I've heard people talk about the relationship between art and emotion for as long as I can remember. Artists pour their heartbreak into paintings, musicians write songs about the things they can't quite say, and writers turn their experiences into stories. I've always understood that connection, particularly when it comes to poetry. I don't think I've ever written a poem that wasn't connected, in some way, to something I was feeling or trying to understand.
But fiction? I thought fiction was different.
I thought it was something I did because I loved doing it. I loved creating people who didn't exist, imagining their lives and building an entire fictional universe for them to inhabit. I loved the research, the character development and the peculiar satisfaction of spending hours thinking about people who live exclusively inside my head.
I knew there was emotion in the stories themselves, of course, but I didn't think my own emotional state had much to do with my ability to write them. As far as I was concerned, all I needed was an idea, a computer and a sufficient quantity of coffee.
Apparently, I was wrong.
Since my dad died, I haven't been able to write fiction. Not because I'm struggling with a particular scene or because I've suddenly decided everything I've written is terrible. I simply can't access that part of myself anymore. The characters are still there, the manuscripts are waiting, and I know perfectly well what I want to write next, but I can't seem to make myself interested in any of it.
It's as though someone has closed a door inside my head, and I don't know how to open it.
What makes this particularly strange is that I haven't stopped writing altogether. I've been writing poetry, sometimes quite a lot of it, and I've been sharing those poems here. But poetry has always come from a different place for me. It allows me to begin with whatever I'm feeling, without needing to invent anything or become interested in somebody else's life.
Fiction asks something else of me. It asks me to be curious, excited and willing to imagine possibilities. It asks me to care about what happens to people who aren't real, and to spend hours exploring problems I've invented for them.
Right now, I don't seem to have the emotional energy for that.
I became curious about whether there was any research that might help explain what I'm experiencing, and it turns out that psychologists have been studying the relationship between emotion and creativity for decades.
A 2008 meta-analysis by Baas, De Dreu and Nijstad examined research on mood and creativity and found that the relationship is more complicated than the familiar idea that suffering produces great art. Positive, activating moods often support creativity, while the effects of negative emotions depend partly on the particular emotion and the mental processes it encourages.
I found that fascinating, because I don't feel as though I've lost my imagination. I feel as though I've lost the desire to use it.
Research on grief also suggests that bereavement can affect concentration, motivation and everyday functioning. And although those experiences vary enormously from person to person, they help explain why something that once felt effortless might suddenly require more energy than someone has available.
I think that's what's happening to me.
I've always thought of curiosity and imagination as intellectual things, but I'm beginning to recognize how much emotion is involved in them. The excitement of discovering something new about a character, the anticipation of sitting down to write a scene I've been thinking about all morning, the pleasure of getting completely lost in a fictional world—those are feelings, too.
And at the moment, I'm struggling to feel much of anything beyond grief.
It's a strange contradiction, having so much emotion that there seems to be no room left for the emotions that usually make me want to create.
Perhaps that's why poetry is still possible. It doesn't ask me to find something else to feel. It gives me somewhere to put what I'm already carrying.
I miss writing fiction. I miss my characters, and I miss the version of myself who could spend an entire afternoon happily occupied by a world she'd invented. I even miss the frustration of wrestling with a difficult scene, because at least I cared enough about it to keep trying.
I don't know when that feeling will return, and I'm trying not to make its absence another thing I need to worry about.
For years, I thought poetry was the emotional part of my writing life and fiction was the imaginative part. I hadn't considered how much imagination might depend on my ability to feel curious, enthusiastic and engaged with the world.
It's an interesting thing to discover about yourself.
I just wish I hadn't needed to lose my dad to understand it.
Peace, love, and inspiration,
Britt 💚
