Last spring, when the world was convinced Covid-19 had a 3% mortality rate and that we’d catch if we so much as stepped out on our front porches, I started a story. A rather random story in my Shadows of War world about a military reservist who’s captured after crashing on an enemy-held planet. There’s more of a plot to it than that, I promise, but my real reason for writing it was to follow the main character along as she’s forced to hike halfway across the world.
Ok, so it wasn’t that far (I’m not that mean to my characters). But even as a prisoner or war, my character got to experience something I couldn’t: purpose, an unfamiliar environment, the beauty of a foreign world, and interactions with strangers—all things that had been taken away from me. I pinned photos on Pinterest of an ecosystem I’d never visited, felt the sun and wind and rain on my face as my character did, and basically daydreamed my way through Georgia’s stay-at-home order. Putting words on the page like that was, I believed, enough to keep me sane. If I couldn’t escape to hike in Saguaro National Park for a week, I could at least wander the grasslands of Ekril for an hour every night.
Our state’s order expired as I hammered out twenty thousand words, yet the restrictions remained. I wasn’t allowed to go to the office, and the limited travel that was allowed became a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Then the summer humidity came, stealing away my desire to hike even the most local of paved trails. We shoved in one road trip to Colorado in July, which gave me a short burst of life and creativity. But then my husband went back to work and my son went back to school, and I remained at home alone.
And I mostly stopped writing, too jealous of my characters’ adventures and too much at a loss of what to write.
I’ve always believed that writing requires living. I didn’t write a word of fiction until I was 37, and I’m quite confident that’s a huge part of the reason I could just sit down and knock out a few books in that first year. I had lived. I’d had good and bad experiences, yes, but I’d had them. I had ample happenings and personal stories to draw from, things I wouldn’t have known had I started writing in high school or even earlier. And I added to that collection of experience as the years went on—I kept traveling, kept moving, kept meeting new people, kept failing, kept succeeding.
But in 2020, that came to a screeching halt. Travel, work, even interactions with other humans—gone. Turns out it’s difficult to write dialogue when you aren’t speaking to people. Turns out it’s difficult to visualize the nuances of human communication when you aren’t allowed to see people in real life—and when you are, there’s a literal mask covering their face. I’m sure a lot of writers don’t have these issues, but creativity…it’s not a strength of mine.
As 2021 rolls into the second quarter, I’m still trying to finish the last Crownkeeper book, yes. But I can no longer imagine having as much freedom as Riette does. I sit down after work and stare at the screen, torn between jealousy and utter confusion. How would she solve a specific problem? How would she react with faced with a certain situation? How would she interact with another character? I’ve been isolated for so long, I can’t even imagine the solutions any longer.
Of course, this all is a symptom of a larger problem. We all know the elephant of online that’s in the room. But when you can’t even escape into another world because your own has shrunk down to nothing…well, maybe it all circles back around.
And I’m not sure there’s a solution for that anymore.