How Can I Create While the World's Burning?

I’ve been quiet on Substack for the last month. With the holidays, travel, working on my novel, and that state of the world, it’s been a lot. It’s still a lot, but I wanted to check in.

How are you?

If you’re like me, you’re struggling. Every day, there’s some fresh news that feels incomprehensible. We’re bombarded with images that horrify and scar our tender hearts.

Photo by Shannon Kunkle on Unsplash

When I’m not doom scrolling, I find myself staring at walls for long stretches of time. I’m zoned out, unfocused, forgetful. I start crying randomly. I’m not sleeping well.

But I have this book that needs revising. It feels insignificant and futile to write about magic when the mundane is so horrifying.

So how do we, as creative people, move forward with our work right now? We remember some fundamental truths of the creative life.

1. Art does not obey.

The people who are committing these horrors want nothing more than for intelligent, creative people to shut up. Our work embraces truth, joy, imagination, hope. It stands in opposition to their need for the populace to remain stupid, afraid, and obedient.

2. Art is how we survive.

As Stephen King said, “Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” By this he means that, for people like us, art is simply how we survive. It helps us makes sense of the incomprehensible. It helps us remain present and grounded. It’s a release valve on the pressure cooker of our minds.

3. Art is an act of hope.

Making art is a much better use of your time than marinating in doom. Let’s be clear, I’m not saying we should not stay informed. We absolutely should. However, we must be careful to curate our input. Social media is an attention economy, and they profit off of your horror, your outrage, your hopelessness. Sip from the news, but gulp from the creative well. It’s the only way to protect your hope. And we need to hope that things can get better to survive this.

The first rule from Timothy Synder’s On Tyranny of “Do not obey in advance” is being thrown around a lot lately. It applies here because they want us to feel scared to use our voices. They want us to feel like our voice won’t matter. Because once we’ve lost that belief, half of their work is done for them.

Fascists are lazy. They use intimidation because they don’t have principles or morals to support their dark vision. They redefine words because they don’t have the truth to support their arguments.

We can’t abdicate language and image to them. We will not.

Also, in my 20 years as a published author, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that when things are shit, people turn to fiction for hope.

Several years ago, a reader came up to me at a book signing. She was there with her husband and tiny toddler girl. She had a scarf on her head because she was going through chemo for a brain tumor. She’s lost the ability to read printed matter, so she listened to audio books. This woman—this warrior—told me that she listened to my books during chemo and had to thank me for helping her in her darkest hours.

When she died, her family invited me to her funeral. I attended, of course, and felt so lucky to be invited into the lives of this grieving family. I kept in touch with her husband for years after that.

This is the power of our work. To bring comfort to people in pain. To connect us to fellow humans by offering an enjoyable escape or the chance to see themselves in a story or to think differently about something or to imagine a future different than the one they’d been handed.

Your work matters.

Your work is powerful.

Your work is revolutionary.

Your work is how you survive this.

You owe it to yourself to protect your ability to keep creating it.

So give yourself fifteen minutes a day to peek at the horror and mourn. Cry, shake the rafters, scream into a pillow. Then make yourself a cup of tea, put your ass in the chair, and get to work.

So, back to the original question: How can I create while the world’s burning?

You do it like your life depends on it. Because it does, my love. It does.