It’s a testament to the hard reality of the last couple years that you could write a blog post titled, Writing in the Time of Insanity, and literally not know WHICH YEAR you were referring to. 2020, when SARS-COVID-19 shook the world to a standstill? 2021, when we had an armed insurrection at the Capitol? And a vaccine for the virus, only not everyone wanted to take it? Or 2022, when we entered the first petrostate war as Russia invaded Ukraine?
War, Death, and Plague, together again! It’s 3 of the 4 Horsemen, with Famine on the way, given how Ukraine and Russia export substantial amounts of wheat when they’re not bombing (or being bombed) instead of planting.
It’s just life in the Screaming Twenties. We’re finding ways to adapt—some good, some bad—but creating in times of chaos continues to be a struggle… and just our reality.
From October 23, 2020:
| I think we can all agree that the soundtrack for 2020 is basically rage screams and that sound you make when you curl up into a ball and rock for a while. MOST CREATIVES I KNOW ARE STRUGGLING And I don’t mean financially (although MY GOD there is a lot of hunger and poverty happening right now). The struggle I see happening across the board, for literally every creative person I know, is the desperate grappling with the stress and figuring out how to continue making art. Some have simply stopped. Which I simultaneously understand and also weep over—because we need art to get through this. |
You can’t even imagine my joy when I found out Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 had started up and IT WAS LEGIT HOPEPUNK OMG YOU GUYS. And then Kim Stanley Robinson wrote an outstanding piece about writing Utopian fiction and gave a shoutout to hopepunk as a “school” that writers were forming within the genre…
And it suddenly felt like HOPEPUNK WAS EVERYWHERE.
There’s an incredible validation to that. When you’re wrestling with creating this new thing, and you pick your head up and look around and see that other artists are on the same wavelength. That you’ve tapped into the zeitgeist, and that’s why you feel like you’re riding a tsunami, crafting your boat as you’re trying to stay afloat and not crash on the rocky shores.
WHEN I STOPPED WRITING
When I say every creative I know has been struggling, I’m 100% included in that group.
Back in May, when the pandemic was just settling in for its extended stay in all our lives, I finished a book (under my romance penname) and then just… stopped writing.
Because I was in pain—literal, physical pain. I’d pushed through to the end of that novel, but I paid a price with my body. Tendinitis in my arm and spasms in my back were overuse injury married to the manifestation of stress in my body.
It took me DOWN.
For two months, I did what I could, which wasn’t much. Sure as hell wasn’t writing. Taxes. I remember doing those. Surviving the pandemic. Marketing. Business stuff. But I had to switch to left-hand-mousing, and there was no way I could just sit at a keyboard and pound out another novel, which was what I always did when I finished a book.
Then, in July, after two months of zero writing, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I couldn’t type much, so I just spent a half hour in the backyard each morning with a pad of paper and… just wrote. Journaled mostly for a while. I was just *processing*. After about a week, the rambling started to take shape. Not a story, but a sense of urgency. I needed to write about this time we were living in. Not in a literal sense, but something that included the feeling of it. The gaslighting. The terror. The loneliness and suspension of time. The sense that the world was coming undone yet you still had to make breakfast. That we were in this together, we had to be, or everything would fall apart.
I spent a month just doing that. Just thinking and processing and scribbling my half hour of notes before the pain in my back/arm made me stop. I was slowly healing. It somehow became August, and a story had started to take shape. There was a moment—Aug. 13th—when I knew I had to either write this thing or walk away.
So I wrote it.
Took me six weeks. Halfway through, I almost quit. Which NEVER happens, but I simply didn’t know if I had the emotional energy to do this book, which had already grown to be a series of four, even though I was still on the first one. My body was healing, so *physically* I could sit at the keyboard, but *emotionally* I was still a wreck.
Then I realized that writing when it was rough was exactly what this book required. I couldn’t have written it any other time. Only now. So it was write it or walk away. Again.
I kept going.
At the end of September, I finished the first draft. Normally, for me, after writing 50+ stories, the first draft is pretty close to finished. Not this time. This book was nowhere near the book I wanted to write, which was the standard to which I held all my books. I had to invent a whole new editing strategy just to begin to tackle the things I wanted to do in this book.
It took me a month, but I finished revisions last night. If you’d asked me before I checked, I would have said that book took me something like five years to write. That’s the “magic” of 2020—pure time dilation all the way. In reality, it was a month of planning, six weeks of writing, a month of revisions. It’s not a long novel, but still—in real clock time, pretty reasonable, all things considered
The book I wasn’t sure if I could finish ended up being exactly the book I needed to write.
It’s funny how that works out.
It’s not done done—there are still copyedits, covers and descriptions, but those are all straight-forward. That’s normal business, not Hey, let’s tackle an entirely new genre that’s not even really established yet! In the middle of a pandemic! Wheeee!
Yet here’s the thing: I can’t wait to start the next book.
This is only the first of four, after all.
And now I can legit say: I know how to do this.
Keep creating and consuming art, my friends. Be gentle with yourself. When the hard things come, trust your gut, take care of your heart, protect your mental health, and wear a mask.
The world needs all of you still here in 2021.
Peace and Love,
Sue
