turns out, have their own opinions.
Most of the time, this is great. People ask questions or suggest things that make something better, funnier or solves a problem you just can’t work out. And sometimes you’re talked out of your worst instincts as a writer, saving you a fair bit of embarrassment.
My worst instincts, by the way, include wanting to suddenly end a film mid-sentence, having characters break the fourth wall to insult the audience, and including a picture of a hang-gliding orange holding a pig in a TED talk.
[SLIDE:] PICTURE OF A HANG-GLIDING ORANGE HOLDING A PIG
I mean, why have I put that up there? It makes no sense. But I thought it would be funny, and the lovely organisers of this event didn’t stop me.
Here’s another one. In my Masters dissertation, after tens of thousands of words setting out my arguments, explanations and conclusions, I decided to add at the very end, “Or maybe that’s all just a load of old rubbish.”
[SLIDE:] LAST PAGE OF DISSERTATION
Almost cost me the degree.
Collaboration is essential. When you work with others, the work grows, expands and develops according to the skills of everyone involved. And if you’re lucky, those people will be more talented than you with better ideas.
Of course, it doesn’t always work. If you’ve ever been involved with a play, TV show or film, you’ll know it’s a miracle anything ever works.
Sometimes others’ ideas are just too different to yours, and you kind of know it isn’t going to work from the start. Like when I was asked to write a musical comedy… that was also supposed to work as a dance piece. Or when I had a fairly complicated story that was then turned into an immersive piece with audience participation that would likely change the course of events and therefore the message of the story.
With hindsight, should I have said no rather than trying to make them work and being disappointed at the result? Maybe, but it’s scary, because it’s difficult to get things made and you might not get that chance again. Plus trying, and failing, is the only way you really learn.
In 2019 and 2020, I was struggling creatively. One script I’d done had gone round and round in circles with feedback that often contradicted itself, and was going nowhere.
Another script, a feature film, had gotten development funding. As tends to be case with my stuff, the script was unusual – good for comedy, at least what I find funny, but not so good when you’re trying to persuade funders to give you quite a bit of money to make it. It was suggested I radically rewrite the film, make it simpler, more universal, more sellable. Not bad advice, because you do want the film to get made, so although I had reservations, I did it. And they were right, it was a tighter story that would appeal to many more people.
I hated it. Every time I tried to write, it felt like I was trying to swim through paint, and I had to force myself to type one letter after another. Was what I was writing so bad? No, of course not. In lots of ways, it was better. But it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. It felt like something someone else would write. And I didn’t want to write like someone else.
I was burnt out. As a teenager, writing had made me the only friends I had. It had formed the basis of my adult identity, and was directly, dangerously, linked to my self-worth. If I wasn’t a writer, what was I? I felt I’d let down that six year old boy who was annoyed the teacher didn’t let him make Daniel in the Lion’s Den an action-packed two-parter. I was writing too much to please people, and not enough to please me.
I didn’t write anything for three years. Deep down, I knew I’d probably come back to it at some point, but when I did I’d have to take it slow. Start small, don’t tell anyone, no pressure. Just do it for myself. Like when I was a child.
Little by little, I started to get the urge to do something again. There were a few false starts, where I overthought, scared myself out of it. Eventually, I wrote some nonsense poetry which I stuck on my Instagram. Some people liked it, but that wasn’t the point. In fact, if no one had liked it, I’d probably have enjoyed it even more.
More inane poems followed, then a trio of anachronistic doodles of Irish writers:
[SLIDE:] ILLUSTRATIONS
Samuel Beckett playing Pokémon Go on his smartphone; James Joyce using a VR headset; and Oscar Wilde composing a witty tweet on his iPad. Yes, they’re very stupid, but they’re my stupid.
I’m still working things out – this talk is probably the longest thing I’ve written since 2020. But, if I have any advice to impart, it’s to trust in your ideas, your creativity, yourself. Write – or draw, or paint, or sing, or dance, or make – what you want to, not what someone else wants or what you think someone else wants. There are plenty of someone elses who can do that. But only you can think like you.
It’s not easy, and not always possible. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to. Sometimes, that will be for the best. Sometimes you’ll just do things for the money, which is totally fine, but you probably won’t enjoy it.
Creativity is always a compromise. What you can imagine is always far greater than what you can write, or say, or make. At least, that’s my experience. But as long as there’s something in there of you; that spark, that passion, that reason that reminds you why you wanted to do it in the first place, then that’s a good place to work from.
Or maybe that’s all just a load of old rubbish.
[SLIDE:] TO BE CONTINUED…