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Writing under enforced confinement: Finding creativity during circumstances of quarantine and isolation

Published onOct 28, 2024
Writing under enforced confinement: Finding creativity during circumstances of quarantine and isolation

Mandatory quarantine periods, prolonged social isolation and restrictions on social liberties altered the approach of many life writing genres throughout the pandemic of 2020-2023. This paper will observe the effects of government-enforced periods of isolation on the writing process. Furthermore, through a creative-critical approach it will contrast the writer’s experience with narratives produced during other enforced confinements.

Key words: pandemic, isolation, memoir, travel writing, confinement

In March 2020, when the rapid spread of the pandemic resulted in the implementation of government restrictions to mobility worldwide, I was in Scotland to write a travel book. When the pandemic quickly spread across the globe, I had no choice but to return to Australia on one of the final flights to enter Adelaide before border closures. As one of the first to undergo the quarantine process, I was subject to the new compulsory 14-day isolation period to be undertaken in a hotel.

The following days in that tiny hotel room were rife with daily battles to maintain productivity and a positive state of mind. Sporadic phone calls and quarantine checks from law enforcement and health officials remained the only regular contact I received. This unique scenario had interrupted my writing journey, as the newfound lack of freedom and space stifled the creative inspiration I was accustomed to. As I sat at a makeshift desk in the cramped, dimly lit budget hotel room, suffering from the physical effects of COVID-19 that I caught on the flight home, I felt a compulsion to write about my quarantine experience, a task which required a re-evaluation of approach, style and inspiration.

The short period I spent abroad prior to the confinement was brimming with movement, observation and social interaction. The goal then was to produce a thorough piece of travel writing with creative freedom about my family lineage.

Utterly cut off from those previous liberties, I began to rethink how my new setting could be incorporated into a detailed work of narrative non- fiction. The stark contrast between the two periods raises the question, how do non-fiction writers, accustomed to freedom and mobility, find literary inspiration during a time of enforced restrictions and protocols?

Adapting writing approaches

Being an early case of COVID-19, there was a sense of opportunity here to capture as much of my unprecedented adversity in written form as possible, not knowing at the time that the effects would become more widespread. The restrictions, coupled with the desire to document the COVID-19 story effectively, generated a unique writing scenario. As a result, I set out to determine the ideal processes for generating a quarantine narrative by changing my normal writing focus and approach to something more tailored to the isolated setting.

During the resulting period spent in the hotel room (after continued extensions to the initial two-week quarantine), I initially focused on the genre of writing I had been experimenting with prior to the pandemic – travel writing. However, without the mobility required for the genre, the narrative would include more of the internal journey present in all travel writing. Travel writing scholars Carl Thompson (2011: 97) and Tim Youngs (2013: 102) note in chapters ’Revealing the self’ and ’Inner journeys’, respectively, that travel writers look ‘inwards as well as outwards’ (Thompson 2011: 11) concurrently whilst undertaking any journey of mobility. As one interacts with place, the writer undertakes an ‘inner journey’ that involves introspection and vulnerability. Thompson notes the variety in approaches to this intertwined personal narrative style of writing: ‘This new concern with travelling the self could be pursued in several ways’ (ibid: 111). In circumstances of quarantine, it can be argued that the balance between the physical journey and the ‘inner journey’ shifts. With limitations imposed on mobility and social interaction, the personal journey of self in the narrative becomes more prominent than the actual travel.

Having just returned from a writing experience where a more traditional form of travel writing was approached, if I were to continue to embrace the observational details and inner journey present in travel writing whilst isolated, a style closer to ‘vertical travel’ could be used as a method for harnessing creativity (Forsdick et al. 2021). Compared to travel writing’s historical uses, vertical travel is a form that focuses ‘on limited distances and on spatial restriction’ (105) and has experienced renewed prevalence, with severe social and geographical restrictions becoming common practice during the pandemic. The pandemic has been ‘seen as the most recent iteration’ (104) in vertical travel’s long history. Identified as an approach used in a multitude of settings where isolation and confinement play a central role, the primary purpose of vertical travel is for writers to observe their immediate environment in closer detail and to focus on ‘a fairly restricted area, subjecting it to various practices of microspection’ (ibid). Despite the limited physical space in the hotel room, the strange and evolving traits of the pandemic presented adequate layers of observation that could be peeled back with the ‘vertical travel’ approach.

