I’ve been struggling. Just your garden-variety-year-two-of-a-pandemic struggle, but struggling nonetheless. Turns out a writer needs input to produce output, and when the better part of twelve months is spent on 3/4 of an acre of land with one other person, the writing mind stagnates. And while I’ve had stagnation periods before, I always had tools to combat it–just take a break, go for a walk, watch a movie, drink a beer on the back porch–but now those have become my only leisure activities, and they tend to lose their efficacy with repeated use. I find myself tired-er, dumber, and less motivated with each passing day. The human brain requires novelty to function, doubly so if you want to do creative work, as at least some of that novelty is being fed into the story (or art, or music, or any of many other things) mill to produce more novelty.

The old adage goes write what you know, and it’s more or less true. I’ve never taken it to mean that you can’t write about events or experiences outside of your own, but that if you do, you must at least write about these using your own emotions–your own love, your own fear, your own contempt. But as year two stretches out in front of me, and shows me its form, I find it hard to feel these emotions. I mostly feel boredom–isolation and a little anger, sure–but mostly boredom. And have you ever tried to write about boredom? The subject has a way of sliding off your mind like a wall-crawler, and it leaves sticky residue all across your writing in its wake.

Without anything of substance to write about, my work, both the action and the product, has taken on an empty quality. So i tried to write about emptiness itself, but it too felt…empty. I realized, not for the first time, but for the first time it had a practical purpose, that in order to make fiction feel real, to feel like truth, it has to be stuffed with reality, but my own reality has shrunk to a size too small to fill a story. One might think that if that was truth then it would be enough to fill a story, but as in life as it is in fiction, there’s an expectation of feeling. Even if the subject is the absence of feeling.

Ellen Cushing wrote a piece in The Atlantic the other day about how the pandemic is making us all dumb. It was a very good and inciteful piece, but there was a passage that in particular caught my eye. She says, “Sometimes, I imagine myself as a SIM, a diamond-shaped cursor hovering above my head as I go about my day. Tasks appear, and I do them. Mealtimes come, and I eat. Needs arise, and I meet them. I have a finite suite of moods, a limited number of possible activities, a set of strings being pulled from far offscreen. Everything is two-dimensional, fake, uncanny. My world is as big as my apartment, which is not very big at all.”

A few things stood out to me about this. First, is that it resembles my experience with depression, a sense of going through the motions in a world in which your existence bears no effect. This feeling that was once chalked up to a function of chemical imbalances in the brain is now demonstrably a biproduct of abject reality. Depression is really real, and it is all of us, and by definition, it makes doing hard.

Second, is that it demonstrates a caveman’s hierarchy of needs. And it makes me wonder whether there was a reason that early humans didn’t produce complex art. Not because they weren’t as intelligent as us, they were, and not because there wasn’t enough time in their day, research suggests that there working days were actually shorter than ours, but because there was not enough novelty left over for the creation of novel thoughts. The level of newness in the world is a direct product of advanced civilization, and when we lack the most fundamental element of society, that is people and our interactions with them (keep up), we lose our ability to perform novelty.

Put these two things together and boy oh boy am I struggling. On a positive note, if this was just a bunch of mindless drivel, then I have made my point just as well as if I had succeeded in writing something coherent.

Just absolutely fuck this year.

Both of them.