{"id":10344,"date":"2021-04-11T07:46:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-11T14:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/?p=10344"},"modified":"2021-04-09T20:15:29","modified_gmt":"2021-04-10T03:15:29","slug":"a-type-of-disconnect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/a-type-of-disconnect\/","title":{"rendered":"A Type of Disconnect"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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It\u2019s been a difficult thirteen months during shelter in place. From March 2020 to now (April 2021) many of us have felt a spectrum of emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alison Flood eloquently captures what many of us are experiencing:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a month of lockdown, William Sutcliffe wrote on Twitter: \u201cI have been a professional writer for more than twenty years. I have made my living from the resource of my imagination. Last night I had a dream about unloading the dishwasher.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether it is dealing with home schooling, the same four walls, or anxiety caused by the news, for many authors, the stories just aren\u2019t coming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cStultified is the word,\u201d says Orange prize-winning novelist Linda Grant. \u201cThe problem with writing is it\u2019s just another screen, and that\u2019s all there is \u2026 I can\u2019t connect with my imagination. I can\u2019t connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what\u2019s going on in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grant describes waking up in a fog, and not wanting to do anything but watch rubbish TV. Her mind is not relaxed enough, she says, to connect with her subconscious. \u201cMy subconscious is just basically screaming: \u2018Get us out of this,\u2019\u201d she says, so there\u2019s no space to create fiction. \u201cI don\u2019t have the emotional and intellectual energy to give to these shadowy people to bring them out of the shadows.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

William Sutcliffe . . . has been trying to dream up his next book, and \u201cthat kind of work is really, really incompatible with lockdown and with this stage of pandemic fatigue.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Others, such as writer Gillian McAllister, are most affected by the lack of serendipitous glimpses of other lives. \u201cI think authors take so much inspiration from things like the clothes a stranger is wearing, the smell of their perfume, their body language, seeing a couple interact in a bar,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m having to mine my memories for this stuff, which is less authentic and lacks a kind of specific detail that I like to write about in ordinary times.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Linda Grant has also felt \u201ccompletely cut off from material. I felt I was forced into this interiority, when there was no exterior, no outside to engage with,\u201d she reflects. \u201cYou don\u2019t have those overheard conversations on buses, there\u2019s no stimulus. It\u2019s just a sort of sea of greyness, of timelessness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Grant points out, this is \u201ca once in a blue moon example of every writer being affected by exactly the same situation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So are we likely to be deluged, in a year\u2019s time, with locked-room mysteries, or stream-of-consciousness novels about unloading the dishwasher? \u201cIt\u2019s a massive problem for contemporary novelists, most of whose novels are set in a non-specific version of now,\u201d says Sutcliffe. \u201cYou can write a novel set in 2013, 14, 15, but 2019, 20, 21, these are three completely different worlds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excerpted from \u201cWriter’s blockdown: after a year inside, novelists are struggling to write<\/a>\u201d by Alison Flood, The Guardian, February 19, 2021<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been a difficult thirteen months during shelter in place. From March 2020 to now (April 2021) many of us have felt a spectrum of emotions. Alison Flood eloquently captures what many of us are experiencing: After a month of lockdown, William Sutcliffe wrote on Twitter: \u201cI have been a professional writer for more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[104],"tags":[1190],"class_list":["post-10344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guest-bloggers","tag-writing-freely-just-write-writing-prompts-the-write-spot-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p43Dj8-2GQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10344"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10347,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10344\/revisions\/10347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewritespot.us\/marlenecullenblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}