Experimenting with style

During the initial days of the quarantine period, I wrote about the prior events that led to the isolation and noted the ongoing parameters of how the confinement was to be monitored. Once context was established, I realised that a new style might be required to explore space. Initially, I started by detailing the room, examining the layout and describing everything from the initial arrangement of hotel furniture, to views from the window (with consequential narration of hotel staff and other guests). This observation of place was consistent with the travel writing focus I had begun to practise in the weeks leading to this isolation. However, as time progressed and the isolation period increased, the narrative shifted to the more intricate details of the room, such as amenities, textures and smells, an approach explored by Stubbs (2022) in the work Creative and non-fiction writing during isolation and confinement produced during the pandemic. Simple and somewhat mundane activities such as storing and organising food deliveries also began to feature as a part of the narrative. For example:

The green canvas shopping bags are dripping wet from the slight thawing of frozen microwave meals, and I feel them tear slightly as I strain to carry them to the back of the room where the bar fridge sits. The inside smells of slightly off milk, and I cram in the battered and dented array of unnourishing snacks. I organise the food by preference, then rearrange for day-to-day selections, and finally, decide on a system that is the most economical by space. It feels like this has taken hours, but it hasn’t.

Looking inward

Ultimately, after two weeks of isolation/quarantine, the entire experience became more emotionally trying and a noticeable shift in the content of the writing occurred, wherein the narrative turned inwards to a more personal journey of adversity and reflection:

Despite my usual inclination to spend time alone, the company of other people is all I can think about. There is a strangeness creeping into my psyche. It is the worst at night, and the thoughts of where else I could be, what else I could be doing, and whom I could be with are all-encompassing. The room is illuminated only by the small TV’s flickers of light as the heavy weight of my lungs draws me to the rock-hard single bed. Wrapping myself in a paper-thin hotel blanket, I start the dreaded daily battle for sleep, where I am caught in a feverish sea of thoughts on all things health, friendship and fear.

The themes of reflection and helplessness started to be the prominent focuses of the narrative. The inner journey was my commentary of emotions, as well as a broader discussion about my individual place as an early victim of the virus and subsequent government restrictions. The most minor interactions with the world outside the room presented ample writing stimulus, and slight and somewhat insignificant events were used to analyse the state of the ‘outside’ world:

Tonight, I watch the food delivery man, perhaps himself still coming to terms with the particulars of the pandemic, wandering lost, with his mask slipping off his face. Frantically, he looks from his phone to his surroundings and back to his phone. I press up against the glass, like a zoo animal vying for attention, hoping he will catch a glimpse of me, but he drops my food outside the unoccupied hotel reception. It feels like miles away as I look down past the empty car park to see the brown, grease-soaked paper bag against the window. Knowing I can’t go and get it, gradually, I become irrational and wild at the notion.

There was a natural inclination to begin to write in detail about the unusual circumstances of the virus, how the symptoms developed, and how one dealt with the somewhat bizarre effects of COVID-19. Additionally, any creative work that details illness (in this case, COVID- 19’s unfamiliar symptoms) to some degree will significantly depict the intricacies of said illness, as well as possible treatment, recovery or worsening symptoms. An example of this would be The sound of a wild snail eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey (2010), whose stylistic approach to studying the movements of a nearby snail helped the author process her illness. The text also features elements of the already established vertical travel, as the restrictive nature of being bedridden limits opportunities for physical exploration. Similar to how Bailey used the snail to anchor the narrative, I continued to write about the infrequent interactions with the outside world, such as phone calls with health officials and the aforementioned descriptions of delivery experiences.

This method of turning to reflective writing and microscopic, detailed descriptions of the immediate environment and living conditions circumvented a lack of traditional prompts and inspiration, and it proved to be much more writing inspiration than I initially predicted. Throughout my experience, this transition began to happen naturally the longer I was isolated, before turning inward to a narrative that did not just explore space but the self.

