Writing during a pandemic
This week I’d like to share a series of interviews from Man Repeller about writing during These Times, with Mary H.K. Choi, Shenequa A. Golding, and Vivek Shraya. (Maybe there are more to come? I hope so.) I have gone through many different relationships with writing since March, some of which I’ve explored in the newsletter and some of which I don’t understand well enough to articulate yet. At the height of my book-proposal cave, I tapped into serious “writer’s retreat” energy and honestly, it was amazing. But of course, this isn’t a writer’s retreat, as Shraya explicitly reminds us in her interview. It’s a plague.
We have two jobs right now: 1. Surviving (physically and psychologically), and 2. Not infecting others. Neither of those jobs, you’ll notice, is writing. But for me, at certain times, writing has been the key to doing both of those more important jobs. It’s given me a sense of momentum, the certainty of commitment, and somewhere else to go, even if it’s just in my imagination. Perhaps most importantly, it’s given meaning to all the solitude. And this is trickier to talk about, but the pandemic has actually helped my writing, at least sometimes. I needed that solitude. I needed to be forced to truly confront every day’s expanse of time and how I spend it. I needed to watch the world’s artifice fall away to clarify my own ideas about history and humanity, and what it means to be a part of both. And in order to get started at all, I needed to know, truly know, that the future isn’t guaranteed.
Anyway, here are some wis(er) words from Choi. More like this in the links above.
Hustle culture isn’t the wave anymore. Not by a long shot. Now it’s discernment and shrewd allocation of resources and boundaries galore. Energy is finite. It’s a somatically real and depleting thing to keep one eye on the election and another little antenna honed on a literal global plague.
I wasn’t immune to the fantasy that I’d get really, really jacked. Or else learn a language or take a course on playwriting, but then June swung around with zero progress and I realized that so much of it had to do with making this pandemic “worth it.” But no matter how much I try to avoid how scary and sad and fucked up this situation is, I can’t.
Plus, I realized I was trying to “be good.” As if I can cut a deal with the universe, like, if I behave and act diligently and piously and do my work then surely, the pandemic will desist in a reasonable amount of time, like three months? That was just a bullet train to heartache and rage.
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Also, I’m a big believer in the vomit draft. The first version won’t be good. You’re not as good as the You you’ll become once you’ve written the thing. The better You will do the edits and that’s how it works.