Creating Art in Times of Trouble
Creating during personal times of grief, sickness, financial strain, or uncertainty is difficult, but doing it during a time when almost everyone in the world is feeling the same came seem impossible. What I have learned, however, is that just as reading is often an escape from the real world — one that is needed especially when times are tough — writing is as well.
I’ve had some training-wheels-experience for writing during rough times, and while they’re obviously not directly comparable, I find myself going back to my own past when trying to find ways to deal with my current problems. In general, creating during the pandemic has been complicated by a perfect storm of emotions that are at least somewhat replicated by other, similar emotions felt in my personal microcosm that has at least tangentially helped me to adapt and, I hope, can help provide perspective for others.
Issues of Grief, Finances, & Doubt
My first experience with creating under strain happened on the tail end of my greatest success. After years of struggling to find a publishing home for my books, I was lucky enough to strike gold — my debut hit the NY Times bestseller list, I was able to quit my day job and work full time as a writer, and literally my biggest dreams came true.
But soon after, the market for sci fi in young adult literature cooled, and I found myself with a project that I’d worked a year on — and planned a ton of expensive travel for research and promo on — and no home for it. I got the news that the book wasn’t going to be published while in the parking lot of a fertility acupuncture appointment because, of course, the fates were aligning to make my career grief line up with personal grief at the same time, both of which were adding to financial strain that I, in my naivety, had not fully planned for.
Contracts are not paychecks.
This is the book that became The Body Electric, my first self published work (and one that was successful enough for me to know that my publisher had been wrong; the sci market had not actually cooled, and people still wanted — and continue to want — that content from me). But before I went on that journey, I needed to find a way to finish the book amidst the self-doubt that it — and I — was not good enough, that my personal and career griefs could be overridden, and that my finances would not be too hard hit. For one horrible moment that felt like forever, the entirety of the situation drowned me.
Everything happening during this time, from my publisher’s decisions based on a nebulous market to my own body’s issues with fertility, were out of my control.
The ship I’d been on sank — there was no point standing on the deck while the band played “Nearer My God to Thee.” I had to learn to swim by holding on to the things I could actually control.
I couldn’t make my publisher to publish a book — but I could publish it myself. I couldn’t force people to buy it, but I could research marketing plans, develop realistic budgets, and devise a plan of action that would get me a return on my investment. I could no longer afford the expensive trips and promo I’d originally planned, but I could reallocate my budget to the basics.
What I learned: A realistic plan of action, where you focus just on the task at hand and tackling the things that you can accomplish independent of anyone else, helps you to break down the big, impossible-seeming goals into manageable steps.
Issues of Time, Familial Guilt, & Responsibility
During the pandemic, many people who live in families are suddenly finding the emotional burden of supporting that family increased tenfold as school, entertainment, and constant attention falls onto their shoulders, especially if their partner is either not present or working under different circumstances.
After years of struggling with fertility issues, my husband and I were lucky enough to conceive our son. Much as the lowest point of my journey to motherhood happened at the lowest point of my career, the upswing of finding out I was pregnant happened at the same time my career rebounded. I sold A World Without You just months before I became pregnant.
Now, the thing to know about A World Without You is that this is my most personal book to date. It was written as a reflection of my brother’s death, that had happened many years prior to the book, but was still something I was working through. And when I found out I was pregnant, I also found myself struggling with fears that my child would be affected with the same mental illnesses that led to my brother’s early death.
Unfortunately, while my son had a definite due date and a time when he absolutely would be born, the book’s deadline, through the moires of publishing, got pushed back…and back…and back…and edits arrived at very nearly the same time as the baby did. And if I wanted to get paid — because now I had hospital bills! — I needed to finish the book. I certainly could have asked for an extension, and it could be argued that I should have. But I didn’t. I had clawed my way back into the game, and I wanted to stay there.
The first three months of my son’s life ran parallel to the final edits of my book. I rewrote whole swaths, introduced a new character, added a plot line, changed the ending.
With a newborn strapped to my chest.
