The past fourteen months have brought different levels of stress, depression, and anxiety into our lives. In my experience, these things aren't exactly conducive to creative production. The thing is though, any degree of "author" I can claim still comes with the tag "unpublished." In my mind, this means that I have to keep doing the work. If I'm waiting to hear about editorial submissions? Keep working. If I'm waiting for feedback on a manuscript? Keep working. If I loaned out a copy of a manuscript to a friend (or several) and they too busy with their own lives to read it as immediately as I'd like? Keep working. While one thing is out there, start in on the next.
The first part of the pandemic wasn't as difficult to keep working; I'm very used to the routine of setting aside big parts of my summer to do a lot of writing, so if anything having that routine established helped me last year. I had a relatively new manuscript to revise, and since revising is more about directed creativity instead of raw creative production, that might have been easier to do. I worked HARD at it, I still feel pretty good about what I produced, even though surviving the first few months of distance learning at the end of last year was siphoning off my energy.
By the time it was fall, I had most of the work done and enough momentum to finish the revision. I thought I'd be able to go writing into another National Novel Writing Month, but it turns out I got pandemic'd pretty hard instead. I had a good book idea, but I knew the draft would have to be well over 50,000 words. I kept working, I hit 50,000, I came up with some good stuff, but the process was too forced and mechanical and lifeless. I decided to pause that project and start another one, an idea that was gaining traction at the time. This idea actually was a big deal for me, since, after a handful of false starts, held promise to be the first manuscript I was going to write outside of middle grade. This was going to be a full-on, no holds barred ghost story. The kind of books that will make it hard for grown-ups to sleep at night.
After my Nanowrimo misfire though, which absolutely was affected by all the negative Covid energy, I was hesitant to dive right into starting another manuscript. I'd planned to, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense not to. It seemed better to let it develop. Let the idea take up space in my head, and write down the ideas that came to me. I ended up doing that for months. Everything distance learning was sapping me pretty dry anyway, and I sure didn't want to go back into forcing another manuscript into not working, just because I feel each passing year so acutely and it makes me wonder how many years of a writing career I will ever get to claim once it gets started.
But I put that separate category of anxiety aside, and just let the divergent part of the brain work on the story. I didn't think word count, or chapter organization. I thought about character. I thought plot, and setting. I thought of secondary characters and how they'd tie the main ones together or drive them over the edge, or be the thorns in their sides that would act as a catalyst for one of several interwoven plot lines that had started to form. There was no formula, no checklist, but just recording ideas on my phone, writing them on the whiteboard in my office, saving them in a document on the laptop. I'd dissect why the books I read worked or didn't worked, and learn what I could from that. I thought about history, I'd ask people who knew more about some of the plot points how things could really happen. It wasn't that long ago I was kind of stunned to realize that I had planned everything out so thoroughly and methodically that I knew the world and people of this story so well, I could have used them all to tell a completely different story that wouldn't rely on the horror elements and could still be compelling just as a literary work.
I guess if I were going to reflect back on the original question for this post "How have you stayed creative during the pandemic?" I'd have to answer with two points:
1) I didn't always.
2) When it happened, it usually happened one voice memo at a time.
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