[image error] The Write By Night writers’ service solicited comments from several of their associates and friends about writing while in the 2020 COVID-19 shut-down. The following was my contribution.




Shut-in by the shut-down. Demanded by executive order and peer pressure, we venture out-of-doors only by absolute necessity, keep several arm’s lengths away from fellow humans, and wear surgical masks lest our breaths prove lethal. Most people seem to see this as sharing the sacrifice for the sake of the common good. Pulling together, they say, we’ll endure until we beat this pandemic and life returns to normal. 

But I don’t see it that way. Life will never return to “normal.”  

Now this is a blog about writing, and so I won’t get into arguments over why I believe this COVID-19 event to be a pseudo-pandemic. I only mention it to offer why I am especially disturbed by what’s happening, over and above the presence of any virus. 

This “pandemic” has been called “9-11 part II.” I believe that is true, and this current distress is an extension of that earlier watershed event. Indeed, this is the slow strangling of human freedom. The total-surveillance, police state envisioned by Mr. Orwell is leaving the shadows. In a bad flu season, it offers us a protective embrace sure to tighten until we suffocate. 

For me, seeing this adds broken morale on top of quarantine, masks, and social distancing. If you want to begin to see why I feel this way, let me point you to this article written by economist and geopolitical analyst, Peter Koenig.

So how, as writers, do we deal with this situation? Stuck in the house (even if working remotely), do we have lots of time to fill, or to kill? Surely, we can work on our novels, critique online, submit short stories, write articles, and such. We could make it into a stay-home writing retreat. Perhaps we can do all that if we’re able to keep our spirits up, look adversity in the face, and write anyway. Maybe even draw inspiration from the event. Maybe we can say, with Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, “You are here and it is now!” That is, we start from where we are, with what we have, and move forward.

I teeter between that bravado attitude and despair. 

With that preface, I’ll address the Write By Night FIVE QUESTIONS asking how writers are dealing with the COVID-19 lock-down. 


1. What's making you smile/laugh?

I smile in admiration for those persons in my circle of writers who are persevering in their work with determined courage. At the lock-down’s onset, our group immediately began asking how we could continue our critique work online (via Internet). I setup a framework for doing that using Dropbox as a platform. So our work is continuing, though at a reduced level and slower pace. The Dropbox work shows me that our writers, despite challenging conditions, are continuing their projects.

Recognizing the importance of this time (the curse of “interesting times”), some of us have taken to journaling or otherwise writing about it. Dr. Kasie, for instance, aired a segment on her radio program describing the types of stories you find written about COVID-19, especially on the Internet. And Danielle is keeping a VLOG about being shut-in with young children. I am making some notes in a private journal, but until now, haven’t been able to muster the morale to do such work for public consumption.

I am most happy that my own family is together and well. Icing on that cake is my writing family also being healthy and working.


2. What's making you cry (happy and/or sad)?

I have long been heart-broken over the loss of the world I knew as a child. I’m a trailing edge Baby Boomer and I remember truly blue skies and summer days containing a natural vibrancy that inspired the joy of just being alive. Even then, a dystopia crept steadily over the world. It took a great leapt on 9/11/2001, which event took me a few years to appreciate. This current event is an even greater leap in that dark direction.

Realization of this “critical challenge of the hour” (as Thomas Merton described our times) casts a constant shadow in my mind and spirit, infusing my writing with melancholy shades. Ergo, hopeful writing is difficult for me. Even my novel-in-progress is in the post-apocalypse genre (though I’m sure the world I depict is overly optimistic).

3. What's giving you hope, encouragement?

Encouragement comes from feeling safe in the bosom of my family, where we can together endure the storm, at least for now. I thank the spirits that I earned enough over my working life to have retired early when I had to. We can live, and I am able to write.

On the writing side, I have learned enough and progressed enough that I can legitimately see the end of my WIP and anticipate the next ones. That is a reason for personal hope. And little extra projects, like this blog post, also help very much. All this represents the continuance of that self-expression an artist is compelled to make. I see it in my writers’ group. It is a joy in the way that taking a deep, clean breath is a joy.


4. Are you finding new ways to be creative, and/or are the old ways still working?

I can’t say that this lock-down has prompted me to adopt any new or alternate ways to work. After all, I am retired so I’m generally at home, anyway. What’s different is the wider world that throws new boundaries around my writing endeavors.

What’s mostly changed for me is an acceleration of what I’ve tried to do in recent years—that is, learning to write creatively. I’ve learned so much about story craft that I can talk about it and apply principles to my fiction that make it readable. Feedback from my writers group helps much with this. And then there’s the confidence that allows me to, pretty much, sit down at the keyboard and bang out whatever I need to compose. I guess you reach that point through practice in any creative discipline.

Without question, the biggest change in my writing life has been suspending our in-person writers group meetings. As I noted, we’ve moved to online critiques. Some of our writers are very uncomfortable with such Internet-based work, though, and others are too busy working remotely at regular jobs to make use of it. So it’s a reduction in our work, but it is still there. Using a newsletter and “status” emails, I’m trying to keep a thread of communication going. So far, the response has been positive.

5. In what way(s), if at all, will you come out of this thing a changed writer? A changed person?

I am changed from realizing the closer approach of that anti-artistic principle of evil long at work in the world (aka: “the Unspeakable”; re: Thomas Merton ; also James W. Douglass ). It is a difficult thing to see and will affect everything I write from here on, whether I intend it or not. The consequence for my writing impulse is twofold. On the one hand, I feel an outrage that makes me want to write my opposition to the dark forces of totalitarianism, like Victor Laszlo in Casablanca. On the other hand, I’m basically a coward and feel inclined to hunker down within my house arrest and write my passions. Something like Cervantes, perhaps, or maybe E. Dickinson.

Sometimes, I just sit in my stay-home exile on my screened-in back porch on a temperate evening. There, I imagine august literary company. Sitting in the dusk with cigars and whiskey, I discuss drama by lamplight with Mr. Tolkien, Mr. Hilton, Mr. Welles, Mr. Wells, Mr. Orwell, and others. It is a fleeting balm for my soul beyond the reach, or understanding, of the Unspeakable. I suppose most writers have such a snug place in their imaginations. Ultimately, that may be the truest refuge for our sheltering.
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This essay was first published in five posts on 2020 April 12 and 18 on the Write By Night blog.