I have voice notes on my phone, scraps of paper and receipts I’ve dug out of my bag to write on, single pages in notebooks, random sentences on envelopes and thoughts written along the edges of my diary. Some of them are perfectly legible. Some of them are not. Some of them are just one line, written in the kind of hurry that suggests I thought I would absolutely remember the rest of it later. I often didn’t, of course. Others live in my head formed, but unwritten.

There are nine novel manuscripts on my hard drive, in various states of existence. Some finished, some half-finished. I think if they could look at me it would be with an air of resignation that I’m still not attending to them. There are poems, fragments, one emerging manuscript with my partner-in-creativity on Basecamp and three scripts. There are ideas that have titles, ideas that have characters, ideas that have one excellent image and no plot whatsoever.
I have one life. This seems unreasonable.

It has always been this way. From the earliest days of my theatre company, when we toured English Heritage properties and performed private events in parks, right up to now, there has never been enough time. There has always been another idea waiting in the wings, another version of something, another project that might be brilliant if only I could clear enough space around it to let it breathe.

I have had an idea for a play involving the Devil for the longest time. It’s not written. It’s barely even structured. It exists in my mind as a series of images, moods and fragments of dialogue, which is the beginning of something, I can see parts of it. I know the atmosphere. I know the feel of it. I just haven’t had the time to build the thing.

That’s the frustration. The stories are there, I can feel the shape of them and how they draw on all my senses. They arrive bringing scenery, emotional complications, character histories and occasionally quite unreasonable demands that they must be written about right now, before they escape. I just need them to be magically drawn out of me, to pour mystically through my fingertips and appear on the page exactly as they exist inside my mind. This doesn’t happen, annoyingly.

Instead, there is the actual process, which is much less mystical and involves sitting down, opening the document, trying to remember what the sentence on the back of the receipt meant and occasionally wondering why I have written strange disconnected phrases with no further context.

And then, of course, life gets in the way. Money has to come in. Children have to be raised and supported. The house, for reasons I don’t care to think about, requires constant attention. There is laundry, cleaning, cooking, admin, bills, appointments and all the monstrously tedious things that are not creative. After all these years, I still cannot make any glee leak out of laundry. I’ve tried. There is no hidden spiritual lesson in cleaning the oven either, at least not one I have been able to access. It doesn’t even please me when it’s done. It is simply a relief to get back to the things that actually bring me pleasure. Except by then, sometimes, the creative flow has gone.

Or not gone exactly, but retreated. Sulking, perhaps. The capacity battery is exhausted. The mind that was fizzing with possibility at three hours ago has been flattened by four loads of washing, a supermarket order, a form that needed filling in and the general business of being an adult in a world that seems to require far too many damn passwords.

So I wonder, sometimes, whether creativity is a privilege of the rich, or at least the fortunate. Not talent. Talent appears everywhere. Ideas appear everywhere. I don’t believe creativity belongs only to people with spare rooms, funded time and expensive coffee. But the ability to pursue it properly, to sit with it, develop it, finish it, submit it, stage it, print it, risk it, that is a different matter. Ideas may be infinite. My bank balance is not.

Which makes me wonder what would happen if people had more time? If universal basic income existed in a way that actually allowed people to breathe, would creativity increase? I suspect it might. Not because everyone would suddenly write a novel or compose a symphony or stage a play involving the Devil, though frankly I’d be interested to see some of those attempts, but because more people would have the mental space to follow the thing that keeps tugging at them.

And at the same time, creative subjects are being squeezed so sharply from schools that I wonder what we think we are doing. We talk about innovation as though it appears from nowhere, as though imagination is a nice extra, a decorative edge around the proper subjects. But creativity is not just colouring in and pretending to be a tree in Year Three, though I fully support a good tree if the moment calls for it. It is problem-solving. It is empathy. It is pattern recognition, invention, courage and the ability to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist.

If we keep narrowing the curriculum, if we keep treating the arts as optional, indulgent, secondary, then what do we think will happen? Will theatre die a slow death of dross and dullness because only those with private funding and inherited, faux confidence can afford to make it? Will books become increasingly safe, increasingly recycled, increasingly shaped by market fear rather than human strangeness? Will stories be churned through AI, previous work chewed up and spat out in new arrangements, technically competent and entirely bloodless? That’s the part that worries me.

Not AI itself, exactly. Tools are tools. But if we create a world where human creativity is starved of time, money, education and confidence, then we should not be surprised when imitation rushes in to fill the gap. If people are too exhausted to make art, something else will find a way to fill our time.

A book written by a person carries all the inconvenient texture of being alive. Their obsessions, griefs, humour, contradictions, odd little fixations and sentences written on receipts because the thought arrived in a car park and wouldn’t wait. A play carries someone’s thoughts and feelings. A poem carries earnestness. A story carries the strange experience of a human mind trying to make meaning out of all this. I love that I can write in circles, because I do, and it is a form of expression which by reading it allows someone else to experience my world. And that I in turn can follow the unraveling words someone else has left me in a trail into the woods and I can traverse their path and see the world through their eyes, on stage, on paper, in music, on tv and film, in art.

I want the messy, inconvenient, glorious excess of people having too many ideas and not enough time. I want more time for them. More space and possibility. More funding, frankly, though I realise that sounds less romantic than the mystical pouring through the fingertips version.

I want children to grow up believing their ideas matter. I want adults to have enough room in their lives to return to the thing they once loved before work, bills, exhaustion and other people’s needs buried it under practicalities. And yes, I want enough time to finish my own pile of manuscripts, poems, scripts and half-feral ideas before they start unionising.

I don’t know if I’ll manage all of them. Probably not. But they are there, waiting. In notebooks, in folders, on Basecamp, in voice notes, on envelopes and somewhere, almost certainly, on a receipt I will find in six months and stare at it wondering why a prawn sandwich and a fruit tea inspired me to write those words.

What will become of us? Of independent thought and our own capacity to create? I don’t know. But I do know this. If we want a future with real stories in it, we have to protect the conditions that allow people to make them. And maybe, occasionally, ignore the laundry.