How COVID-19 Can Help You Crank Out Top-Notch Articles
By: Jay Krasnow
Tags: Creativity, Relationships, Covid 19, Ideas, Writing

How COVID-19 Can Help You Crank Out Top-Notch Articles

(The pandemic helped me refocus — and you can do it too.)

Photo: Engin Akyurt / Unsplash / Irrevocable, nonexclusive copyright to use & distribute for free

I’ve always created — at least as far back as I can remember. I made doodles and drawings for my parents as a child. I can’t say that any of them were really good, and I never was serious enough about that type of creativity to go to art school.

It wasn’t like that at all for me.

My creative path has been more of a zig-zag than a straight arc. In junior high school I dreamed of applying my creativity as a talk show host, but did little more.

My creativity takes a cinematic turn

Then, in high school, I found a love for film and photography, and became a de facto visual media major. I didn’t do much serious writing in high school, though. But the films I made as a high school senior were good enough that my teacher submitted several of them to a state-wide film competition.

I didn’t win any of the film competitions. Ironically, New York University offered me admission to its Tisch School of the Arts. I can’t really give you a good reason for turning down the Tisch’s invitation that I come to their center to study film, but I did. I never regretted it.

I become an accidental journalist

Instead, I went to American University in the District of Columbia, where I learned a smorgasbord of communications skills. I took classes in drafting press releases and in writing journalistic stories for print and broadcast journalism. I also continued my film and photography studies.

While a pair of articles I had written were printed in The Eagle, American University’s student newspaper, I rarely wrote on my own time. After four years of college, and two more years in graduate school, I was offered a job as a rookie reporter for a trade publication. I almost turned the news organization down, but at my parents’ urging, I gave it a try. I quickly found that I loved covering Capitol Hill and policy — but the pay wasn’t very good.

I go from spy satellite analysis to poetry

After a few more zig-zags in my life, I found myself analyzing spy satellite imagery — and hating it. It made my head spin. I wanted to go back to journalism, but several recessions after I had taken a job with the government, many of the nation’s top publications were failing, getting bought or competing with ‘journalism by Twitter.’ To be sure, the two news organizations I had worked for were bought by other companies, basically for scrap.

Somewhere around that time I started writing poetry, including more than 1,000 haikus. I didn’t do much with them, and I only showed them to several family members and close friends.

I make a transition to public affairs

Meanwhile, I began a slow transition to the field of public affairs that would culminate with me returning to school to get a master’s degree in public relations from Georgetown University. Two semesters before I graduated from Georgetown University, one of my instructors told me about Medium. I created an account, and posted my class project about creative scientists who bring their artistic talents to their STEM jobs in the U.S. government on the platform. I continued to write sporadically — but I also went months without posting anything on Medium.

Sometimes I felt guilty about not writing — so I filled the gap with posting some of the poems I had written a decade ago that were just sitting on my computer.

Yet, I struggled to find the spark to write meaningful articles that I wanted to post to Medium.

A new love sets me on a different course

Then in September 2019, I started dating a woman I met in synagogue during Rosh Hashanah. She was Black — and I am white — and that would matter to me as a writer, as you will see shortly.

Then the pandemic came, and I wrote a piece about how I was more afraid of getting robbed for a can of beans, than getting COVID-19.

As I looked for topics to write about, it only seemed natural to write about some of the things I had learned by dating a Black women, so I wrote a piece on what you should never do to a Black person.

By then, my girlfriend and I were living together to weather the pandemic, and I wrote about how the pandemic forced me to abandon my home. As I wrote about the pandemic — and my relationship with my girlfriend — my relationship with my girlfriend ran into major headwinds.

It wasn’t obvious at first, but our relationship — which previous to the pandemic seemed like a slam dunk — was beginning to unravel. We would last until sometime in September.

I didn’t imagine in April that we would part ways in the fall, but even in the early days of the pandemic, I found that the stress of my relationship with my girlfriend was hindering my abilities as a writer.

Once again, I leaned on my old material. I posted one piece that told readers everything they needed to know about ever president of the United States in the form of haiku, with one haiku dedicated to each administration. I then posted another set of poems about each American state, also in the form of haiku.

My relationship shatters and my writing blossoms

By the time I started posting my legacy poems, it was obvious that my relationship with my girlfriend wasn’t going to work. After writing a few poems about it, I set out to write a piece about what I learned about racing by dating a Black woman.

It was then I realized that because of my experiences during past year — the pandemic, my relationship with my ex-girlfriend — I wasn’t the same person that I had been a year earlier.

That meant I had material for writing essays, poems and other materials for Medium. In tandem with that realization, I began churning out more material, some of which I posted on Medium. I also submitted my writings to literary magazines, which rejected them all.

Yet, I knew that even the most famous authors knew rejection before they became household names.

For my part, I continue to crank out articles — and some poetry. Some of them will go on Medium, like this article, but others may find their way into literary magazines. You never can tell.

What you should do if you have writer’s block

If you’re wondering what you should write next, then you haven’t experienced life enough. It was only through my unique experiences during the pandemic — and with my now ex-girlfriend — that I became supercharged, such that I could turn to writing and write in warp speed.

I could write an article about all the things I learned during the year I dated my ex-girlfriend. Some of them have to do with race, and others don’t. But one thing is for sure, by experiencing life through the eyes of a minority, I now see things that were invisible to me — a white male — before I dated her.

When that voice inside your head tells you that you have writer’s block, that might not be correct. You may fear what your audience will think about your writings. But it’s more likely that you’re stuck in a prison of your own making, and you need to experience life more. And by doing that, you boost your ability to churn out articles that you will want to write, and people will want to read.

And frankly, given all the ways that COVID-19 has changed our lives taking stock of how COVID-19 has affected you is your first step to becoming inspired to write something meaningful.