Ideas had always come easy to me. So-called ‘blank page’ writer’s block had never been a problem I’d faced. The reason was, in part, because I started writing relatively later in life – in my mid-30s, and had a career and a world of lived experience that provided ample fodder for my stories (I’ve written previously about the benefits – and the downsides – of starting a writing career as an old bastard). Indeed, I began writing while I was living in Ha Noi, and in some ways that was my most fertile period as a writer, even if also my least competent.
Lately I have found it tougher to come up with ideas and quite frankly, when I do, they feel inferior to some of the stories I was trying to write in the past. This is, in part, due to the pandemic. I am in lockdown again, and at the time of writing this article, have been so for two months. Now, the be clear, this article is not about writing during lockdown. It is about how to stay creative, no matter the circumstances.
I will say this: the first time I was locked down, it had the virtue of being new. We (my family) thought carefully about how we could get through it. Timetables split child responsibility between my wife and I, menus were made for the coming week of meals, daily breaks for exercise and outdoors set: everything we could think to be productive and healthy during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
This time around, well, we’re fucking over it. What day is it again? Who’s cooking? How many times did we have take-away this week? Are you boys wearing underpants!?
I stay up way past midnight, sleep in, drink on strange days, and impulse buy books (sounds like heaven, you’re thinking). The bonus with the book buying is random packages turning up on the doorstep that I’d forgotten ordering. Little presents from the book gods, once a week. But books aside, no, this isn’t heaven, as everyone reading this will be aware.
Remember those memes, at the start of 2020, of all the great things the great artists and thinkers of previous eras did while in quarantine? Yeah, well. They didn’t have kids to home-school – the wife or the help did that. They didn’t have the aggressive algorithms of the social media companies hacking their brains and turning them into doom scroll zombies, watching our strange and gradual dystopia unfurl into reality.
Again, we know all of this. The question remains: how do we stay creative? For me, personally: how do I remind myself how to write? I’ve been ground down, I will admit. Turning up at the desk every day – the job of anyone who wants to be a writer – feels harder and harder.
Ian McEwen has spoken about routine being the enemy of creativity – taking journeys, being away from home, breaking habits, helps spur creativity. I’ve often thought this myself, probably because the idea is simple and obvious: if you do the same thing day in and day out, the creative brain doesn’t receive the juice it needs.
It is hard to break routine in a pandemic. In Australia, unlike most of the world, there is the added restriction of domestic travel. States and Territories are shutting their borders all the time, trapping people in and out, and so any kind of internal travel comes with the ever-present risk of being stranded. These days, I can’t even leave my city.
I never forget that it is harder in the developing world, and harder in the poorer regions of Australia. My former career was as an aid worker after all, and so I’m acutely aware that for the most marginalised in the world, Covid is simply another degradation of poverty. We will never know the true number of deaths from the pandemic, because the dead will never be counted in so many countries. In Afghanistan, for example, the disease ripped through the population for the most part unreported. The crematoriums were burning day and night at the start of the plague – as they did later in India and so many other countries.
But we are talking about creativity here, not cosmic injustice, and reminding ourselves how to write remains an ongoing concern for most writers. 
Ian McEwan has also said: “Sometimes I force an idea by writing the opening paragraph of an imaginary novel.” Most of the time this doesn’t go anywhere, he says, although perhaps his best novel, Atonement, started in this way. I don’t quite do this myself. The closest I’ve come to this is in short stories. Sometimes I’ll find a phrase I love, write it down as the title of the story, and then see if a story will come from that.
Ghosts of a Neon God (2016), for example, came from the title of a Taiwanese film that translates to “Rebels of a Neon God.” I didn’t enjoy the movie that much, and it has nothing to do with the story I wrote, but it is, for mine, one of the best movie titles of all time. Another of my stories, Dark on a Darkling Earth (2014), came from a line in a poem by Du Fu (considered one of China’s greatest poets). Again, the story has nothing to do with the poem, but damn I loved that phrase.
Despite knowing all of the above, and despite trying to find ways to trick myself into more productive writing, I was still foundering. Somehow, I’d overlooked the most obvious reason of all: I’d stopped reading. Or, at the least, was reading a hell of a lot less. My reading has suffered because of the distractions of social media, and because of my own laziness. Conventions kept being cancelled, literary festivals as well, and the launch of my collection, now twice-delayed. I was over it, and so allowed the algorithms to wash over me, to push me and to pull me. I was swept along on the current, on YouTube, on Netflix, on Twitter. It’s frighteningly easy, isn’t it? Binge watching crap, falling down angry rabbit holes on social media. Turn around and the whole evening is gone. 
Binge-reading is the first and best form of binge-entertainment. That’s what I’ve rediscovered. I’m enjoying, again, putting in a solid day’s work at the computer, and then retiring to the couch to read an enthralling or entertaining or enlightening book. That’s my job, as a writer, and as jobs go it’s a pretty fucking good one. The pay is terrible, yes, but it abounds with upsides.
I get more ideas the further I move away from my favoured genre of cyberpunk. I tend to read crime and literary novels rather than science fiction (and I try not to read cyberpunk at all*). I measure the ideas I get from a book from the number of times I have scrawled something its margins (yes, I am a habitual book defacer, and no, this is not a bad thing. Books with notes in the margins, with underlines, with arguments against what is being written – these are books that have been loved). Going by this metric, non-fiction seems to hold the most ideas for me. Non-fiction from weird places, especially. One example: back when I was going my PhD, one of my advisors suggested a post-modern academic text about the philosophy of architecture and cities. It was as dreadful as it sounds, but by god it gave me some good ideas, that I then used in a short story.
History books, science books, biographies: there is some great raw materials in these things. Books with a scientific viewpoint – artificial intelligence, the science of memory, the impact of psychological trauma on the brain – have provided rich veins of inspiration, for me.
The corollary of this is also kinda obvious. If very hard to do: turning off the internet. My most productive days are when I toughen the fuck up and turn the damn thing off.
None of these ideas are new or particularly mind-blowing, but they are surprisingly easy to forget. I did. Sitting here at my desk, finding each sentence absolute drudgery, wondering what the fuck was going on with me. Some things I can’t change. Being locked down, for example. But many others are within my control, and the control of every writer.
* I am a cyberpunk writer who rarely reads cyberpunk, because, well, I’m not completely sure. I think it is partly because I don’t want my ideas to be ‘polluted’. I’ve read and watched copious amounts of cyberpunk in the past. But while I am writing in the subgenre, I find I can’t stand consuming it from other sources.