A few weeks ago, I did something very strange. I started writing a new novel. I say “strange” because we are in the midst of a pandemic and I have felt completely consumed by working a full-time job (now from home), managing the stress of hearing my husband’s booming voice on his work calls every day, caring for an almost-three-year-old who shares her father’s booming voice, and tending to my books that are either already in the world or on their way there.
Over the past five (five?!) months, I have often fallen back on tired cliches like “at the end of my rope” and “at my wit’s end” and “hanging on by a thread” to describe my emotional state. So, when I got the urge to commence a new book, I gave my subconscious the side eye and said, “Are you f**king serious?”
When the pandemic first began, I could not imagine writing a new novel. It wasn’t just the time it would require—though that was a big enough obstacle—but the mental energy too. Like many writers, I’m highly sensitive, and the onslaught of news about what seemed (still seems) to be the apocalypse was enough to make me want to curl into the fetal position for the foreseeable future. I channeled my anxieties into publishing short essays about childcare and the burden on women during the pandemic, but I had no interest in a big, long-term project that would require vast stores of creativity.
Until I did.
But why? Why now?
Poet Ada Limón summed it up like this: “I think creating during these unfathomable times is both impossible and necessary for me” (Poets & Writers magazine). Yes, that’s it: Impossible and necessary. In a way, writing is always like this, but a global pandemic dramatically exacerbates the feelings of impossibility and necessity. As Zadie Smith says in her recent essay collection, Intimations, writing is “a psychological quirk.” And now, perhaps more than ever, psychological quirks abound.
We write for escape.
When I asked Mary Kubica, bestselling author of six novels, about writing during COVID-19 she said, “For the most part I’m not feeling the urge to write. But every now and then the urge does strike and it’s the greatest feeling—to be able to slip into the world of my characters for a while and step away from our current reality.”
Steven Rowley, author of Lily and the Octopus and The Editor, shared a similar sentiment: “I feel very fortunate to have a job that allows me to escape into other times and places where some of our current stressors don’t exist.”
We are living in a time when escape from reality is a requirement for sanity, and fiction offers the escape that we cannot get from trips we had to cancel due to COVID-19 restrictions. Personally, I have always preferred escape within the confines of my home—much less hassle and cost (hashtag introvert).
During the emergency mode of the first few months of the pandemic, I did not realize that this would be a long-term thing that would require long-term escape. It’s not surprising that, as that became more apparent, I started a novel. When the world feels overwhelming, I can turn to my novel. If I don’t have time or mental space to write, I can think about my characters. As author Adam Haslett said, “Writing is a form of dissociation. In the hours of real absorption, you leave behind your room, your body, even the mind you imagine as your own.” Dissociation, for many of us, is a survival strategy right now.
We write to make meaning.
It is common for artists to create in times in crises—not just to escape, but to process our discomfort and grief, and, ultimately, make meaning.
John Milton wrote Paradise Lost after losing his wife, his daughter, and his eyesight. Van Gogh created some of his most celebrated paintings while in an insane asylum battling anxiety, depression and possible bipolar disorder. Virginia Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse while grieving the loss of her mother. Frida Kahlo started painting after a near-fatal bus accident that left her with chronic pain, and she created one of her most renowned self-portraits after a painful miscarriage.
Carolyn Gregoire, co-author of Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, wrote recently, “Art seeks to make sense of everything from our smallest sad moments to the most earth-shattering tragedies. It helps us to process and come to terms with the things in life that we can’t control and can’t really explain.”
Right now, there is so much we can’t control, and even more we can’t explain.
It goes without saying that COVID-19 is our generation’s collective crisis. We are in touch with our mortality in new and intense ways. We are grieving the loss of the world as we knew it. In “That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief,” Scott Berinato interviews David Kessler, the world’s foremost expert on grief, who says, “We feel the world has changed, and it has…The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively.”
We write in the face of this grief, in the face of our mortality. We write to try to understand what is happening in our world, and in our inner selves. We write with urgency because the brevity and fragility of life has been revealed so clearly. Many have thrown around the word apocalypse and I find it interesting that the Greek meaning of this word is not all doom and gloom. It means “revelation” and “an unveiling or unfolding of things not previously known.” As author Tracy Barone told me, “We’re in a bit of a glass bottom boat where you can now see everything, and I personally find that inspiring. It pushes me to see deeper into myself and lean into the uncertainty as I’m writing.”
The novel I started writing has nothing to do with current events on its surface, but it does have to do with trauma, loss, and living with uncertainty and fear. Somehow, fiction is always slightly nonfictional in that it represents the author’s unique psyche—hidden within the pages of the books we write, our inner demons lurk. This generation of writers will be processing the pandemic via their stories for years to come, in ways that may not be obvious to readers (or even the writers themselves).
