Welcome to Start with this, a podcast featuring Night Vale creators Jeffrey Cranor and me, Joseph Fink.
This is the show where we get you making stuff one simple assignment at a time.
Start with this.
To write in a plague, art is hard.
Starting is hard.
If you want to start somewhere, you can start with this.
You can start with this.
There was a tweet by the musician Roseanne Cash that went viral in the early days of this crisis, claiming that while under quarantine due to the bubonic plague, Shakespeare wrote King Lear.
The implication was that we all had an opportunity, maybe even an obligation, to use this time trapped inside productively to go to work on our own masterpieces.
Now, historians don't know if King Lear was actually written under Cor, although I did learn that for about 60% of Shakespeare's life, his theater, the Globe Theater, was closed due to plague, which is a rather astounding thought that the majority of his life, he did not have access to that theater.
But I can tell you this.
It's likely that even if he did write King Lear during that time, he also spent a lot of that time worried and crying and not sleeping well.
We are artists, sure, but we are human above all.
Most of us have found it a struggle to create art in these times.
We are all feeling some combination of fear and grief, and those are not feelings conducive to the focused contemplation that work demands.
And that's okay.
Productivity is a modern idea designed to keep the numbers on the stock ticker going up and up, no matter the human cost.
We do not have to live by those measures, but we do want to live, and we do want to create.
So let's talk, you and I, on writing in a plague.
I'm Joseph Fink.