Producing the confinement memoir

While producing a personal narrative in quarantine may incorporate elements of writing vertically, perhaps a more common occurrence is the creation of highly personal and introspective writing, resulting in a narrative that is more memoir than travel writing. Navigating the somewhat broad definitions of memoir, in Memoir: An introduction, Couser (2012) notes: ‘It will be, or resemble, a reminiscence, consisting of personal recollections’ (2012: 19). The memoir, considered by many a sub-category of autobiography, has been historically difficult to define, as noted by Couser. Despite this, the form is highly prolific, mainly after the memoir boom in the 1980s. My interpretation of the defining characteristics of a memoir is a work of autobiographical life writing that represents a segment of life rather than life in its entirety. The boundaries of the pandemic present a finite period for non-fiction writers to document in the form of a ‘COVID memoir’. While pandemic stories will continue to be published, current examples of the COVID memoir include Cassie Alexander’s 2021 book Year of the nurse: A Covid-19 2020 pandemic memoir, about experiences on the medical frontlines and Carmel Bird’s 2022 book Telltale about the author’s relationship with literature in her home.

The broad scope of life circumstances from which a memoir may be born suggests that there are no objective parameters on what environments are essential or suitable for a memoir. In The Memoir and the memoirist: Reading and writing personal narrative by Thomas Larson (2007), it is noted that during the emergence of memoir’s popularity in the 1980s, the genre’s distinction could be identified by the duration of the personal narrative. Larson notes: ‘It was then that a new kind of storytelling emerged: short and mid-length books, sometimes called memoir, in which the author chose a particular life experience to focus on’ (2007: 15, italics in the original).

While documenting my account of the quarantine experience, I decided to contextualise the writing using the circumstances leading up to the quarantine to effectively capture the hysteria, pace and severity of the state of emergency that was declared:

At the airport, every store is closed. People sidestep one another apprehensively, and parents cover their children’s mouths with clothing items in lieu of correct protection gear, unavailable at this Airport. Every cough might as well be a gunshot, and people elect to sit on the floor rather than seats if it means creating distance from others.

Additionally, as the quarantine period finished after 21 days, I was thrust into the ‘lockdown’ period, which affected the entire public’s mobility and functionality. The everyday restrictions of social liberties (social distancing, closures of businesses and drive-through testing) presented a new set of occurrences and stories to explore in my writing. Consequently, the ‘particular life experience’ (2007: 15) noted by Larson is a segment that spans from early 2020 to mid-2021, when the limitations of the pandemic began to slowly ease:

Every day continues to be a struggle between the relative normality of being out of quarantine, and the looming presence of the virus at every turn. At the supermarket, shoppers tentatively reach for a trolley from the queue, as if it is going to bite, before wiping it down with an anti-bacterial wipe. They give each a wide berth in the aisles, causing more confusion and collisions in the process.

Considering that the COVID-19 period is not clearly defined (to some, it’s ongoing; to others, it ended with the re-establishment of everyday liberties), it is evident that memoir is an appropriate and common approach to writing about enforced confinement and isolation. It would be nearly impossible to produce a quarantine memoir that does not incorporate a detailed analysis of the quarantine environment, further enforcing a hybrid style of vertical travel and memoir. With that style in mind, the result is a comprehensive quarantine narrative that is both immersive memoir and immersive travel writing, two distinct genres identified by Hemley (2012), combined for a narrative that effectively covers the story of confinement and confinement’s broader implications on one’s life:

Over the last three weeks, something has switched in me. The absence of personal contact was never something I considered to be incredibly damaging, but it has been. The days alone in the hotel haven’t left me with an optimistic outlook on the importance of company. But rather a fear that at any second, this can all happen again, without warning.

Writing in confinement in other settings

When contextualising my quarantine writing among peer genres, it is beneficial to look at other environments where isolation is enforced to identify similar and effective tropes and stylistic choices. Another mode of enforced confinement, wherein specific inspirations the writer may be accustomed to are limited, is incarceration settings such as prison or detention.

