WRITING AND COVID
I asked writers to respond to this: “ I’m working on a piece about the impact that the presence of Covid (not having the virus, but the presence of the general anxiety around the pandemic) is having on writers. Are you interested in responding to that question? I’d been noticing that I felt distinctly uninspired to write, read an article about other writers feeling the same way and decided I wanted to hear from writers who I knew/know. Thanks, Mary Sojourner
A few writers responded:
Scott Baxter, poet: Since my writing is spare, sporadic and dismissable and always done in monk-like solitude,
Covid has not affected it one iota.
Tom Bailey, essayist and environmental writer: Sign me up as another who has been “distinctly uninspired,” but with an asterisk because I felt this way before covid. Book number two was taking shape in my mind over a period of several years with notes collected, files compiled, thoughts jotted down and ideas beginning to coalesce around potential themes and sequences. None the less, I have not felt much motivation to start in earnest.
Some background: two years before covid I made some major changes in my life, retiring from work running a small land conservancy, and getting married after being widowed for nine years. Coming down from 40 years of reporting to work daily and maintaining a schedule, the sudden freedom from rote was liberating; yet it enabled me to become a bit lazy. What the hell—I earned it, I told myself. Pre-retirement, when asked about my plans once I pulled the ripcord I talked about how I intended to go upstairs to my home office every day and keep to a routine as I had done with my job. When the time came, though, I didn’t do it. I enjoyed long, leisurely mornings over tea with my wife. I did household chores. I baked a lot, enjoying the instant gratification that comes with producing something yummy in just a few hours after a career of projects that often took years to come to fruition.
Another factor was poor sales of book number one. My publisher didn’t do much to promote it and I wasn’t sufficiently experienced or savvy to promote it myself. When I thought of writing number two, my enthusiasm was dampened by the shadow of number one’s disappointment and I found myself thinking, “what’s the use?” I fell into the “nobody cares so why should I write it” mentality.
No, I can’t blame covid for getting into this rut. But your question prompts me to think about whether covid may have contributed to my staying in it. I’ve had little spurts of inspiration and felt sparks of motivation, but none has caught fire. Would it have been different without covid? Friends have suggested that the social isolation and time at home brought about by covid must seem like a perfect opportunity to hole up in the writing loft and crank out the pages. An opportunity, yes, but one that I haven’t seized. I found that I’d rather read than write during covid, with writing limited to a few e-mails to friends and a number of documents relating to my volunteer job on the board of trustees of a small state university. (I was elected chair of that board just before covid hit, so it has been, to say the least, a very interesting and busy couple of years in the chair.) I have written a lot of the sorts of things that I used to write at work such as policy statements, resolutions and official correspondence. I have been doing some similar writing for another volunteer job with a foundation working to increase the number of recreational trails in our state.
But back to reading. Thinking back to all the reading I’ve done, I believe that the a response to the confinement brought about by covid has been to travel vicariously through time and to different places by reading. Less social contact plus practically zero travel equals much greater hunger for the experiences offered in books. Which subtracts from time and motivation for writing. At least that’s how it seems to me as I reflect on it.
I am fortunate enough to not depend on income from writing. I have a modest pension, savings and Social Security so I don’t have the pressure to make money from writing. That is a great blessing, but also not a motivating factor.
Energy ebbs and flows. The “what’s the use” feeling often recedes before thoughts of “it doesn’t matter who may or may not read it; it doesn’t matter how much it sells—or if it sells at all—you must write it because it needs to be written and it needs to be ‘out there.’” Maybe it will matter in the future that I wrote it. Or maybe it will be enough for me to have the good karma that comes from doing the work without expecting or getting attached to any particular outcome. That’s the really important angle on all this: writing when you just plain need to write it and can’t avoid it. I haven’t gotten to that point—yet. Is it coming? It just might be…
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