On the creative possibilities of colour, and how to make conditions for it to thrive
I’ve only become conscious of the way colour works to fire my creative energy in the last few years, but I'm excited about where it's taking me next
I want to write about colour and the different ways that colour influences the way I write, and also deepens the way I feel and process emotion. Not always, but sometimes, I feel my emotions in colour. Neurlogically, this is called synesthesia, and the clearest definion I can find of it is as “a neurological condition in which information meant to stimulate one of your senses stimulates several of your senses. Each one of your five senses stimulate a different area of your brain. Looking at a bright neon yellow wall, for example, will light up the primary visual cortex, at the rear of your brain. If you have synesthesia, you may also feel like you can taste the color of the wall while you look at it. So not only will your primary visual cortex be stimulated by the color, your parietal lobe, which tells you what something tastes like, is stimulated, too. Researchers believe people who have synesthesia have a high level of interconnectedness between the parts of the brain that are tied to sensory stimulus.”
Although I find the sound of the word synethesia quite pleasing, generally I don’t like scientific explanations for emotional states or ways of being. I prefer to believe that there are parts of our psyche and creativity that cannot be explained by science or rational explanation. And I also believe that any of use can create conditions for it to flourish, for it to manifest its incredible power in any of our lives.
I’ve only become conscious of the way colour works in my creative energy in the last few years, although I think it’s always been there. In quite a basic way, I’ve always felt happier and more alive when I live in houses with bright painted walls. I can feel my life more clearly that way, and I’m also learning about how to create conditions for this kind of creative power to thrive, wherever I am. I want to share this with you here and I’d be fascinated to hear about your experiences of colour, so let’s chat about this in the comments.
Exactly a year ago I was working on the final drafts of The Giant on the Skyline. It was an incredibly intense period of writing. I handed what I thought was a relatively strong draft in to my editor in early February 2023, but that draft went through another 5 intense redrafts before it was finished that summer. I feel so fortunate to work with a brilliant editor, Susanna Wadeson at Doubleday, and The Giant on the Skyline is the third book we’ve worked on together (my first book, The Wild Other, was published by Hodder). A strong editor is essential to the life of a book - in fact I’d go so far as to say that Susanna turns my words into books. I enjoy the editing process too and I trust Susanna completely, so getting at the words together was an exciting and creatively demanding process. I wrote the early draft of the book, which I handed to her in February, floating between three or four relatively remote cafes in the villages near my home, but for the redrafting process, I knew I needed a place of silence, where I could focus on some very hard work without wondering if I needed to buy some more coffee to justify my place at a desk, or driving miles looking for a cafe with a spare socket.
So I rented a room in a house in a small town hear my home. The house was being renovated, and my little writing room at the top of the house had nothing inside it but a chair and a table. It was at the top of some steep stairs, and sometimes - often in fact - I had to force myself up there, talking to myself as I moved one step upwards to say, ‘you can do this Clover, you can do this, have confidence, go ON, believe in yourself’.
There was quite a bit of damp on the walls, almost enough to be tangible presence in the room, but mostly it was just me and my page on my laptop in a fast and furious dialogue with one another. This wasn’t easy. Sometimes the relationship between me and the page felt like an abusive relationship driven by fear; creativity can be scary and my relationship with it can terrify me. It’s erratic, and sometimes it goes silent, or worse, taunts me, that I have no right to make my voice heard, that my story, my thoughts, my take on life and emotions are of no interest to anyone.
At that point, creativity has no colour, but is just a blank, flat plane of grim white nothingness. And believe me, that’s a plane I’ve had to walk across, looking for light, many times. As far as I can see, that’s part of the deal of being a writer. Learning how to double down and keep on walking, to keep on looking for the things that brighten the darkness, or colour the bright white confusion of the blank page, is part of the process of writing.
But there’s also another extreme place which creativity can also take me, and that place is the thing that keeps pulling me back there.