Martha and the Vandellas recorded Nowhere to Run in February 1965. Today, fifty-seven years later, there is nowhere to run. The reality of a pandemic that can kill you cannot be alchemized by prayer – or by telling yourself that Covid is an opportunity for spiritual growth. I’ve found myself beginning this post for Breakthrough and having to force myself to keep writing. I stopped. I sat with the emptiness, and I realized that I’ve felt uninspired since Covid changed our human worlds.
I read a few internet articles on the stifling effects of Covid on writing and creativity – and was strangely comforted to know that I wasn’t alone. I asked friends if they were noticing the pandemic’s effects on their writing. They responded. Thank you.
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.
Craig Childs: It’s hard to tease out Covid from the full mass of polarization and shouting happening right now. It feels like an age of monsters who keep getting bigger. I’m inspired to write and I’m also afraid of it. Sentences and scenes want to fly out of my fingers, while words are being taken for their worst possible meanings, stories twisted into culpability, and we have to live with this because it’s true, our words have terrible meanings and not one person is free of culpability. Opening your mouth can feel like a transgression. My instinct is to open my mouth and let stories flow, let the world be transparent. Of any time, now we should speak. Even in an age of wrongs, even if our hands are shaking, we should keep writing. My instinct is also to hide, cover myself with garbage and leaves. With so many wrongs being made, I don’t want to add more. Somewhere between the two instincts, which are always there, we write.
Lynette Sheppard: Writing (or not) During Covid. I was able to write at the beginning of the pandemic. I penned pieces about my tiny island community’s responses to Covid. I sprayed my countertops with bleach; the sharp smell triggered memories of the previous pandemic. AIDS. Flashbacks helped me infuse emotional truth into on my novel about the eighties epidemic. I had time and space to write. It should have been ideal.
And then: nothing. I stopped writing. I wasn’t worried; I’ve often had periods of lying fallow, like soil needing to replenish its nutrients before growing a new crop. I thought this was no different.
Two years later, I am both ‘committed to’ and ‘paralyzed by’ the task of writing. I’ve never lain fallow for so long. I managed to finish a novella, but I haven’t written more than a couple scenes for the AIDS novel. I’m well and truly stuck. My writing mirrors the limbo of Covid-time.
I have been able to put words on a page for our local Red Dirt Writers group. We meet via Zoom once a week and share prompt writings. Not much comes out of it but we support one another through this weird time-out-of-time. At least, our gatherings (if you can call them that – little squares on a flat screen) keep my fingers moving on the keyboard.
Maybe fallow earth isn’t an accurate analogy. Maybe the hopeful morphing of a caterpillar describes how I’m feeling. I am still in the pupa – likely in the stage where the caterpillar liquifies into a goo before changing fully. It remains to be seen if I emerge with wings.
Heather von Bargen: Yes, I have been completely uninspired to write since Covid. I have written only pieces for work: Website content, blogs, email newsletters, etc. I don’t even journal as much as I used to because it seemed so repetitive.
Taking a cue from Ross Gay’s amazing book about Daily Delights, I have been trying to come up with those of my own and write about them in my journal, but they are definitely not daily.
No personal blogs or personal essays.
I jot notes down for ideas for future writing but the thought to actually put the butt in the chair to do it is lacking.
Worse, I don’t even feel guilty about it.
Instead, I have been reading more as an escape. More fiction than I usually read. (I highly recommend: Matrix: A Novel and
I have hope that the covid situation will improve or normalize and I’ll get back to writing. I have more to say and I’m not giving up for good. I look at this as a hiatus. I get ideas, jot them down, save them – and wait. I know it can be a trap but at this point, I’m just trying to get thru the day without catching covid or losing my mind.
Tom Bailey: Sign me up as another who has been “*distinctly uninspired,” but with the asterisk because I felt this way before covid. Book number two was taking shape over several years with lots of material. But, I have not felt much motivation to begin to write it.
I had made some major changes in my life: retiring from administering 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 was liberating; yet it enabled me to relax. Pre-retirement, 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.
My publisher didn’t do much to promote my first book, and I wasn’t sufficiently experienced or savvy to self-promote it. When I thought of writing number two, my enthusiasm was dampened by the shadow of number one’s disappointment. I fell into the “nobody cares so why should I write it” mentality.
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 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. But, I found that I’d rather read than write during covid, with writing limited to a few e-mails to friends and documents specific to my volunteering job on the board of trustees of a small state university and in another volunteer job with a foundation working to increase the number of recreational trails in our state.
All my covid confinement reading has been to travel vicariously through time and other places. Less social contact plus practically zero travel has created my greater hunger for the experiences offered in books. My current increase in reading has eaten up my time and motivation for writing.
I am fortunate enough to not depend on income from writing. That is a great blessing, but also not a motivating factor. Energy ebbs and flows. There is the “what’s the use” feeling. There are thoughts of “it doesn’t matter who may or may not read it; it doesn’t matter how much it sells. And I think, “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 at this time. Or maybe it will be enough for me to have gained 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…
John Fayhee
As for me, the main impact the pandemic has had on my writing is that it has shrunk outlets for publication — magazines and newspapers getting less advertising and consequently printing less pages and/or less issues and by extension freelance budgets shrinking even more. It’s like I hardly even think about getting published for money anymore unless something falls into my lap.
