Writing in the Dark: Why This Adar Many of Us Are Finally Putting the Words Down

We are writing under a sky that feels uncertain.

This is not the usual conversation about how the holiday around the corner sparks creativity and renewal. Any month on the calendar can offer that. Rosh Hashanah can claim renewal. Spring can claim renewal. Every writing guide can claim renewal. But this year, as Adar arrives, many of us are not writing from a place of gentle reflection on the tailwind of restoration. We are writing while waiting for the other shoe or ballistic missile to drop, during a war we cannot fully define and cannot fully leave behind because it shows no sign of truly ending.

Last night, well early this morning, I dreamt I was taking a walk just outside my house, along the wall on the other side of my garden. I was walking along a wide sidewalk I have walked for more than thirty years. Without warning, the lights went out. Not the streetlights. Not the lights inside homes. The lights of the universe. Everything went completely dark. There was no outline to the street, no horizon, no sense of distance. It was absolute black.

A friend of more than thirty years was beside me. She had picked me up in my garden for a walk. We rarely have time for friends these days, but in the dream she stood there calmly, the only sound in the dark, and said it was a cyberattack. She felt for my  hand and said we have to go back inside, as though that was the most normal thing in the world. 

The war, or rather, another war, had begun. 

We turned around and tried to find our way back to my garden. We hadn't gone far, had hardly left, but we could not even see the outline of the door. And even if we could, there was a code on the door that was even more obscure. I never saw the door or the code or anything else. We searched, drowning in darkness until I woke up with a migraine. That's how dark it was.

It was not the first time I had dreamt something like this. Over the summer, twice, I dreamt I was on the phone with my eldest, my son, when a siren sounded. He said, with a clarity that only exists in dreams, "Mom, this time it is a chemical attack. Get to the safe room now." I woke from that dream with the echo of urgency still in my body. The same dream visited me again two months later, and then nothing until last night. 

Now it is the eve of Adar. My grandson's first Adar. 

The month of reversals. The month of nahafochu. The month when what is hidden becomes visible and what seems inevitable can suddenly change direction.

It is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the moment when many writers feel an almost physical need to write down what they are carrying.

Writers across Israel and across the Jewish world are working under a particular kind of pressure this year. Some are documenting daily reality. Some are writing fiction that feels closer to reality than they expected. Some are working on memoirs that now require an entirely new final chapter. Others are writing fantasy, historical fiction, or family stories, and discovering that the emotional landscape beneath their work has shifted.

There is a sense that we are all recording something, even when we do not yet know what shape that record will take.

Many of my clients write me these messages in different words from Calgary, from California, from right down the street. They are writing more urgently than before, yet also more cautiously as if each word must survive this next battle, attack or code red. They don't want to be blasted out of the written word. They won't bow out or be blown out; they want to tell stories and I encourage them. Only yesterday on a Zoom with a writer/scientist in Jerusalem, I urged, for every Shabbat there is a Motsei Shabbat. I might as well have blown a shofar or shared my screen with a poster that declared, this too shall pass. 

That was before that third dream, of course. Now I'm not sure who was comforting whom. 

Adar, with its themes of concealment and revelation, feels like the right time to begin putting some of this into language. One of the unexpected truths of this past year is that living inside the imaginations of other writers can be a form of steadiness.

Editing manuscripts means entering worlds that are not the news cycle. It means spending hours inside someone else's narrative logic, emotional arc, and carefully constructed sentences. It requires attention to structure, voice, and meaning. It demands patience. It rewards clarity.

There have been days when opening a manuscript and beginning to read has felt like stepping into a space where language still functions in an orderly way. Where paragraphs build toward understanding. Where a character's struggle, however fictional, has a shape that can be examined and strengthened. Where revision is possible.

Working with other writers' stories has not been an escape from reality. It has been a way of remaining grounded within it. The discipline of careful reading and thoughtful editing reminds us that even in uncertain times, language can still be shaped. Narratives can still be refined. Meaning can still be made.

Many writers discover something similar when they return to their own drafts. Putting words on a page does not resolve uncertainty, but it creates a container for experience. It allows memory, fear, hope, and imagination to exist somewhere outside the body.

There are periods in history when people later wish they had written more. Recorded more. Preserved more of what daily life felt like. We rarely recognize those periods while we are inside them.

For many writers, this Adar feels like such a moment.

Some will write directly about the present, but little of that has passed my desk lately. Most are still fighting the battles of WW2, Holocaust-related books are still the number one manuscripts to cross my desk whether as memoir or other nonfiction. Family stories/memoir are a close second with interestingly, Jewish fantasy now running at number 3. 

Whatever form the writing takes, the impulse is the same. To document. To process. To create something that will outlast the immediacy of the moment.

When writers begin working from this place of urgency and depth, they often reach a point where the manuscript needs another set of careful eyes. Not to change the writer's voice, but to help shape and clarify it. Not to impose distance, but to support precision. Developmental editing, structural feedback, and careful line editing all exist to help a manuscript carry its full weight without losing coherence.

Writing through uncertainty

We do not know what the coming hours, days, weeks will bring. None of us are writing from a place of complete stability. Yet writing has always existed alongside uncertainty. Some of the most enduring literature has emerged from periods when the future felt unclear and the present felt fragile.

Adar reminds us that reversals are possible. That what feels hidden may yet be revealed. That stories told in dark moments can carry forward into brighter ones.

If you have been carrying a manuscript quietly, or if recent months have given you something you feel compelled to put into words, this may be the time to begin shaping it. Not because the world has settled, but because it has not. Not because everything is resolved, but because it is not.

Writing does not require certainty. It requires attention, honesty, and the willingness to place one sentence after another until a narrative begins to emerge.

Sometimes, in uncertain times, that act alone is a form of steadiness.