It's Time To Be More Madonna...

Generation X needs to turn to our patron saint of reinvention

A couple of years ago Madonna played the O2 Arena in London for The Celebration Tour. My friend called me up and said we should go. Yes! I said, until she told me the price of the tickets, then I went a little quiet.

‘I’ll buy them and you just pay me back when you can,’ she said. And I told her to make the decision I was too scared/excited to and hung up.

Reader, two nights later I was up on my feet in the O2 Arena as Madonna danced 80ft up in the air after a sell-out, stand-out show. What a woman. What a moment. I laughed, I cried. I sang until I was hoarse. It was so nostalgic because she has always been there in my life, guiding the way, showing us women how to be in our thirties, our forties, our fifties and now our sixties.

‘We’ve grown up together,’ she said from the stage of the O2 Arena, and it’s true. Her reinventions have forced us to keep up, she spotted the world changing while we were still playing her old records and harping on about the Blonde Ambition years. She knew it was necessary to change and she dragged us with her, oftentimes kicking and screaming. We found something we didn’t like about her reinvention, and she didn’t give a shit and did it anyway, and look at us, still packing out arenas around the world to see her perform.

A few days after I had been to see her, I was walking my dog (wearing my new Madonna tee, obviously) and I got chatting to a bloke who had also been there. ‘Yeah, but did you see her dancing by the end, she looked absolutely knackered – it was embarrassing.’

She was absolutely knackered!

‘I’d like to see you in your mid-sixties dancing and singing for two and a half hours and not looking knackered,’ I replied.

I won’t hear a word against Madonna, not for how she behaves or how she looks. She is a trailblazer, and I think now it’s time for my generation to look to her again for guidance.

At the weekend, there was a piece in The New York Times entitled It’s The Generation X Meltdown. The piece was about how people of my generation who have spent our years earning a living in creative industries are now looking around at our industries that have been obliterated and our skilled jobs that have been replaced by Chat GPT, and we are, to put it bluntly, shitting it.

It’s true, since I was 18 I have worked as a journalist, when I started in local newspapers as a cub reporter we had 14 reporters, I went to court every morning and filed stories over the phone that filled column inches in the evening newspaper that very same day. Today, the evening newspaper I worked on has been replaced by a weekly rag filled with ads, last time I heard there were one or two reporters working across two papers. Even the last national newspaper I was on is a lot thinner than it used to be, I picked them all up in the supermarket the other day, felt how thin on news they were, and this is because they are losing their advertisers – that is, after all, what has always funded your news appetites, not the cover price.

Ten years ago I pivoted into book publishing, and that industry is also going through a tricky period right now with only backlists keeping it afloat and editors lost as to what the reading public want.

Last week I went to speak at my daughter’s school to teenagers who want to be writers. One of my slides quoted Dorothy Parker’s advice to budding writers: ‘shoot them while they’re still happy’ – though I tried to be more positive to those kids. But there was a question from the audience – from one of the parents actually – asking how our industries are being impacted by technology, by AI, and it’s a good question and I’m afraid a depressing answer.

‘But,’ I told him, ‘the good thing is that we are forced to change, we are forced to seek new income streams, to reinvent ourselves, and that can be exciting.’

Because if we’re truly creative, shouldn’t we feel comfortable with thinking outside the box?

For a long time I have envied my old colleagues who kept their staff jobs on newspapers while I had to give mine up when I had my baby. I was jealous of their steady income, but now I see them being made redundant, called up at home before their shift is starting and told their services are no longer needed. It’s devastating. Being a journalist, being a writer, has been so tied up in our identity that we don’t know what to do without it. Who even are we anymore?

“Aside from lost income, there is an emotional toll — feelings of grief and loss — experienced by those whose careers are short-circuited,” The New York Times reported in its piece. “Some may say that Gen X-ers in publishing, music, advertising and entertainment were lucky to have such jobs at all, that they stayed too long at the party. But it’s hard to leave a vocation that provided fulfillment and a sense of identity. And it isn’t easy to reinvent yourself in your 50s, especially in industries that put a premium on youth culture.”

All true, but then I think of Madonna, who might have a little to say about that.

I read an excellent piece on Substack this morning by

Jonathan Small

entitled Gen X Strikes Back. He had read the piece in The New York Times too but he is feeling much more chipper about it, reminding us all that we, Generation X, are the resilient ones, the latch-key kids, the ones who dragged ourselves up. We can get through this, Jonathan says, and not by searching for new jobs, but reinventing our old ones, taking all that knowledge that we’ve accumulated and repackaging it into mentoring, courses, Substack.

‘And that’s the mindset we need to start owning,’ he writes. ‘The idea that being one thing isn’t the goal anymore. In fact, it might be a liability.’.

He is so right. While I have envied those in staff jobs, not just in my industries but in others, I now see how vulnerable they are. A friend of mine who was made redundant recently said that old cliché: ‘I’ll just go and stack shelves at a supermarket.’

But he’ll need to join the queue because that’s what everyone’s fallback is and we’re now having to take those fallbacks a bit more seriously. Or consider new ones.

I remember about eight or ten years ago deciding that I was going to turn my back on the journalism that had at some points in my career made me a six-figure salary, in favour of a more creative life writing books. I decided I would be happy simply to earn enough money to pay the monthly bills, what I hadn’t banked on was those monthly bills doubling in the meantime. Also, having quit that ‘safe’ staff job to raise a child singlehandedly, I realised I was facing a double jeopardy because while I’ve achieved more in my writing career in the last ten years than I ever achieved in journalism, I now have a glaring gap from the office on my CV, and so, I can’t go back, I can only go forwards.

And so, I find myself turning to Madonna, the queen of reinvention, reimagination, creativity in how she has rebirthed herself. And so yes, I am teaching, I am writing courses, I am holding workshops. I am mentoring, I am assessing manuscripts, I am passing on my knowledge. I am still ghostwriting, I am lucky enough to also be writing my first memoir/work of narrative non-fiction. I am redrafting the novel I put in the freezer three years ago. I am here, on Substack, writing for you, holding my monthly creative writing workshops, enjoying all the words and inspiration that comes out of those (this month’s one not only saw some brilliant work produced by those who attended but helped me unlock a piece of my own novel).

So I believe that those of us who are truly creative can see this fallow period as a fertile time, to sow seeds of ideas, to force us to think outside the box, to drag us kicking and screaming into new eras, to find new ways of earning doing what we do best, and what we love. Very soon I will be launching the ghostwriting course that I have been writing, it’s an intense one, it’ll be a small group, it’ll involve lots of work, lots of practice, lots of feedback, but one I believe it will give you another string to your bow, it is a course that I believe will give you another ‘slasher’ career. (As always I’ll be offering places to my paid subscribers first so don’t forget to upgrade to hear news first).

It is also a course that would not have come into existence if I hadn’t needed to be more creative. And so, the industries that I have relied on for so long being shattered have created new openings, new opportunities, and it is our job to find them.

And we seek inspiration from our patron saint of creativity, Madonna, who had this to say on the subject:

“I am not reinventing myself. I am going through the layers and revealing myself. I am on a journey, an adventure that's constantly changing shape.”

What will be your next shape? We’ll have to wait and see.

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