American author Maggie Plummer becomes the first person to guest twice on my blog. It’s been more than a year since she first appeared, here ; what a different world we lived in then. Today she’s going to talk about something highly topical so it’s over to Maggie.
Writing Fiction During a Pandemic
When the coronavirus began to hit the United States a few months ago, it just so happened that I was finishing up my latest novel, Webs in the Mist: The Jessie Morgan Series, Book 2. As the television and internet news got more and more alarming, working on the new novel gave me desperately needed, long breaks from real life.
What an advantage, submerging my overactive mind in my 1970s Jessie Morgan fiction world! What a blessing! Each day, when I finished working on the book, I felt refreshed by having thoroughly escaped our new reality. It reminds me of how, during our too-long, too-gray western Montana winters, I sometimes find relief by writing about hot, sunny settings. It’s a mental vacation.
As the coronavirus crisis progressed, I watched friends and family being consumed by the news, obsessed with the pandemic’s frightening impacts on our country. Many of them were and are paralyzed by it.
I’m lucky, because somehow I’m able to keep working on my writing during this crisis. I’m lucky in other ways, too:
- I live alone with my sweet dog and work in my house, so staying home in self-quarantine is not that different from what I normally do;
- I don’t have children at home, taking away from my writing schedule; and
- My new novel is set in the 1970s and offers a cheerful escape for my readers; I’m not adding to their fear with pessimistic, dystopian novels, and that helps me go for it, even now.
One writer friend is journaling about her day-to-day pandemic experience. That can help us work it out in our minds, and keep our spirits up. Keeping a gratitude journal is a great way to stay focused on our many blessings.
COVID-19 is a huge distraction that’s difficult to avoid, with the media in our faces. Our imaginations take off: What a story! How will it end? Compared to what’s actually going on in the world, perhaps our novel’s conflict seems trivial. How do you keep going as a writer?
I think we can give ourselves a break now, whether we’re being productive in our writing or not. As novelists we can bury our heads in the sand and feel good about it. But: If we can’t write during this pandemic, that’s OK too. Life is too short for beating ourselves up.
Here’s the bottom line: Writing fiction is good for our mental health. It’s a great way to channel our creative energy, so that we don’t go haywire and start bouncing off the walls. Writers need to write. That means spending plenty of time in our fiction worlds, even if all we do is play around with character studies or do internet research about our books’ settings. The main thing, I think, is to immerse ourselves in that fictional realm, letting our writer minds take a massive, deep breath of fresh air.
Don’t forget, our writing might just help others take refreshing, deep breaths, too.
Maggie Plummer is a multi-genre author whose latest novel, Webs in the Mist, is Book Two of her semi-autobiographical Jessie Morgan series. Like Jessie, she lived in San Francisco during the freewheeling 1970s, riding the cable cars in raggedy bell-bottom jeans. These days the author works from her Montana home near the shores of Flathead Lake, where she loves camping with her sweet black lab, Peaches. Webs in the Mist is Maggie’s fourth published novel.
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