Madheads and Creative Lessons

The characters were everywhere. The stories about them flowed almost constantly out of the mouths of the characters themselves and the stunned spectators who witnessed their antics alike. That's just what it was like growing up in a Yorkshire mill town in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Each of these tales or sightings clambered into the back of my increasingly busy subconscious mind, adding another colour to brighten my view of the world around me.

Many of these characters will appear in a forthcoming short fiction collection called Madheads, but that's for another day. My editor and I had a good chat about using the word mad - with good reason - but he felt the affection with which I used Madheads was more than evident throughout the manuscript. To me, to call someone a Madhead meant that these people had stepped into folklore, that something rich and memorable seeped from their every pore. I would grow older and see the many complex layers entrenched in each of them, some poignant and melancholic, others raw and fierce. Or some other nuanced blend; the emotional tapestry that forms the fabric of Madheads.

But there was more than that.

When I began to write The Creative Condition, I started to look beyond the black comedy at work in my fiction and at another valuable lesson these people had given me. Unrefined creativity lit them up.

Like the next '90s kid, I bought whichever magazine had more blatant creativity plastered on the cover and in its pages; pop stars, mainly. In my case, this extended to the artists in my mum's books, but I always admired a less celebrated and often completely ignored creativity in how these characters spoke and behaved. In almost all cases, they saw no creativity in themselves, and would staunchly deny it if you dared suggest it. But they couldn't ever hide it. Even then I was influenced by their individuality, their unique humour, and how they fit into the social scene.

There came a time, probably the tail end of secondary school and early art college, when this became a conscious appreciation, and I actively sought to surround myself with the broadest span of personalities available at any one time. Nights out started to look like The Usual Suspects line-up and my eyes were wide with the sheer possibility of what might happen as the raucous elements collided on a Wetherspoons carpet, or on the fabled last bus home.

What was sad about all of this was, often I was the only one who welcomed and truly indulged in this human tapas assortment. Most people would grumble about those who did not slip right in unnoticed, who challenged the easy peace in some way. They would never have considered these characters to be creative in the absence of something society bracketed as flagrantly so; an instrument or paintbrush, and this goes on, through education, in workplaces, and in society.

That's one of my goals in writing The Creative Condition. To encourage a framework from an early age that supports people to roam and map their personalities in a way they might get to love and command the juicy bits. Time and time again I watched these characters lose that edge over the years, their souls growing heavy as their creativity was neglected, misdirected, or never even spotted. You only have to look at today's mental health statistics - particularly among young people - to see how bad that's getting out there as the obsession with economic growth and being somebody without knowing where to start reaches a crisis point.

I want to use the book to start weaving a great big net to catch those who've tumbled because, in part, of tough starts in life, who with the right kind of mentor, might find greater purpose, and fizz in a way that brings happiness and many benefits to our cultures and societies.

For The Creative Condition Podcast , head here. The Creative Condition book is due in late 2023/early 2024.