Jeff Bollow This worldwide lockdown is an extraordinary moment in time.
The Coronavirus is taking over and ramping up. Everyone is anxious, nervous, sad, and certainly not sure how to channel their energies.
In the midst of this chaos, writing can be an incredibly centering, calming, therapeutic, focusing activity.
In fact, your current ideas and emotions can be turned into written material. These big amorphous fears could become productive solutions. Your imagination will actually help you through this time in lockdown.
Lockdown WRITING Focuses Your Creativity and Your Time
The great irony of this situation is that the best thing you can do for everyone else, for humanity, is to isolate yourself. To stay inside your home.
But there’s a problem: By confining yourself, the only thing you can do is think. Worry. Imagine all the terrible things that could happen. This is not productive, nor is it going to help your situation. It will only increase your stress levels, and ultimately make you more vulnerable to the virus.
Instead, take this time and give it some structure. Make it productive. Find the silver lining. By changing your line of thinking, you will realize that today is not so bad. If you go one day at a time, you will make it through this.
Organize the hours of your day into sections. Allocate one of those sections for writing. Any kind of writing. Make it an hour, or three hours i fyou have time. The point is: writing can give you structure during your day.
When you sit down to write, rather than have all the ideas swirl in your imagination and take you to whatever scary places you can go, you can focus it into a narrative. Focus it into a story. Something positive… productive.
What character or story situation could you come up with? What world or distant universe? Ultimately, what you create at this moment in time will become someone else’s source of strength during their own isolation.
This Moment WILL Pass
This will end, and when it does, business will boom.
If you look at any point throughout history, people have always been able to survive tumolous eras. And when those times pass, life returns to a new normal. And it begins to flourish once again.
My grandmother used to have a saying, which many grandmothers certainly had – this too shall pass. It’s true, and you have to think about the fact that this lockdown will pass.
And here’s the kicker: don’t just take up writing. Take up long form writing. A screenplay. A novel, or a short story collection. Why? Because now that you have the opportunity to come back to it consistently – every day – you’ll be giving your brain a reason to keep going. To keep pushing. To see light at the end of the tunnel.
When you become scared about the world and what’s happening in it, you tend to think in short-term cycles. This is normal. Your brain is trying to help you survive and move on as quickly as possible. But if you can take a moment and grasp the situation as a bigger picture, there are no limits to what you can achieve. No limits to where you could be five years from now.
This way, you will keep your focus on the goal. On the final accomplishment of a larger writing project. Something that you probably could not do efficiently before the lockdown started. By pouring your creative energy into something specific, you will be able to weather the storm more efficiently.
Skill Development TAKES TIME
When it comes to a specific type of writing, like screenwriting, the number of skills that need to be learned may seem daunting. In fact, there are approximately two to three hundred unique skills that need to be mastered before one can become a professional screenwriter. When you only focus on the number of skills, it seems like an impossible challenge. But in fact, you are more than capable of achieving it.
Ironically, right now, you have the time to do this. In particular, to focus on the mental, intellectual, and creative skills that your brain already possesses. Writing is comprised of a uniquely internal set of skills, but they take time to develop. In some cases, years.
But do not let this discourage you. You don’t need to reach the level of mastery to produce creative work that resonates with others. That tugs at their heartstrings and helps them to overcome the current problems that have seized the world. Your goal, right now, is to help others with your creative abilities.
Writing is COMMUNICATION
Ultimately, writing is communication. I did a TEDTalk about five years ago where I talk about how ideas spark ideas. I also wrote in my book about fifteen years ago that ideas spark ideas. It’s one of the things that I discovered through teaching writing.
When an idea pops up in your brain, it also sparks an action for you to take. If it doesn’t, instead of an action, it will spark another idea – in a neverending loop. In fact, this is how the global human brain works as well.
I am a big believer that every single one of us has a unique window on our world. No one else will see the world or this moment in time like you’re witnessing it. You have DNA that is unique. No one else on the planet has the same DNA makeup as you do. No one else walks through life on the same set of space-time coordinates as you do. And all of this has shaped how you see and perceive the world around you.
This gives you imagination that is intrinsically unique to you. Stories that literally only you can tell. So, it’s up to you to tell them. And by telling them you’re putting your ideas out into the world which can spark ideas in other people.
If we imagine the world as a giant brain and every person as a neuron in that brain, what you put out into the world becomes the input for the other person.
Thus, it is essential for each of us to capture what we’re seeing. To capture what we’re imagining – and share it with the world.
Overcome the LOCKDOWN through Writing
So, how do you do that?
The best thing that you can do right now is write. Create stories. Come up with ideas that will ultimately help to heal the world. If you don’t know how to get started, check out “Writing FAST: How to Write Anything with Lightning Speed”.
If you want something to take you day by day through a long-form project, I spent the last ten years building this system called FAST Screenplay. FAST Screenplay gives you a new action step to complete every single day. So, each day you take action, you build on everything you’ve done before and you grow as you move all the way through this process.
Whether you’re interested in screenwriting or not, FAST Screenplay will help anyone through the writing process. You can adapt it entirely to novel writing or to non-fiction writing. Simply change the idea of the producer with the publisher, or the audience.
Here’s the ultimate advice:
Every single day, open a word processing program and start writing what you’re feeling.
Your thoughts. Imagine the future. The past. Other worlds, or time periods. Let your imagination go free – and don’t judge it! Don’t worry about whether what you’re writing is good or bad. Just write.
What characters could you invent? Which situations or scenes can you imagine that people would have to overcome? What genres? Whatever it is that you’re drawn to, start to imagine those ideas in different genres.
Those of you who are on the frontline fighting this virus: We love you. We care and we appreciate what you are doing for the rest of us.
We will make it through this and when we do, we’re going to create something better on the other side.
If you want, you can reach out to me and read a bit more about what I do.
Stay creative. Keep writing.
