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.
My word count usually falls off a cliff after the push of NaNo, but I’ve done NaNo enough times that I knew to expect that. I kept writing, much slower as winter and the Omicron wave started to drag me down, but things were still moving. I’m up to 37K on the WIP now, about halfway through the draft. I haven’t gotten this close to a full-length novel draft since City of Hope and Ruin in 2016 (though I did write and publish some novelettes in between), so that’s pretty exciting.
A few months ago, I had to pause work on the novel because we Turtleduckers decided to do another anthology. (More about that in due time!) I needed an SFF short story idea, and my brain went back to “confront the pandemic head-on” mode. I guess there’s no in-between anymore…
Writing is still slow, but it’s still going, for which I am very thankful. I’m revising the anthology story now, and it should be wrapped up soon. Then I need to write a freebie for Turtleduck Press and maybe a flash piece for something else. By May, I should be able to get back to the novel WIP. Unless my brain has other plans, which is always possible.
If you’re a writer or other creative, how has the pandemic affected your work? I’d love to hear from you!