Rae Leaver Rahman

As part of my DYCP grant, I will be writing a series of blogs. You can read all of them through the category DYCP.

In late 2021, after many years of feeling really removed from my ability to write, I was suddenly struck with an idea that I really wanted to explore. It had been a tough eight years or so where I had been struggling with balancing recovery from a viral illness, post viral illness, the pressures of trying to work full time and moving across the country, and many other issues, and I had written very little at all. With this new energy I wrote a good 12,000 words, and tentatively asked a friend who worked in editing if she would be willing to have a look over it. Her feedback was really detailed, and I was really grateful that she had taken my request so seriously and donated so much of her time, but the level of detail and the depth of the critique made me think that I maybe wasn’t quite as good at this as I thought. Where I had written with confidence, the edit was full of questions around language and syntax, and I felt myself wondering if I had it in me at all. When I told her this, she took a moment, shook her head, and told me that wasn’t true. She wouldn’t have given me so much detail if she hadn’t thought my writing was impressive.

The generosity of that feedback combined with my new spark of interest really made me think about the relationship between time, craft, and art. There had been an assumption that I had a lot of experience in the craft of writing prose, which I don’t have. I come from the generation who, at least in state schools, were not taught formal grammar at all. I studied combined English Language and Literature at my school for my A Levels, because the option to study them separately was not provided, and I had flunked out of university because I had, rather ambitiously for somebody with my education level up to that point, decided to study a joint honours in English and Music and had flunked the latter. That assumption had come because there had been a judgement made from the quality of the art, which was positive. So what did I need to take the next steps, and to make sure that I was not making the same mistakes again?

At the heart of writing, you have to write. The first thing I did was send out to as many things as time would allow. I work part-time, but have had a string of jobs that are mentally demanding, so I had to balance the time I had with the things I wanted to apply to. I wrote to submit in almost all cases, rather than submitting existing work. I found that out of eight submissions in the first half of the year, six ended up with a longlist at minimum. I used to struggle with submissions in my twenties because I was so emotionally led by what I was writing. It would be the only thing I was working on, and I would only send it to one thing and be waiting on the results the whole time it was out there. I realised in 2022 that it has to be a numbers game, and that building your writing should be like planting and maintaining a garden. You plant things that are complimentary, appropriate for the season, and you hope they all make it. If something doesn’t, you have a look at why; perhaps it was not quite in the right spot, perhaps it hadn’t quite had the right sort of nurture, or perhaps it was just one of those things… but you still have the rest of the garden.

The second thing I did was try to grow my connection to other writers, and to learn about other writers. I started to seek out the authors I had enjoyed reading, and looked then at who they admired across other writers, agents, journals, magazines, editors and publishers. I listened to podcasts like Confessions of a Debut Novelist, The Writing Life, What Page Are You On, Write Off, The Influx Press Podcast, and What Editors Want. I took a week out to do the first Mslexia novel school and met a group of writers that I still share work with.

At the end of 2022, having had a successful year, I was set for an exciting 2023. Yet I still found that making time and space for my writing was hard. I had a wedding, new family commitments, a house move, a new job. I had all of the old commitments to ways of working that were not serving me as well. I needed to look at the structure I had built myself for success, and that was what led me to apply for Developing Your Creative Practice.

Developing your Creative Practice (DYCP) supports the development of independent cultural and creative practitioners. Individuals can apply for up to what is now £12,000 (having started as £5,000) to take a step change in their creative work. I had been aware of the programme since it launched in 2018, when I was working on an Arts Council funded project as an administrator, and remember sifting through the spreadsheet looking for those artists in my area and what they were doing. I’ve always been interested in how other artists make, and this was opening up development to a whole range of people who may have never even thought to take time away from just the creation of art and into time to hone, or even change, their craft.

In five years of digging through spreadsheets, helping others apply, writing references and cheering on others, it never occurred to me to apply for myself; however by the end of 2022 I felt like it was the perfect time to try if I was ever going to be serious about my own work. I had been lucky enough to be chosen out of sixty disabled writers to receive mentoring for my current novel. I had interest in wider circles in my work, and I had built the start of a potential network purely by being curious about other people’s art and their craft. I needed space, time, and access to additional training to fill the gaps if I was going to be able to make the most of this opportunity. As with every application or submission I do, I asked for help from a few trusted sources, I made the best case for myself and my work that I could, I hit submit, and I forced that submission into a place of neutrality. I may get it. I may not. It does not exist anymore, until there is a yes or a no.

When the yes came, I was stunned. I was obviously delighted, but there was also a pang of shame and guilt. I knew many, many other deserving artists across the country who had not been so lucky. I asked myself: what makes me worth it? I know there are many people who see me as an arts worker, not an artist in my own right, and I had to remind myself that I am just one of the millions of creative people with a part-time job in another field. If I am serious about being a writer again, then I have to stand in that space without apology.

Of course, as an artist who is inspired by the art of others, it’s not a solely personal plan for the next year. I am going to be travelling to meet new people, and will be exploring creating new writing groups in the county. Outside of the DYCP work, I am also working on a range of R&Ds with trusted collaborators. At the heart of the matter though is taking time to build a sustainable practice for myself after years of working on other things, primarily survival and recovery. After having fallowed the soil for so many years, it is exciting to have the time to grow a garden again.