Creativity vs. COVID

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

I went looking for an answer to the question of why the pandemic and quarantine has affected so many artists — in my world, mostly I mean writers — so negatively. In my case, before COVID my daily life involved sitting in my home office writing my fiction, ghostwriting other people’s fiction, and writing business articles for a regional magazine. My workouts involve hiking and running on desert foothills behind my house. Outings involved coffee or lunch meetings with friends once or twice a week, often (quietly) begrudged because it meant I wasn’t writing (I enjoyed these when I got there. It’s getting there that’s hard.) So quarantine and pandemic, before and after my husband’s 8-week furlough, meant life as usual.

So why wasn’t I writing?

What I found when I went looking for why the pandemic interferes with creativity was a great many articles on creatives in advertising and entertainment, and how creating things like photoshoots used digital tech to go on with business. Interesting, but not what I was looking for. I also found articles on how businesses had to scramble to be creative and keep their doors open (well, not open, but…)

There are also a lot of articles out there on how people are coping with lockdown and remote work by taking up hobbies they’d abandoned before or starting new pursuits, learning new things, and trying new creative pursuits…