With social media fragmenting, I’m bringing back my old “You Tell Me” Wednesday discussions to try to get good old fashioned blog conversations going. If you’re reading in a feed reader or via email, please click through to the post to leave a public comment and join the discussion!
The last few years feel like they will be forever be caught in a strange time vortex. It somehow feels like decades and the blink of an eye at the same time.
What did it do to your creativity? Have you emerged as a different writer?
During the pandemic, I was stuck creatively like I’ve never been stuck before. I was so stuck I forgot what being creative even felt like. It wasn’t until the world started unthawing that I managed to get going on my most recent novel.
It definitely made me more thankful for those time when my writing is flowing, and gave me a renewed sense of what really matters to me. That translated to a greater willingness to be patient as a writer and more focused on my own vision.
What about you?
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Art: A Masque for the Four Seasons by Walter Crane
I was the exact opposite. I continued a memoir I’d only just begun, and completed it by the time the world emerged again. I’m an extroverted introvert. I enjoy people and engagement, but only for a limited time; I’m more than happy to cocoon myself in my home office for indefinite periods. During pandemic isolation, I could write without distractions or work commitments that made me feel guilty. I would never wish for a deadly and chaotic crisis of that magnitude again, but I luxuriated in the space and time it gave me to write.
I was able to write my fifth book in the first half of 2020, but my agent all but gave up shopping my fourth book and I ended up firing him at the pandemic’s one-year mark. So I consider it a wash.
Since I was already retired and with no one to look after but myself, I wasn’t affected that much.
I was motivated in another way, though. My general health was going downhill and at the time I didn’t know how much time I had left (I had no worries about COVID 19) and so hurried to finish a project. Self-published on Amazon for the first time, and likely the last with my current project. My health stabilized somewhat and I’m also trying to write a query for this WIP and having a dickens of a time. But the challenge keeps my brain from stagnating.
I was fortunate to have lots of paying work I could do at home, but this meant not much time for writing. I did finally manage to add writing back into my schedule in 2023, but 2020-2022 is kind of a blur. No complaints, I was glad to have work. But it wasn’t easy to get back into my WIP after nearly 3 years.
Four years later, I’m still stuck. I actually loved being home during the pandemic, and did produce some work, but now – now I’m distracted by the world. Turning off the news has helped, but my focus remains…unfocused. 😔
I kept calm and carried on. Didn’t buy into the hype about the big C, it all seemed so rigged. So, I worked on the manuscript, coffee-ed with friends, and spent weekends exploring my state.
I couldn’t write at all. I buried myself in cozy comfort reads and video games. I’d been heading toward burnout anyway with a day job that was piling way too much stress on, plus coping in very unhealthy ways, and the lockdown was the final straw. I finally started writing again in November of 2022, but it wasn’t until last year (after getting a new day job) that I completed a project again. It was deeply discouraging, but I’m finally back into the swing of things.
I invested in some online writing classes because “everyone” was signing up for classes and doing stuff on-line. I’m realizing that some of them have been more helpful than I had thought.
When the pandemic hit, I was working as a freelance writer and I was lucky because it was actually really good for business. It also meant that it was suddenly no big deal getting my interviewees to use Zoom!
And, whether this was a coincidence or not, I was struck by an urge to write poetry, and then fiction — neither of which I’d done since I was a kid. Once the fiction kicked in, the poetry fell by the wayside, but the fiction’s still going strong.