If you’ve spent the past year hunkered down writing every day, the pages blossoming with crisp words and deep thoughts, bully for you. I am suffused with envy. However, when I hear authors I admire say they haven’t written more than a grocery list since March 2020, I want to cheer.
Comparisons, as we know, are odious. They are also a facet of being human. I’m trying not to let my lesser angels get too cranky when others recount their pandemic productivity. Normally I’m a person who can get stuff done, but it seems the disciplined practice I spent decades building has disappeared as quickly as rolls of toilet paper flew off the shelves in the early days of Covid. The habit of not writing, it turns out, is sadly easy to acquire in a pandemic.
Aside from hours and hours of teaching and Zoom meetings, a lot of my time this past year went into vacuuming, obsessing over the news, and loathing the shiftless version of the person who still answers to my name. The pandemic has given all of us a kind of permission to not be ourselves, to lower our expectations of what we can require of others (including students and family members), and to reset our ideas of what is attainable. In some ways, that feels like a gift. But it doesn’t solve the longer-term problem of how we think about our own output and ourselves.
Even without global disruption and with the pressing deadlines of tenure and promotion, it’s challenging to do work that requires concentration, research, and polish. We need time to let things take root and bloom. Teaching classes, grading papers, enduring meetings, tending to family, and doing the bidding of our pets means that writing can easily take a back seat.
I know — or at least I tell myself — that big projects take as long as they take. Those of us with tenure enjoy the luxury — the correct word — of having merely our identity and egos, not our livelihood and security, suffer.
A good thing about the pandemic is that no one needs me to list the impediments to productivity. We are all plenty aware of what has gotten in our way for the past year. Many of us walked the line between toxic positivity and wallowing depression, between feeding sourdough mothers and fending off complete mental dishabille. But after 20 years of doling out advice about writing, I’m less certain than I’ve ever been of how to tell other writers what to do or how to feel. All I can say is that if you haven’t been able to write, you are not alone.
But then, you already knew that.
In evaluating job performance, compassionate administrators will have stopped the timer in March 2020 when things closed and will perhaps restart it in the fall, pushing back deadlines by at least a year or more. Extra time on the tenure-and-promotion clock (or whatever employment clock you are evaluated against) seems like pocket change given that the efforts we’ve been making to serve our students should have netted us hazard pay.
Eventually things will return to something resembling “normal,” though I hesitate to use the word. We’re going to have to start taking showers again and showing up on the campus. We’ll be able to keep some of what we’ve learned during this weird time and will, no doubt, have to break some newly acquired bad habits. Mostly, we’re going to have to figure out how to jump-start our drained batteries.
After not writing much more than emails for the first nine months of the pandemic, I managed to get going on a book again, though in nothing like the steady state I have long been accustomed to. Fits and starts these days feel like a win, and I’ve decided to try to show myself the generosity I would to any friend in trouble and attempt to consider this period of not writing as “gestation.”
What got me writing again? You might find this hard to believe, but I promise, it’s true. In the winter, a stray remark by someone who had been on a committee to read my grant proposal reminded me that I had been working on a book I was excited about. A few kind words from a virtual stranger allowed me to dig that project out and start in again. She had liked the idea and thought it worthy. Even though I’d gotten the grant, it had been easy to forget that I was expected to produce something when mostly I divided my time between Zoom meetings and vacuuming. I remembered how good it felt to have a sense of purpose and a goal.
Here are eight other things that helped me get writing again. Perhaps they might be of use to you.
Talk about it. Once you muster the courage to talk about not writing, it can help dissipate the shame. Even more so if you chat with someone who will remind you of your previous successes. Share your fears with a mentor, friend, or family member whose nudges will motivate.
Remember what used to work. Think about the ways you were able to create time and space in your day to devote to writing. Can you change your physical set-up and trick yourself into thinking you have a new place to work? Milton said, “Space may produce new worlds.” That’s not just true in hell.
Give yourself a deadline. In this case, you’re not setting a deadline to finish, but to begin again. Start with something easy. I told myself that as soon as winter quarter ended, I would force myself to reread what I had written. That proved a good warm-up and got me interested in continuing.
Think in chunks. If I ever believed I had to run 26.2 miles (or, for that matter, 100), I would never toe the start line. But at the beginning of every long race, I’ve told myself I just need to run a mile. Then another. Mile by mile, “bird by bird.” Instead of thinking you have to write a whole book, write an introduction. Or a chapter. Or a section. Or a description. You can coax yourself into finishing overwhelming tasks by breaking them into manageable bits.
Find some peeps. I’ve long been a fan of writing groups and writing dates. This business of putting words on the page is darned lonely. Gather a group of others who also need to get going again and you will boost one another. My recently reconvened writing group has done that for me. The fear of disappointing others can be a powerful motivator. Encouragement is buoying.
Don’t expect brilliance. If you’re pragmatic, as I am, you know that done is better than perfect. For me, the hardest part is facing a blank page. Once I have something to work with, I can revise and tweak and even write new blank document drafts. Writing is easy; thinking is hard.
Find readers. One of the most useful things I did was to gather the courage to send an early draft to someone I knew only from her byline but whose work I’d long respected. We’d had a brief correspondence, and I realized how useful it would be to get feedback from someone smart who wasn’t invested in me. Her generous response left me feeling indebted and grateful.
Practice gratitude. I’m not a yoga-peace-and-serenity type, but I do believe that stopping to appreciate the juice and joy of the spring and summer seasons, the greater availability of vaccines, and the end of a hellish academic year are things to feel thankful for. The practice of gratitude, as we know from every spiritual practice, is uncommonly helpful.
More than a year into the pandemic, I’m still working my way out of this rut. But I’ve realized that the person who used to get up each morning to go to a cafe for three hours and write is still me. I just needed to find some ways to remember her and hope that she will eventually return.
