Write Like No One Is Watching

I’m trying my hand at erotica for the first time in my life. 

I’m working on something that opens with a murder. But it’s also kind of funny.

I’m finally getting this book of my heart out.

I’m writing short stories with my boyfriend that are just for us. 

This is a sampling of the discussions my published writer friends and I have been having lately in answer to the perennial question: how’s the writing going? 

Of course, that’s not really the question being asked between the lines. Or answered.

What we all want to ask out loud is: what if the readership, the audiences, the CAREERS we’ve built …don’t survive this?

It’s been nearly a year now since the world upended itself in the form of a global pandemic. I don’t pretend to speak to the resulting and on-going grief and fear and sickness and death here. I’m just talking about the writing. So forgive me in advance for what might seem simplistic and irrelevant observations at first glance, but we writers are desperate to make sense of the world we live in through our writing. So that’s what I’m trying to do. Daily. 

Dear Readers: Our “process” – the one you ask us about at bookstore events and book club appearances – is largely to tame the wild and big questions that keep us up at night by making our characters fall in love, or kill each other, or both. The goal is that you will read our words, and give us your interpretation (which incidentally is something we will wish we had thought of, but won’t actually be anything we were smart enough to think of) and then talk to us about what the story meant to you (which will move us to tears on the inside as we try to be cool and eloquent on the outside, because we desperately want you to invite us back to your events again in the future). 

And so. Now that we can’t talk and connect with each other at writing conferences or retreats or book expos or libraries, we writers are floundering a bit. Sure we have social media and online spaces, but those spaces are NOISY. With everyone clamoring for the same microphone, we’re not sure at all who’s listening anymore or when we’ll get our next turn to talk. And now that Zoom has become a functional, but still somewhat unsatisfying, option (kind of like a folded-down-page-for-a-bookmark-kind-of-alternative), we writers are kind of missing the way it used to be.

Of course, “used to be” is relative, right? We all mostly started in this business at that pristine well of inspiration as idealistic debut writers in love with words and story, carefully considering arc and stakes and point of view, regardless of whether we had an audience, or a single reader, but hoping someday we’d have a few.

The pristine well grew a little contaminated as the years went by, and we put our art out in the world. We learned how to find our lane, stay on brand, and to care what the critics thought and wrote. Sure, this evolution from debut author made our craft better (hopefully!), but it also made us more self-conscious and we became limited in ways we might not have even realized until now.   

And while I can’t speak for any other industry, I can say that what felt like a few postponed book tours and a temporary redirect in the publishing industry has now transformed into what is clearly a new route altogether.  Which means, we writers are looking at the way we write – the way we used to write – in a brand new way.

At first, the questions among ourselves started simply. Obviously. 

How do we set a book in contemporary times without putting masks on everyone? 

Do we back up the timeline of every book that comes out in the next few years to 2019 just to make things easier? 

How far in the future can we stop talking about social distancing and vaccine research without sounding dated or irrelevant or obsolete?

But as the year has gone on, and conferences and book events have been canceled well into the foreseeable future, the questions have become much different. When will we ever be able to sit in a room together – writers and readers – and feed off each other’s creative energy the way we all crave so much? And how do we sustain our creativity and our “process” in the meantime, when the only energy in the room is ours alone?

It’s this simple realization – the energy in the room is ours alone – that is both terrifying and liberating. Because this means we can write the way we did when we were not yet published. We can write like no one is watching and in doing so, unlearn those bad habits of self-consciousness and limitation. We can stretch beyond the genres we’ve sold in. We can explore characters we haven’t yet met but desperately want to. We can write things that are not for publication or the masses at all – but are hearty food for our souls.

So that’s what we writers have been talking around and through and hardly ever about. Will this time alone have been time wasted or time well spent for the next chapter of our careers? 

Personally, I suspect that maybe, just maybe, in that liberating space of erotica and funny murderers and short fiction written only for and with our boyfriends, we’ll find something special. 

Keep writing, my brave and fierce writer friends. Like no one else in the world is watching.

Because eventually they will be. 

And what a party we will throw then, right?

Xo

Amy

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: How To and Tips