Lock-down has, converse to what many of us imagined when it began, been an unproductive time for most writers I know, myself among them. Surprisingly while a lot of writing involves voluntary spurning the rest of humanity to isolate yourself behind a keyboard, when your actually forced to spurn the rest of humanity and isolate yourself it becomes harder to be creative and the keyboard becomes so much more daunting. Now there is a twist no one saw coming…

Now, I will admit that a bunch of writers struggling to find those ever elusive narrative partials if far from the worst thing to come out of lock-down. As social problems go its a long way from the top of anyone list, including the writers themselves on the whole but it isn’t just writers who seemed to be having a creative slump, its the majority of those who participate in the creative arts of any kind. There was a spike early on when creatives were all doing video uploads and trying to find new interesting ways of getting out there without getting out there… Musicians were recording live concerts from their living rooms. Poets were doing video readings (which clearly should be discouraged, because poetry…) Authors were doing reading on live chats… There was in fact a brief upsurge of creative people pitching in to entertain the housebound masses in a blitz spirit of ‘we are all in this together’. This I think that in of itself was one of the contributing factors to the slump that followed, the pressure to be creative, pressure the creatives put on themselves to reach out and be there for a shell shocked society smothered the very creativity it was trying to force and (for me at least) the narrative partials were suffocated and the keyboard ceased to tap.

I struggled to write, or more exactly with the will to write. The novel I was working on at the start of lock-down stuttered to a halt and sits waiting for me to get back to it. The other novel I took back up to try and get past the slump by changing lanes fared little better, even the blog became first something of a chore, then dried up completely for a while. The knowledge I was not alone in this creative slump did not come to me until later when connecting to my fellow writers. Though knowing that no one else was writing ‘the great lock-down novel’ didn’t help me get past the slump, though misery is ever courteous of company.

Somewhere in this long cruel summer of isolation the creativity has started to creep back however, and the keyboard has started to tap, the narrative particles have started to spark once more and while its not yet a river, words have started once more to flow. Firstly because I needed to write a tale about pirates for a Harvey Duckman anthology and knowing I was not the only one trying to do so helped. That was over a month ago and since then I have gotten back into the writing grove, though it is causing me to revise a lot of what I had written in the five months before, those words that struggled to find the page show the strain of doing so. But the particle’s are flowing once more…

A Squid on the Shoulder is starting to take shape, I’ve a collection of collated short stories coming out in a month or so and of course there be Pirates on the horizon coming out on Pirate day… (more news on that to come)