By now, most of us have gone into social-distancing or quarantine mode due to the COVID-19 health crisis. Many creatives have seen the order to stay home as a blessing in disguise. It was seen as a time to take up new hobbies and get to that writing that we never seem to have time for. One of my friends compared it to an unexpected writing sabbatical. On Twitter, I saw a number of people talking about how Shakespeare wrote King Lear during the Plague, and that they had aspirations to do the same. When I was working my last shift before the library closed, a colleague asked me what I was going to do with my time off, and I confidently replied, “Finish my book.”
Continue reading “You Don’t Have to Become Shakespeare in Quarantine”
Ever since I started working in the Local History department at the library, I have had a whole new appreciation for the personal archive. So many things that we have in our collection are things that I would have thrown away or found too mundane to save, if I was living a hundred years ago. All the old receipts, income tax forms, random photos of buildings and other paper paraphernalia tell the story of our city. While processing these things at work, I’ve had a lot of time to think about the stuff that I’m saving and recording in my own life. I’ve been thinking about this for years, but it was brought to mind again this past Christmas when my grandfather gave me something from his personal archive.
It’s been about five months since I committed to writing seriously, so I want to spend a little bit of time reflecting on those five months in this post. In particular, I want to take a look at my ongoing relationship with the concept of productivity and the guilt that goes along with it.
Some of the earliest and most prevailing advice I’ve heard about writing is to do with the importance of reading. Every class, every book, and every writer have had the same advice. It seems to be the one thing that all writers agree on: good writers are good readers. This week the importance of this advice dawned on me.
