Splendid isolation: Managing time and making culture among novelists during the pandemic

Abstract

While many public performances of culture were shut down during much of the pandemic, the homes of many artists became prominent places for making culture. In particular, the pandemic created a rift in the temporal and spatial organization of work and leisure, affecting time management. This article turns to the creative lives of 32 novelists in Sweden who were interviewed online over video in 2020 and 2021. Using the example of these authors, the article investigates the impact of the pandemic on actors in culture who, to a large degree, already work creatively in physical isolation. The pandemic became an external shock affecting the temporal organization among authors and their ability to juggle commitments in life. For some, the pandemic situation appeared to create a rare slowdown of their relationships to their creative lives as well as a synchronization of spheres of life, feelings of resonance, and time for writing. As their regular activities disappeared and commitments weakened, others felt a non-resonant slowdown in their creative capacities. Those whose lives were intensified by new or additional work to make ends meet lost time for creative work, with writing becoming a guilty pleasure in response to the pandemic as a trauma. The research results emphasize the temporal conditions for making culture at home during the pandemic and argue for the general importance of studying temporal organizations of careers and art-making.