As for the writing itself, the pandemic has had little to no effect on my inspiration, output or subject matter. It has actually served to clear my head a bit regarding what is important and what is not about which to write.
Of course, I am also getting old. Time is running out and I refuse to let a pandemic impact what I have left to do., Except travel. The pandemic has really fucked that up royally.
Michael Wolcott: Has Covid dampened my inspiration to write? Maybe. But for me, finding energy to write has never been easy. No work I’ve done is harder than the work of making good sentences, of adequately telling stories that convey truth.
For many years I’ve written a general-interest newspaper column, mainly because weekly deadlines force me to write. There are so many reasons not to.
In my view there is far too much writing out there already. This was true even before the internet made it possible for any halfwit to unleash their misbegotten prose on the world. The numbing effects of social media and our degraded political discourse have only made things worse. We tread water in an ocean of polluted language. The anxieties and stresses of the Covid Age are simply the latest toxins to enter the water. The larger question is, why do we write at all?
Because it’s what our species does. Whether or not we deliberately make sentences and paragraphs, all humans “write”. We are constantly flexing our big primate brains with language, transacting our relationships and doing our best to make sense of the world by trying to rope it in with words. We are addicted to diction.
Gabriel Granillo: Been meaning to respond to this prompt, but, perhaps to illustrate your point, I’ve had to work up the mental energy it takes to sit down and write this. I realized yesterday a couple of things yesterday while shopping for groceries.
The first was just how exhausted I had become. I had gone to the market only to pick up a few items for that night’s dinner, and still, I found myself there, breathing through my N95 mask, sluggishly going from aisle to aisle in search of what I needed. By the end of the experience, I felt as though I had walked the entire West Coast. Realizing then that I had to go home and cook made me crumble. Then I had to wash dishes, then I had to write. These normal, everyday appointments have become so terribly exhausting to me.
The other thing I noticed, which may in fact tie into why I’ve been feeling so uninspired to write, was that the woman who helped me at the self-checkout lane yesterday was the only other person I talked to. I had bought a Sapporo to go with the fried rice I was making that night, and she needed to check my ID. She had purple eyeshadow and short grey hair, an older woman who looked pleasant enough. She didn’t say anything when she checked my ID, just mumbled my birthday to herself and entered some code to override the computer checkout. And that was it. But I realized how inspired I become from being around people, noticing their habits and the way they dress themselves and the way they speak. I unconsciously tuck these things into some mental safe, and then sneak them into my writing. These chance encounters, small conversations, and little moments added up to something. At the very least, it made writing easier because I didn’t have to imagine these moments. They happened every day.
But I am feeling better every day, and looking forward to connecting with people in the most random of ways again. Been working on a few stories, in fact, and one big one which I feel confident about. It’s about a boy who gets lost in the forest. Not the most unique story, but it keeps me up at night and I feel compelled to write this story. Every day I’m plugging away at it, and I feel pretty good about it so far.
Kathleen Weaver
Shock, followed by investigation, need to know. Fear. Anger at an incredibly irresponsible clown in the White House, and the evolution of COVID into a political weapon.
ANXIETY.
Already feeling anxious. Lost my mother 3 months prior. Trying to lead & support the family. Never before knew the trauma of saying good-by and closing the business of someone’s life and times. Luckily, I was recently retired. Unluckily, I was recently retired, capable, and the new matriarch.
WRITING.
I could not focus on my writing. No longer employed, I no longer had outside deadlines. Uninspired, I barely wrote in a journal and I’d been journaling for 50 years or more.
In conclusion, COVID shock. Loss of a parent-friend. General anxiety in my surrounding community. Supporting the people I cared about. Demanding emotional time. Writing? Put it off. Nothing more to say. Just putting one foot in front of the other. A totally new chapter on survival.
Anonymous: While COVID has restricted my face-to-face access to friends, it has also opened other doors for me. This is partially due to my daily medical problems, but I have found a new appreciation for the people who have been in my life. I have looked through family photos, and I have written down memories or small stories of interactions with my parents and other relatives. I am putting them with the photos. I also like keeping a gratitude journal, as it helps me reflect on the day and find SOMETHING good in it, despite COVID and all the rest. I suppose I could say that COVID has been one of several inspirations to write, but very differently from my usual stories and poems. My medical situation is the main challenge as I wait for doctors’ appointments, so I’m not sure that my reaction to writing is necessarily a consequence of COVID.
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Martha and the Vandellas recorded Nowhere to Run in February 1965. Today, fifty-seven years later, there is nowhere to run. The reality of a pandemic that can kill you cannot be alchemized by prayer – or by telling yourself that Covid is an opportunity for spiritual growth. I’ve found myself beginning this post for Breakthrough and having to force myself to keep writing. I stopped. I sat with the emptiness, and I realized that I’ve felt uninspired since Covid changed our human worlds.
