Stranger Days #30: The Coronavirus Creativity Surge

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Welcome to stranger days--my blog series exploring daily life, challenges in times of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just sharing insights or thoughts about how to make it through these days.  

For those of us lucky enough to be homebound during this month, I've seen such a surge of creativity from friends, colleagues, and strangers on the internet. I generally think of my friends as creative and interesting but it's great to see the projects they are working on from knitting to art to poetry to video and audio projects and so much more.   I am grateful that folks are both finding ways to cope as well as opportunities and bandwidth to embrace their creativity.  It's so great to see and enjoy during these times.  

I, too, have also experienced this creativity flowing in terms of my writing.  Beyond now writing some 30 days of posts (a feat not usually performed on this blog unless I am doing a 365 project), I'm finding that my ability to write other things and the rate at which I rate has increased.  

Questions:  In the first week, I did a post about asking friends questions each day to keep engaging and connecting with them and I followed it up with a post of some of the original questions I had also come up with.  Well, this tradition has continued and I've been largely coming up with some interesting questions/challenges for my friends each day. This is both creative and reflective as I have to think about a substantive and engaging question.  

Fiction:  Based on a mere title that my friend mentioned of a new flash fiction tale that he wrote, I, too, created a super-short short story.  Since then, I've had at least one other story come to mind that I'm working on.  

Nonfiction:  From that questions practice, I also ended up writing and getting published an article for The Good Men Project on how using the questions was a means of staying connected.  I will also be getting a second article published in the next week or so on the site based upon another prompt that they put out.  Similar to the first one, it was a pretty easy article to write in that it flowed right out of me.  I'm also mostly through an article on audiobook terminology (a humorous take) that also just erupted out of me like it had been waiting to come forth.  

Academic:  I found that there are no less than three academic articles ruminating in me right now.  Now, they don't flow as easy as the fiction or the nonfiction, but I am slowly putting the structure on them and find that I do in fact have something significant and unique to say, which I'm excited about (and a bit surprised--mostly because I feel like I have something to meaningful contribute to several different discussions right now and I'm not sure I've had the confidence or comfort of the fields to speak before).  

Maybe it's because of some freed up time from commuting, the brain working overtime to keep distracted from all that the pandemic and economic fallout imposes, or maybe these ideas would flow regardless.  Still, it's worth noting for me just how much creativity is abundant right now for many folks.

What about you? Have you been struck with inspiration and creativity?  Are you working on new projects?  

Take care. Be careful. Be care-filled.  Welcome to stranger days.

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