I’ve always made up stories. As soon as I was old enough, I started writing them down and never stopped. I also never thought of it as something I could quit my day job for, so writing was always a back-burner activity. I wrote in my spare time, sent out queries and waited for rejections, knowing that even if I did get picked up by an agent, it likely wouldn’t mean a full-time career.
Because I didn’t feel writing could be a full-time career for me, I felt guilty for the amount of time I spent on it and other creative pursuits—reading fiction, playing games, or watching movies. I felt pressured to do more “worthwhile” things with my time, and a lot of that pressure came from myself. If someone looked at my life I wanted to be able to point to something other than a stack of unpublished manuscripts and say, “See, look, I accomplished things. I’m worth something.” So I gave the majority of my time to other things – learning skills for my career, trying my hand at various home renovation projects, trying to learn another language, etc. I enjoyed all of those things, and they all had value, but they weren’t where my heart was.
Even after I met my husband, who has had more faith in my writing than I ever did, I still didn’t have that sense of self-worth. I’m the type of person who can manage to feel guilty over someone else’s belief in me, and the more positive he was about what I wrote, the guiltier I felt that I still hadn’t accomplished something with it. Though I knew I would never quit writing, because I simply wasn’t capable of quitting for more than a week or two, I had begun to think it held no intrinsic value. I wasn’t writing the next great American novel. My books weren’t going to solve any of the world’s problems.
So, what does all of this have to do with creative importance? Well, though a pandemic certainly is not the way I would have chosen to recognize the value of creative work, that’s exactly what it made me do. I was waiting on three book releases (Jessie Mihalik’s Chaos Reigning, Skyla Dawn Cameron’s Blood Ties, and Ilona Andrews’ Emerald Blaze), and when each of them came out despite everything going on, it was absolutely amazing because, just for a moment, I could disappear into another world so completely that I could forget the trash fire burning around me. I could find strength in each of the characters and take a little bit of that strength back with me into the real world.
The same thing happened with music and movies. Taylor Swift’s surprise album Folklore had me on a high for two weeks straight. Then The Killers released Imploding the Mirage. The fan remake of The Princess Bride came out, and then Bill and Ted Face the Music released. Each of these things kept me from falling too far down the Pandemic Despair Garbage Chute and reminded me that people are still out there creating things.
I know the same thing has happened for so many people in my life. I’ve lost track of the number of people I know re-watching The Office because it makes them happy in what otherwise seems like a very bleak time. Everyone I know is reading, watching, playing, and listening more than ever before because it lifts them up and makes them feel connected to humanity during a time when it is otherwise difficult to feel connected to anything, and that is the importance of creatives, not just during this pandemic but all the time.
Art, in all of its various incarnations, reaches people in a way few other things can, and realizing this has allowed me to stop feeling guilty for the time I spend on my own craft. Even if I never quit my day job. So if you are a creative, in whatever form that may take, then know that what you do has value. Keep going. Even if you never share it with anyone else, even if it’s just for you, that has its own value.
On a parting note, as Bill and Ted recently reminded me, “Be excellent to each other.”