The 2020 Pandemic Made Me a Better Writer

On the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, I choose to appreciate the gifts given in the craziest year of my life

In all transparency, I spiraled at the onset of the 2020 pandemic. To be obsessed with clarity and void of valid answers is to be crazed. At the time, the words of the country’s president and medical experts were incongruent. Nurses and doctors who I called friends were also clueless, and more tired. By the second week of March, I had taught my first writing course for less than two weeks before COVID-19 shut down all NYC schools. The film I co-wrote for two Sundance Screenwriters Labs was scheduled to begin production in April. COVID killed that, too. We were less than two weeks away from the start of spring and my world was cold and crumbling. At least it felt so.

Then a casual phone conversation with my literary agent gifted me the lightbulb of the year. A simple assessment — “well, you now have the space you wanted” — changed my perspective, my 2020 and quite possibly the rest of my life.

In early 2019, I shared with my agent a desire for time to breathe and read then hear myself and write. It had been eight years since I decided being an independent contractor was best for me professionally (and mentally). But such sovereignty begets exhaustive demands. You must hunt, kill, cure and cook damn near every…