Dispatches from the Pandemic: i tried to quit writing. it didn’t work.

A few years ago, I quit.

Not took a break. Not stepped away. Quit.

Since I was eight years old, I wanted to make movies. That was the first version of the dream: a kid staring at a screen and realizing, somehow, that movies were not just things that happened to him. They were things people made. Which meant, theoretically, I could make them too.

I took a few detours along the way. Music teacher. Lawyer. Air Force officer. Serious jobs. Practical jobs. Jobs that came with dental insurance and small talk and the opportunity to tell people at parties that I had a plan.

But all of those detours came from the same place: fear.

Fear that I wasn’t good enough. Fear that wanting to make art was childish. Fear that if I tried and failed, I would have to live with the knowledge that the thing I wanted most was not actually available to me.

For a long time, I let that fear dress itself up as responsibility.

I went to school to study film. My friends from high school made films. My friends from college made films. People around me kept finding ways to make work, even if it was small, even if it was messy, even if nobody was paying attention yet.

I moved to Texas and found myself in a different life. My wife was in graduate school. Her friends became my friends. Psychology students. Marketers. Salespeople. Bankers. Smart people. Good people. Some of them loved movies. None of them were trying to make them.

I was trying to keep us afloat.

I took job after job because rent had to be paid. Health insurance had to be kept. Food had to go on the table. The dream became something I talked about in the abstract, the way people talk about running a marathon someday or learning Italian or restoring an old car. A nice idea. A version of myself I could visit now and then, but not become.

At the same time, I was trying to write the story I thought I had to write before I could write anything else.

It was about losing my brother in Iraq.

For years, I could not separate the story from the life. Any criticism of the script felt like criticism of me. If someone said the main character was passive, I heard, “You did nothing with your life.” If someone said the character was unlikeable, I heard, “You are unlikeable.” If someone said the story was not working, I heard, “Your grief is not working.”

That is a very dangerous way to write.

There is a moment in Inception where Cobb tells Ariadne not to recreate entire places from memory, because it confuses the line between dreams and reality. That is also a pretty good writing lesson. You can steal details from life. You can steal textures. You can steal the ache. But if you drag the whole thing in exactly as it happened, the story stops being a story. It becomes a courtroom. And you are both the witness and the defendant.

Eventually, I hit the wall.

My wife was doing homework on the couch. I sat down across from her and waited for her to notice that something was wrong. She did. I was on the verge of tears.

I told her I was done. Done with that script. Done with grad school. Done with being a filmmaker. Done with the whole embarrassing enterprise of wanting something that clearly did not want me back.

I dropped out of the program.

Then I did something worse.

I deleted everything.

Scripts. Short films. Old projects. Vimeo. YouTube. Accounts. Files. Footage. Drafts. Breadcrumbs.

Gone.

I told myself I was going to become a serious person. Mr. Corporate. A man with a LinkedIn profile and a five-year plan and no idiotic need to express himself. I would make bags of money. I would stop putting my hand on the stove and acting surprised when it burned.

I call that period The Dark Ages.

I did not write. I tried not to think about writing. I tried to kill the part of me that wanted to make things.

It did not die.

It got meaner.

My wife finished school, and we moved to North Carolina for her pre-doctoral internship. Once again, I was in a place where my friends were mostly her friends. So I started looking for people who liked movies. Not even filmmakers necessarily. Just people who cared about the same weird, glowing thing I cared about.

I found a few groups. I got a new job. It was not film-adjacent, but it also did not drain every ounce of life from me by 5:00 p.m. For the first time in a while, I came home with some energy left. People at work loved movies. We showed each other favorites. We talked about scenes and endings and performances. The old electricity started coming back.

Then came the thought that always gets you in trouble:

Maybe one more shot.

I started outlining again.

A short time later, my wife got a job in Colorado, and we prepared to move again. I searched for film groups, production companies, festivals, anyone who might want help. I emailed probably a hundred people. Most did not respond. A few said to reach out when I arrived.

One person asked if I was working on anything.

I told them about the story of my brother.

Before long, I was sending outlines, character ideas, drafts. The story I had sworn off was back. Not because I had conquered it, but because it had not finished with me.

In Colorado, I found a filmmakers’ group. I went to meetings. I saw what other people were making. I volunteered at screenings and festivals. I was an extra in a couple of films. I met people who were open to new collaborators and new friends.

I was alive again.

Then COVID hit.

Meetings stopped. Screenings disappeared. Festivals were cancelled or postponed. The world shrank to the size of a room, and I had a lot of time to sit with myself.

Here is what I learned:

Not creating is poison to me.

Not writing. Not being around creative people. Not having some half-mad project in motion somewhere in the back of my head. It curdles me. It makes me worse. More anxious. More resentful. More convinced that life is happening elsewhere, to better people, while I check email and behave.

The people I thought were against me were not always against me. Some were just saying things that sounded too much like my own fears. The real enemy was usually inside the house. It was the voice that told me to quit before anyone else could reject me. The voice that told me deletion was discipline. The voice that told me wanting more was evidence of immaturity.

That voice is full of it.

If you are a creative person, I want you to understand something very clearly: even if you stop believing in yourself, that does not mean the work is dead. It may only mean you are tired. It may mean you need rest. It may mean you need new friends, better feedback, a less haunted relationship with the thing you are trying to make.

Take the break if you need it.

Take a walk. Get a job. Pay the bills. Go quiet for a while.

But do not confuse silence with surrender.

And never delete your work.

I mean that. Never.

Put it on a hard drive. Email it to yourself. Give it to a friend. Throw it in a folder called “Do Not Open Until I Am Less Dramatic.” But do not burn the evidence that you were here, that you tried, that some earlier version of you cared enough to make something.

Finding your way back home is hard enough without erasing the road.

I am still writing. Still trying. Still making my way back through the dark with my hands out in front of me.

The work survived me.

That feels like a good place to begin.