It would be remiss to claim that writing produced during the quarantine periods, lockdowns and social restrictions of COVID directly mirrors that of incarceration writing. However, it is reasonable to suggest that parallels can be drawn between existing prison literature and other isolation/confinement writing circumstances, particularly in approaches to the observation of place, inner journeys and commentary on topics regarding the enforcement of the subject’s prolonged confinement (Stubbs 2022). While these narratives remain distinct, notably in the severity of the environment and extended, sometimes indefinite timeframes, it is the approach to writing personal stories that I propose that holds similarities, if not in specific content, in areas of focus.

Imprisonment writing, or ‘prison literature’, has been an enduring critical and commercially successful form of creative non-fiction for hundreds of years. In The rise of prison literature (2009), Freeman attributes this popularity to the number of influential writers, including Thomas More, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard (Freeman 2009: 113), who found themselves imprisoned during the 16th century. As a literary genre, there continue to be current examples of historical and modern prison narratives, incorporating and blending genres of narrative non-fiction, memoir or fiction. Ruth Ahnert (2013), in The rise of prison literature in the sixteenth century, notes that even in the earliest examples of prison literature from religious prisoners, ‘these circumstances and impulses resulted in works of literature that covered a vast range of genres and forms’ (2013: 3).

While prison literature is often cited as closer to memoir than a narrative resembling vertical travel, these stories inadvertently use a similar focus on deep environmental description, commentary on the rudimentary and repeated aspects of internment and analysis of the repetitive nature of the writer’s situation. At the very least, the prison narrative is born from the suppression of freedoms similar to that of quarantine. Ahnert (2013) notes: ‘History has shown that when unreasonable strictures are placed upon freedom of expression, proscribed voices are likely to emerge elsewhere in oppositional sites, or what has been described as “counter-public spheres”‘ (2013: 6). By comparison, quarantine affords many more liberties than incarceration; however, my own adapted writing experience similarly came from varied strict systems put in place.

Nelson Mandela’s famed autobiography A long walk to freedom (1994) and Henri Charrière’s memoir Papillon (1969) are examples of texts that showcase the enduring popularity of stories about incarceration and highlight how prison stories can additionally fall into other classifications of life writing. When considering a contemporary example, such as Albert Woodfox’s 2019 work Solitary, the uncertainty of appeals, sentence lengths and pending trials play a pivotal role in the narrative, and the nature of his claustrophobia is encapsulated in passages of writing that could be described as vertical. He writes:

My clothes tightened around my body; I took off my shirt and pants but still felt like I was being squeezed and strangled. The ceiling was pressing down on me. It was hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to see. I forced myself to stand. I took a few steps, trying not to fall (2019: 114).

To a lesser extent, the narrative I crafted during my hotel experience reflected the ever-shifting boundaries of the confinement, as the duration of the period was frequently extended. Phone conversations filled with miscommunication and uncertainty were regular and found their way into the narrative, presented as they occurred:

‘Hi, Joe, this is Sophie from SA Health, calling for your daily check- up. How are you feeling today and what is your temperature?’

‘Yeah, I feel fine, and my temp is normal. This is day three with no symptoms? I guess that means I can go home?’

‘Oh no... who told you that?’
‘The person who called for my daily update yesterday....’

‘Well, I believe that two negative tests are now required before you can leave isolation.’

‘She said I just needed to be symptomless for a few days.’

She proceeded to call whomever it was I spoke to the day before.

‘Yes, we will have to send someone out to meet you over the next two days to ensure you are negative. So, it will be at least another few days.’

Naturally, in creative works produced under circumstances where the isolated parameters are enforced by forms of law, a particular resentment toward authority may develop. As law enforcement carried out their duties, sometimes with a sense of reluctance, my already heightened emotional state of quarantine resulted in anger and animosity, as things such as fines and permission continued to be presented as a necessity to my ’freedom’. Being among the limited human contact I would receive regularly, critique of those in charge of my arrangement began to feature heavily in my writing. Of police checks, I wrote: ‘I get a call from the police who coldly demand I come to the window to “prove I am isolating” as if this is a random parole or home detention check.’