The thing that carried me through this time was a lovely friend, who told me that I would want my child to know that I had goals and aspirations beyond motherhood. Yes, being a mother was truly important to me, but it was also important to me to be a writer. While my baby was far too young to know that the clacking of my computer keys was mommy living her dream, I used that sentiment to push down the fears that I wasn’t being a mother enough. Every time a mommy-blog would tell me how I should be staring lovingly into my son’s eyes 24/7, I reminded myself that when my child looked at me, I wanted him to see a person in her own right, not someone who lived only for him.
Whenever I was too tired to do both — be both a writer and a mother — I felt guilt. Whenever I had to make a choice to be only one, regardless of what that choice was, I felt guilt. So…I just did my best. Some days, I mothered more. Some days, I wrote more.
Some days I just slept.
But all days, I forgave myself.
When Your Entire World is On Fire
But there are also times when the whole world is on fire.
This may be you right now. I don’t know your situation. Maybe you’re a medical professional going in to fight COVID-19 directly on the frontlines. Maybe you’re working in a grocery store and being accosted by Karens who aren’t even wearing masks. Maybe you’re unemployed and single and depressed. I don’t know what your life is like right now, but if you’re reading this far, chances are, things are bad.
And I’m sorry.
First, the truth: sometimes, things are so bad that you can’t create. And that’s okay. Or, at least, it’s as okay as it’s possible to be. Don’t beat yourself up for not writing or creative art every day when you’re barely surviving.
Write after survival.
But if you can create, if there is a moment where the fires have burned low enough that they illuminate your paper rather than burn your fingers, no matter how short that time may be, remember this: Books are an escape for the reader, but they are an escape for the writer as well.
Last year, my husband was dying. Actively. There’s no other way to call it when a heart just decides to quit. When the doctors at two different hospitals throw up their hands and give up. When an ambulance carries him two hundred miles away to the last hospital that has a chance to maybe help, perhaps, but no promises. When even at the last-chance hospital, only a handful of the doctors there think he has any hope.
I will never forget one particular day in one of many ICU rooms. Over the sounds of the heart monitor, I could hear through the door the circle of doctors in the hall outside, debating whether it would be worth even attempting to save my husband’s 37-year-old life.
His only chance at life was a heart pump, but he was, ironically, too ill to have the surgery that would save his life. There was a delicate balance between using medicine and minor procedures to increase his health to the point of getting intensive, day-long open-heart surgery and then hoping that surgery didn’t kill him.
During this time, I had the misfortune also of having my safety net fall away. My father had passed away unexpectedly the year previous. My mother, who was most often my childcare backup, had fallen just weeks prior and badly broken her ankle, needing a wheelchair and care of her own. And, once again, I found myself in a position where my career — like all arts careers — wasn’t exactly stable. With credit cards in one hand, and my little boy’s hand in my other, I booked myself into the cheapest motels close to the hospital.
And I tried to work.
Do you know how much a quarter of a year in three different hospitals and multiple intensive care units costs? Did you know that before you get approved for the heart transplant list, the hospital talks to you about whether or not you can afford the tens of thousands of dollars of medications and fees that will be required after health insurance? Did you know that motels aren’t considered a health cost?
And, if your income is dependent upon writing, do you know how hard it is to look at all those bills and wonder if your words will be able to pay them? And then wonder what you’ll do if those words are not even enough to save the people you care about the most?
It was a stressful summer.
And, at times, I had absolutely no words at all inside of me. There are times when there are no words. And many of those times, for me, happened during that summer.
But I also found that when I couldn’t work on a novel, I could sometimes write a short story. And when it was the worst, the scariest, the darkest…the novel I was writing became one of the few glimmers of light.
It became my escape.
I wrote about wonder and impossible things. A blend of fantasy and science fiction. Pure escapism. Adventure. Joy. Things I wasn’t experiencing at all — except through those characters. And the relief I felt at that was the balm I needed.
Writing — creating of any kind — in the darkest moments of your life may be impossible. But if possible, embrace it.
Escape in whatever way you can.
Build the world you want to live in, if only for a moment.
