All my writing projects now feel inconsequential in light of this global pandemic. I opened my Scrivener document and scrolled through chapters yesterday, wondering how to write when there feels like a Before and After—a hinge in history that didn’t exist before.
I feel full of words, but they’re suspended in air like confetti and I’m waiting for them to shuffle into some kind of pattern that will help make sense of the world. But just as I’ve learned that I need to get outside and jog for my mental health, I know I also need to write. Writing is not a want; it’s a need.
This past week one of my favorite podcasters, Ann Kroeker, encouraged writers to journal and document the days. Although it seems hard to imagine, we will forget what this is all like. People may never see our wrestling and wrangling of words during this strange season, but writing will help us work out the kinks in our own souls. If you are a writer, carve out time and space in your day to write.
I once told a friend that I wasn’t a verbal or internal processor. “I need to write things down to make sense of them,” I told her. “What does that make me?”
“A writer,” she said.
I’ve always been more of a tortoise than a hare when it comes to making sense of things. I was never the first kid in class to raise my hand because I need time to process. I know this about myself. For a recent essay I published, I had mulled over those ideas for nearly a year before I wrote it. Madeleine L’Engle always encouraged her writing students to spend lots of time thinking, then to write without thinking. Often our ideas must be seeds hidden in the damp ground long before they become flowers.
Just two months ago I added an extra morning of preschool for two of my kids so that I would have nine hours a week to pursue freelance writing. But then the world closed its doors and we are living on top of one another in our house. Now that I am home full-time with my kids, aged 3, 5, and 7, that time to write evaporated.
My husband already works from home, so we rejiggered our schedule so that instead of working from 9 to 5, he now works from 10 to 6 and he gives me the morning hours to hide out in his office and fight with words on the screen. Can you enlist your spouse and get creative with your time? Perhaps there’s more fluidity to our schedules than we thought.
Making space for creative work will help sustain us through the next weeks and months of isolation. Writing will give us an outlet for expression and perhaps open portals into truth and beauty we might have missed otherwise.
Keep writing.
Keep writing, painting, creating. At times, invite your children into your creative endeavors. Perhaps they too will catch the passion. Don’t apologize for carving out time and space to create—even if no one buys your words or even reads them. Writing will keep us afloat. And it may buoy others as well.
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How are you getting creative with your time so you can write?