Later, I would come to note that this reaction was the product of the prolonged confinement, not indicative of my larger feelings towards law enforcement. The regularity of unscheduled law enforcement visits and calls from administrative staff tasked with tracking virus spread presented ample writing inspiration. This tendency to write about frustration with authoritative bodies is common among narratives of the pandemic and a trait shared with writing during incarceration. Stories born from incarceration allow the broader public a window into this experience, illuminating circumstances that most of the public find unfamiliar. The same can be said for the pandemic memoir, especially memoirs of those impacted in severe ways.

When analysing both situations of incarceration, enforced quarantine and any other stories of isolation where the very nature of confinement features strongly, there are situational commonalities. These include the threat of intervention by law, consequences for breaking quarantine periods, social gathering and distancing restrictions and long-term health effects that may appear as common focal points in the writing or at least prompts for deeper discussion about the long-term implications of the human experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adapting to the environment and documenting these trials by non-fiction writers ensures that the broader COVID-19 experience can be reflected critically in the years to come.

Conclusion

While my experience as a writer attempting to produce creative work during quarantine is not indicative of the broader COVID experience, it allowed for experimentation and critique regarding what aspects of confinement writing are consistent across varied life circumstances. It is evident that there are familiar non-fiction accounts, such as memoir, that can be produced detailing the COVID encounter and the broader experience of writing confinement. More experimental approaches, such as combining the emerging concept of vertical travel with confinement memoir, capture the intricacies and adversity of the peculiar pandemic period.

Ultimately, using the different writing approaches I have shared in this essay, I created a narrative that spans the virus’s infancy, right through to re-establishment of relative freedom. In an attempt to transcend the limitations imposed by quarantine periods, lockdowns and the stifling of social and professional lives, I strove to write in a way that captured the unique characteristics of this time. Describing, analysing and experimenting with these abnormal restrictions has proven to be the most effective way for me to capture my pandemic story.

Opening the hotel room door, the first thing I notice is how bright the sun seems. I leave the musty smell of the room behind me, stepping out onto the balcony. I turn and look at my home of over three weeks as the gloved and masked cleaner stands patiently to the side, eager to disinfect every inch of the space and possibly destroy all sheets and towels. In my mind, my war with the pandemic has ended, but as I pump hand sanitiser onto my hands before climbing into my car, I doubt I have seen the last of it.

References

Ahnert, Ruth (2013) The rise of prison literature in the sixteenth century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Alexander, Cassi (2021) Year of the nurse: A Covid-19 2020 pandemic memoir, Caskara Press

Bailey, Elisabeth Tova (2010) The sound of a wild snail eating, Chapel Hill and New York, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Bird, Carmel (2022) Telltale: Reading, writing, remembering, Yarraville, VIC, Transit Lounge

Charrière, Henri (1970) Papillon, trans. by O’Brian, Patrick, London, Hart-Davis

Couser, G. Thomas (2012) Memoir: An introduction, New York, Oxford University Press

Forsdick, Charles, Kinsley, Zoë and Walchester, Kathryn (2021) Vertical travel: Introduction, Studies in Travel Writing, Vol 25, No. 2 pp 103-109

Freeman, Thomas S. (2009) The rise of prison literature, The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 2 pp 133-146

Hemley, Robin (2012) A field guide for immersion writing: Memoir, journalism, and travel, Athens, University of Georgia Press

Larson, Thomas (2007) The memoir and the memoirist: Reading and writing personal narrative, Athens, Ohio University Press

Mandela, Nelson (1994) Long walk to freedom: The autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Boston, Little, Brown

Stubbs, Ben (2022) Creative and non-fiction writing during isolation and confinement: Imaginative travel, prison, shipwrecks, pandemics, and war, Abingdon, Routledge

Thompson, Carl (2011) Travel writing: The new critical idiom, New York, Routledge Woodfox, Albert (2019) Solitary: Unbroken by four decades in solitary confinement. My story of transformation and hope, New York, Grove Press

Youngs, Tim (2013) The Cambridge introduction to travel writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

Conflict of interest

No funding was received for this essay.

Note on the contributor

Joe Patterson is a writer and PhD candidate from Curtin University and the University of Aberdeen. Joe has written feature articles on various topics spanning travel, military history and local news. He has also taught creative writing and journalism at the university level and has delivered specialist lectures on literary journalism. The creative component of Joe’s PhD project involved the production of a memoir detailing the pandemic.

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