Cats, Chaos & Creativity (Why Cats Make the Best Coworkers and Terrible Deadline Managers)

The cat is, at this exact moment, sitting on my keyboard. He has been sitting on my keyboard for thirty-eight minutes. I have been writing this paragraph in seven-second bursts whenever he stretches enough to expose a key, and the resulting prose has the specific stop-start texture of a working creative trying to get her job done while a small orange dictator decides which letters she is allowed to type next. The cat does not care. The cat believes the laptop was invented as a heated platform for his comfort. The keyboard, in his theory of the universe, is a regrettable design flaw.

His name is Margaux. He is six years old, one-eyed, an ex-shelter rescue, named after a wine I drank at a friend’s apartment at 2am the night I committed to adopting him. He has been my primary studio coworker for four years. In that time he has supervised approximately two hundred and forty illustration projects, eighty client meetings (always from the lap, always shedding into the camera frame), an unreasonable amount of late-night journaling, and a quantity of writing that has been completed despite him rather than because of him. The contribution he has made to the work is, in any quantifiable sense, negative. The contribution he has made to the life around the work is the only reason I have not, several times, quit the working creative life entirely.

This is, I think, the actual case for the studio cat.

What a cat is for

A cat is not a coworker. A cat is atmospheric infrastructure. The cat does not help with the work in any way that can be measured. The cat does, however, change the texture of the working day in ways that turn out to matter more than any actual help would have.

The cat is a reason to stand up. The cat is a small living animal that has needs. The cat is a presence in the room when you have been alone for nine hours and are starting to dissociate. The cat is the exact opposite of a productivity hack; the cat is, by structural design, an anti-productivity element that produces (somehow) the conditions in which sustained work becomes possible at all.

The working artists I know who do not have pets often, by their own report, become slightly less themselves over the course of a long workday. The cognitive isolation produces a specific flatness; you have been alone with the work for too long and you have started to lose the part of yourself that the work is supposed to be coming out of. The cat interrupts this. The cat does not let you stay in the work too long. The cat physically jumps onto the keyboard, blocks your view, demands food, knocks something off a shelf. The cat is in this sense a forced break-taker, doing for you what you would not have done for yourself.

This is, I think, why the historical pattern of writer with cat is so consistent that it has become a cliché. Edward Gorey lived with seven cats. Hemingway’s cats are still descended from in Key West (the polydactyl ones, on the museum property, still a tourist attraction in their own right). T.S. Eliot wrote Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats about his actual cats. Murakami, Borges, Highsmith, Le Guin, Plath, Nelson, every other writer in the canon at some point had a cat that featured prominently in their letters and biographical record. The pattern is not coincidence. The pattern is a working relationship between the cognitive demands of writing and the cat’s specific way of intruding on the cognition.

The medieval-manuscript precedent

There is a famous body of marginalia from medieval European manuscripts (preserved at the British Museum, the Bodleian, and various continental collections) showing cats interrupting scribes. The most famous is a 14th-century Italian manuscript with cat paw-prints inked across a page; the scribe wrote a complaint in the margin (translated): “Cursed be the cat that pissed over the book of Lucca.” This is, structurally, the same complaint I have been making (silently, in my head) for four years, in slightly different vocabulary.

The medieval scribe was a working creative. The cat in his scriptorium was atmospheric infrastructure. The interruption produced both the pissed-on book and the surviving margin-note that documented the working relationship for posterity. Without the cat, no margin-note. Without the margin-note, less surviving evidence of how the medieval working day actually felt. The cat’s contribution to literary history is, in this sense, accidental and substantial.

I think about the Lucca scribe often when Margaux has done something specifically inconvenient. The lineage of cat-related working-creative complaint is seven centuries deep. We are in good company.

What the cat takes

Honestly, the cat takes a lot. About 30% of my keystrokes during a working day are deleted-and-retyped because the cat sat on a key for too long. About 15% of my client calls have featured cat noises in the background that I would prefer the client not have heard. About 5% of all surfaces in my apartment are covered in a permanent layer of orange fur that no vacuum has ever fully removed. The studio cat is not a free addition to the working life. The studio cat is a continuous low-grade tax on the working life that turns out to be worth paying.

The reason it is worth paying is this: the cat is the version of another living being who needs me that fits the budget and emotional bandwidth of a working freelance creative who has chosen not to have children, has not yet figured out a sustainable adult relationship, and lives alone. The cat is the cheapest source of structured caring-for-something the working creative life provides. Caring for something matters. Caring for something keeps you tethered. The cat is the tether that costs the least and provides the most.

The math is brutal but accurate.

What the cat does not do

I want to dispel a few myths.

The cat does not “help me think.” The cat does not “inspire my creativity.” The cat does not “ground me in the present moment” in any way that is useful to the work. These are romanticizations writers tell themselves about their pets to justify having paid for litter for the last decade. The cat is not a creative tool. The cat is a creature.

What the cat does is coexist with the working life in a way that lets the working life remain bearable. This is a small claim. It is also, after years, the actual claim. The cat is not magic. The cat is also not optional.

If you are a working creative considering whether to get a cat, my honest advice is: yes, but not for the reasons you will be tempted to tell yourself. Don’t get a cat because you saw a charming photo of a writer with a cat. Don’t get a cat because you have read that cats help with creativity. Don’t get a cat because you think it will make your apartment more aesthetic. Get a cat because you have decided that the working creative life is going to be lonelier without one, and you have done the budget math on litter and food and vet bills, and you have accepted that the cat is going to be a small permanent inconvenience that you have decided to make space for in your life.

If those are the reasons, the cat will work. The cat will not help with the work, but the work will get done anyway, and the working life around the work will be slightly more livable than it would have been alone.

A small note on Margaux specifically

Margaux is, currently, asleep on my left forearm, which means I cannot reach the trackpad to scroll, which means I am writing the closing paragraph of this piece in a slightly contorted position because I do not want to move him. This is, in fact, how most of the closing paragraphs of my pieces get written. The cat is asleep on me; I cannot move; I have to finish the sentence I am currently writing because if I do not finish it now I will lose the thread; the constraint of cat-on-arm turns out to be the same as the constraint of deadline-in-hour; both are external pressures that produce the closing paragraph faster than I would have written it alone.

The cat is, in this very specific sense, helping with the work. Just not in the way the writing-and-cats genre likes to claim. He is helping by sitting on me and forcing the closing.

I am going to type the last sentence and then not move for an indeterminate period because the cat is comfortable and I do not have the heart to disturb him. The piece will be finished. The cat will continue to sleep. The chaos and the creativity and the cats and the working life will all coexist for one more afternoon.

This is the whole job, mostly. The work will get made around the cat. The cat will be the reason the day is bearable enough that the work could get made at all.

That is the case for the studio cat. The case is small. The case is also, after four years, sufficient.