In 2019, Kessler identified a sixth stage of grief—finding meaning. Art is part of this stage. As Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl said in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.” As writers, we create stories because it’s the way we know to ease suffering—personal and collective.
Ultimately, this meaning-making is a form of asserting control over the uncontrollable. As Zadie Smith writes: “Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance.”
We write for, or because of, a sense of purpose.
For me, writing has always been about connection. On the page, through my characters, I can share my innermost thoughts and feelings and fears. As a reader, I get access to others’ innermost thoughts and feelings and fears. As Madeleine Watts wrote in a piece for Lit Hub, “Literature can do one thing that no other art form can do: It can let you experience what it is like to be inside the consciousness of another human being.” In other words, literature facilitates empathy. And, what the world needs desperately is empathy. “Storytelling has never been more important,” Tracy Barone told me. “We can choose to see our human connection through this global situation and writers’ voices can channel this.”
For others, writing is a way to contribute to the greater good, to offer people much-needed escape. Mary Kubica said, “I feel compelled to produce more because it’s one way that I can give back during these dire times.” Michelle Gable, bestselling author of several novels, echoed this: “A few times, I’ve felt pretty bleak, like fiction is pointless, why am I doing this, who cares? On the other hand, I’ve done a lot of reading during this pandemic and I get so much out of these books.”
Fred Venturini, author of The Escape of Light, also mentioned how it’s easy to wonder “why bother?” as a fiction writer when global issues make stories seem insignificant. But, he said, “I keep coming back to the idea that our universal language is stories, that is how we best learn, remember, and engage. To be a translator of that important language is a gift not to be wasted.”
A gift not to be wasted, but…
I return to Ada Limón’s words: “impossible and necessary.” For many of us writers, there are days when creating is truly impossible, no matter how necessary it feels. These are unsettling times. The anxiety can feel crippling. Some days, due to childcare responsibilities or work or whatever else, I cannot manage to take a shower let alone write 500 words. And that’s okay. This is not the time for writers (or anyone) to compound their feelings of overwhelm and stress.
Author Kathleen Kaufman told me, “I’ve had to meditate on the idea of impermanence, the concept that attachment to things you think are vital, are nothing more than illusion. In terms of my writing, that translates to a lack of urgency, the ability to forgive myself for not being superwoman. If you wrote your King Lear during the pandemic, great. But it’s equally great if you simply managed to respond to your email.”
For some writers, there are practical explanations for stalling on writing projects. Steven Rowley said, “The world is changing so rapidly and there is such a long lag time between starting a novel and when (or if!) it is published. I feel it’s important to address current events, at least tangentially, but what is it I want to say about the human condition in 2023, 2024 or beyond? It’s almost too much to think about.” Fred Venturini shares this concern: “Are we firmly in a world now where you have to wonder how to write a scene in a bar? If you set something in 2019, are readers just going to think you’re dodging the pandemic?”
There are a number of reasons—all of them valid—for slowing down the writing process right now. As Carolyn Gregoire wrote, “Real creative growth happens at its own natural pace, which can’t be forced or rushed. Creativity thrives with mental breathing room, wide-open inner spaces to roam, and unstructured time to dream and reflect.”
Many of us do not have “wide-open inner spaces to roam” right now. Most of us do not even have wide-open outer spaces to roam.
Even writers who are not actively writing are likely in the mysterious pre-writing phase—listening, absorbing, processing. Author and screenwriter Hollie Overton told me, “I’m not churning out pages right now. I consider it a good day if I get a thousand words in, or if I have a new idea. But I remind myself that the best writers recognize when something needs to be written and when it’s a time to take a beat and listen and absorb what is happening around you. There’s no race to the finish line for artists. Our job is to create and, pandemic or no pandemic, that’s what I’m going to do. It just might take me a bit longer right now.” Steven Rowley shared similar thoughts: “These things can’t be rushed. Right now, so much of my job is listening. And that’s a good thing.”
I will continue to work on my novel, knowing it will probably take me three times longer than normal to complete. I expect there will be entire weeks when I will not be able (or willing) to write at all. It is comfort enough to know that I have writing in my life (in addition to Zoom therapy sessions). The words of poet Victoria Chang stay with me: “I think writing is a form of protest…I write now to tell off the pandemic, in a way. To prove that writing as an act can and will endure. It might not ‘save’ us, but I do know it will always be here for us.”
Yes, it will always be here for us—for us writers, for us readers, for us human beings in need of escape, connection, and meaning.