Ok, yeah, I did go for that likely extremely overused, ripoff title. Sorry, not sorry.
I’d decided to share this article I wrote for Bard of the Isles (https://www.bardoftheisles.com/), mostly because I didn’t have anything new to report this week and I thought ‘hey, here’s a ready made blog post that’s still sort of relevant.’ It is still relevant – we might be out of lockdown, but at lot of these feelings are still valid for 2020 in general. And now we’re coming close to a second lockdown and the world is looking a bit crazier again, and I thought that maybe this was a seriously weird time to share an article about creativity during lockdown. Or maybe it’s the perfect time? I don’t know. The TL;DR is: be kind to yourself. Life is strange right now, and it’s wearing us down in all kinds of ways. Lord knows, everything in my life is pretty straightforward and I’m still bumping around my Twitter feed, staring into space and wondering why it’s always 3pm (Like, seriously, how?).
Anyway, I’m sharing it, just in case someone is feeling the same way. It’s pretty out of date – I wrote it at the end of April/beginning of May – but the advice remains the same. And I promise, I did not write my novel during lockdown, though I have spent a lot of time staring at it angrily since.
…so many of us look at these examples of creativity despite the lockdown and view them as creativity because of the lockdown.
‘Finally working on that novel as you self-isolate? You’re not alone,’ says a headline in The Guardian – published on the 26th of March, three days after UK lockdown started. We’ve all seen the Buzzfeed articles and blogs telling us to ‘stay creative during lockdown,’ and over the last two months we’ve seen arguably some of the greatest TikTok videos of all time. Social media keeps telling us to make good use of our lockdown, and we all have that one friend who has somehow managed to read ‘War and Peace,’ write a novel and learn the piano all in the last nine weeks. The internet is awash in creativity and it is beyond wonderful to see what people are capable of creating during this uncertain time, yet it is also an incredibly difficult time to pursue our own creative jobs and hobbies.
As always, with social media comes social pressure: so many of us look at these examples of creativity despite the lockdown and view them as creativity because of the lockdown. With the loss of the daily commute, reduced social commitments and – in some cases – reduced hours at work, it’s easy to view this as the creation of ‘extra time’: time we should fill by finally finishing that first draft of a novel, or getting the query letter just so. I have yet to discover where all this extra time is hiding, and the reality for many people, of course, is that there’s even less time than normal.
A close friend of mine is a primary school teacher and has a three-year-old daughter – she is juggling both childcare responsibilities and work, with none of the usual support from nursery or help from the grandparents. She said to me that she was sad she wasn’t learning a new skill or working on her idea for a children’s book because she was worried that she would look back on this time at home and think she ‘hadn’t made the most of it,’ even though most people would rightly be in awe of what she is managing to do with her time.
For people without children, there is still plenty to steal away this mythical and elusive ‘extra time.’ Many of us are navigating a complete change to our job descriptions and working environments, learning to work efficiently from home – but also learning when it’s time to turn that computer off and walk away from a workplace which now exists in our own homes. Without the usual structure of our daily lives, time moves quite differently. I have never related to anything more than the Oatmeal’s depiction of the ‘Quarantine Smartwatch’: a watch which is always showing the time of 4pm (my personal crunch time is 3pm – I don’t remember a time I didn’t look at the time and think ‘oh dear god, it’s 3pm’).
All of this before I even mention the ongoing global catastrophe which is still unfolding around us. We are all learning to navigate a completely new mental and social landscape: one which includes things like global death tolls, prominent adverts for facemasks and technologies which allow us to talk to distant loved ones. By its very nature, creative work taps into our mental state, and it is all knotted in with our own mental health and creative egos. It’s always important to respect this.
My ‘creative ego’ is a fragile beast at the best of times, and it has taken a thorough beating over the past couple of months. I have bribed it with ice cream, pinned it down in a study-shaped cage and tortured it by pointing out all the great things other people are achieving, and yet it has remained resolutely uncooperative. There are times when it retreats altogether, only for us to glare miserably at each other across the room, while the wordcount on the screen reports that, no, you have not written anything since last Tuesday – you failure. We’re miserable and distracted, with mere seconds elapsing before we refresh twitter or the BBC website, and the countdown on a Tomato Timer has never felt so long.
