Writing Through a Pandemic, Two Years In
It’s been just over two years since we learned the phrase “social distancing”. A lot of the writers I know have been struggling. Turns out it’s hard to be creative when there’s bone-deep uncertainty washing away at your foundations. Related: the romantic myth of the writer in a garret. It’s also hard to be creative when you’re scrambling to fulfill basic needs like housing or taking care of your health and/or loved ones…even without a pandemic on top of that. (Here we give a nod to musicians, many of whom have been determinedly putting up livestreams and online concerts while their main source of income was cut off. Those have been a huge source of comfort to me, and I hope to the various musicians as well.) I’ve had plenty of creative struggles, too, during this time. I barely wrote at all in 2020, although I did manage two installments of my clockpunk serial (I’ll get back to that one day, I swear!) and a few thousand words during NaNoWriMo. During most of 2021, I could only write short pieces that all confronted the state of the world head-on, from pandemic-themed poetry to flash fiction. (We won’t talk about the short story I started in 2019, set at the Olympics during…a pandemic. Oops?) Then came NaNoWriMo 2021. I’ve talked before about how I made my secret stretch goal of 10,000 words on my unashamedly escapist feminist fantasy WIP. It felt really good. I had energy again for a few months.…