Writing through the fog

 The last two years have been a cheerless time, and many creatives have found it hard to produce new content in that time.  I've kept going mainly because I've been re-writing existing work.  

The hard bit for me on a new novel is the detailed chapter planing I do before I start to write the story.  That's where the characters are created, and the plot discovered.  Having decided to re-write these two old novels, most of the hard work was already done.  I was keeping the storyline, with the same plot points, so the rewrite was about adding new characters into an existing narrative.

On both old novels I'd pulled my punches when it came to advocating for the novel's theme.  This time round I made it, and the arguments I wanted to put forward, much more explicit.  That was partly because I wanted to, but partly also because I'm aware that fiction - at least science fiction and fantasy - have become very politicised in the last decade.

So, as I write what is called 'soft' science fiction, stories about people and cultures and how they interact, I  felt I needed to get more political in my work too.  And diversity is a big buzzword in publishing right now.  In the last couple of years there have been diversity initiatives to open up more publishing access to people of colour and of diverse sexualities.  A lot of authors now market their books on Twitter by saying they contain gay relationships, protagonists of colour, neurodiverse characters. etc.  

I have reservations about this becoming a selling point for books, but it's something I can't ignore.  And when I looked at the two books I was rewriting, both of them were far too white.  They did have aromantic and gay characters, and some representation of people with disabilities, but part of my rewrite was about broadening that representation.

That kind of new creation I could manage fairly easily.  What I struggled with at times was creating completely new short stories.  I do regular spoken word with T'Articulation, and part of the joy of that has always been in rising to the challenge of writing something new to fit the theme set for the meeting.  But there have been a couple of times recently where I've really struggled to come up with a story in time.  I haven't had that problem before.

Julia Cameron talks about us 'filling the well', having experiences and encountering images which feed our creative machine.  Many of the sources of those ideas have been shut down by covid for the best part of two years, and my well has been in danger of running dry.  Even the most creative of novelists have struggled to turn work in on time, and many have had to ask for deadline extensions.

So I'm not alone in my brain fog, and at least I'm not under a deadline I can't meet.  But I'm hoping that things get better in the coming year and that the fog lifts.