But, of course, this doesn’t mean the end for creativity in the time of Covid-19. The old school friend who just finished her debut novel did it somehow, after all, and there’s even hope for those of us with creative egos as moody and intractable as mine. With that in mind, I thought I might share some of the things I’ve found which help me to get some words down on the page (or at the very least, help me to stop sulking about it). I won’t lie to you, ice cream does help, but it may not be a long-term solution.
As always, all advice comes with a large side of do what works for you. On twitter, V. E. Schwab wrote: ‘The only thing I hate more than Earl Grey tea is prescriptive writing advice,’ a sentiment which I could not agree with more (on both fronts)!
- Be compassionate
Being kind to yourself is not always an easy thing, but look at what we’re dealing with right now: these are frightening and unprecedented times, and here you are, living through them. More than that, here you are, trying to create something, a task which is fraught with emotion and vulnerability at the best of times. Whether you add a tiny sentence or spend some time thinking through that difficult plot point, realise that everything you do right now is running uphill. Everything you achieve is hard-won – and even seven words is worthy of celebration.
- Respect your own routines
Your own routines, nobody else’s. There’s a lot of advice out there suggesting we should hold to ‘normal’ routines and restrict ourselves to office hours; this definitely works for some people and absolutely will not work for others. It’s worked for me, in many ways, though my morning is now begun with a very gentle hour (or two) where I do nothing but read as a lead-in to the day. I consider it a kind of commute and it’s now an integral part of my lockdown routine. The important thing is that you find something that works for you. Maybe you find that you have always done your best work at three in the morning and now you are free to do so – good! You are the night. Seize the thread of creativity where you can and embrace whatever makes it easier for you.
- Avoid comparing yourself to social media
This one arguably applies all of the time but it’s always worth stating again. It doesn’t matter what anyone else is doing/writing/creating – some days it will be you who’s writing about your triumphant wordcount and earning jealous glares from the rest of us. Existing during the pandemic can feel like everything is fine and safe and normal one minute, and can move to scrolling bleakly through headlines and trying not to cry in another; some days you will be able to work like normal, and some days all you can do is sit on the couch and binge-watch She-Ra on Netflix – and that’s fine.
- Don’t expect to operate at the same level – or at an even higher level – than normal.
Part of me feels like this one is so obvious that I shouldn’t even include it, but considering I have so completely failed in grappling with it myself, it might be worth mentioning. There have been so many times during lockdown when I have held myself hostage with phrases like ‘if you can’t get this book written now, when will you ever be able to finish it,’ or other similar patently ridiculous statements. This is a difficult time and writing during this time will be harder not easier.
- Work on projects for fun
It filled me with delight to find that, since the start of the pandemic, fanfiction website ‘Archive of our Own,’ or AO3, has seen an uptick in the number of views, by as much as ten million extra views a day: we are turning to things that give us comfort and pleasure in our times of need.
All kinds of writing are worthwhile, help us to grow as writers and allow us to develop new skills; Hugo award winning author N.K. Jemisin recently posted on twitter that she first experimented with second person as part of a fanfiction, a voice which would go on to feature prominently in her award-winning and hugely successful series, ‘The Broken Earth.’ When I guiltily told a friend that I had been writing fanfiction instead of working on my novel, she said, ‘if we started to host a podcast together, would you forbid us from just hanging out and talking for fun?’
Let your impulses give you the kick-start that you need and embrace what makes you happy – even professional writers are allowed to have fun with their craft.
- Respect that creative work is still a kind of work and that you need breaks
The last one is the hardest one for me. Some people are out there writing as their full-time job and others have to fit it around other working, and life, commitments. Either way, it’s easy to feel like every spare moment should be used for writing: that this is the only way we’ll get our projects finished and ‘out there’ into the wild. But writing is work – sometimes beautiful, joyous, transcendent work – and that comes with its own kind of strain and exhaustion. Respect that you need time off, even in a lockdown, and even from your writing. Take a day off, take a holiday – and no, I don’t mean take a day to clear out the shed like you’ve been meaning to since last summer. Take a real break: you deserve it.
So, these are the things that have been keeping me and my creative ego at peace in May when we were so often at war in April. Our quarantine world is beginning to change once more, with the UK and Ireland both embarking on multi-stage plans to lead us out of lockdown. No doubt, hard and harder times are ahead, so patience and compassion will be needed more than ever, both for others and ourselves. The words you write and the worlds you create are beautiful and worthy things, and they have the power to bring joy and relief to others. Just make sure that when you are crafting these wonderful things, you don’t ask too much of yourself in the process.
Annabel Campbell 