It’s Hard to Write During this Pandemic
I don’t know about you, but I am finding it harder and harder to concentrate with all this COVID19 stuff going on in the background. The cacophony of voices with ever dire predictions and even worse, the real statistics make my head hurt, and my heart flutter. Even with meditation music in the background and constant “Ommmm” to produce positive vibrations in my life, I still find it troublesome to fall into my characters’ lives.
There’s No Social Isolation When You Write
On the other hand, when I do manage to penetrate the curtain of disharmony that is surrounding me, and I can make that leap to a telling a story, well, it’s magic. There is no social isolation when you write stories. Your head is filled with visions of that which you write. You forge a relationship with the characters that pop into your head. You birth them and discover their beautiful and sometimes ugly traits. You weave a background for them that gives them the need for goals. You contrive situations to build conflict, making your characters have to wade through hard choices – choices that they sometimes nail, and at other times they fail. And before your eyes, they change.
When the story is done, you grieve a little because you have to leave your friends. But, in fact, they dance in your head and keep you company whenever you think of the story. Sometimes if you are lucky, they are persistent and keep you up at night wanting to star in another story. When you are a writer, no matter what you write, social isolation is pretty much impossible because you never are alone.
Here’s a Poem on that subject.
Solitude
By Marie Staight
The pandemic swept into our life.
Sneaking, creeping, robbing people of breath.
Disrupting entire cities with so much strive,
Leaving a path of darkness and death.
Wash your hands! Don’t touch your face!
You must be persistent!
So, it doesn’t kill off the Human Race.
Get away! Keep your social distance.
The government tells you to isolate.
Six feet or more between each one.
Wear masks and hibernate.
Watch TV and have no fun.
In my imagination, I play
I fight the beast on typing papers
I beat it till it goes away.
I write of romance and silly capers.
You see I am not in solitude
When my mind can invoke
Characters that collude
To kill the monster with a dagger’s stroke.
There is no social distance,
When, with my characters, I write.
They reside in a timeless existence
Keeping me company through the lonely night.
Comments are welcome.
Chasing The Tale 