The Pen Comes Out Under Fire

The Pen Comes Out Under Fire

Here is something I keep turning over.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, sirens went off across the country. People grabbed what they could and ran for shelter. Trains out of the cities were packed. Nobody knew what the next day held.

And in the middle of all that, a lot of people sat down and wrote.

Not afterward. Not once it was safe. During. In basements. Between sirens. On phones, in the dark.

One group of researchers later gathered written accounts from nearly 1,500 Ukrainian civilians. The writing came in over almost two years, while the war kept going. People wrote what they saw, what they lost, what frightened them most.

The researchers even measured how much the writers were hurting. They scored each account for signs of trauma - and for something called moral injury. That is the specific wound of having seen, or done, things that broke your sense of what is right.

People carrying that kind of weight still chose to write.

Here is the part that stays with me. Many had never kept a diary before. They started in the worst moment of their lives.

You would think war is when writing stops. There is no quiet. There is no spare hour. There is barely a safe wall to lean against. And yet the writing went up.

Why do people reach for a pen exactly when the world is hardest to hold?

This is not a phone thing. It is not a 2022 thing. It is very old.

Go back to Britain, late summer of 1939. War with Germany was days away. A small effort called Mass Observation - a project to record ordinary daily life - sent out a quiet request. Would regular people keep a diary? No rules. No set topic. Just write down your days.

About 480 people said yes. Shopkeepers. Clerks. Housewives. None of them famous. They wrote through the bombing of cities, through years of rationing and fear.

One of them, a housewife in her late forties, wrote so faithfully and so well that her diaries later became a book, and then a film. She had simply answered the call to write down an ordinary life - right as it stopped being ordinary.

Eighty years apart. Two different wars. A paper notebook and a smartphone. The same strange reflex.

When the ground shakes hardest, people write it down.

I want to understand why. Not the noble version, where everyone is brave and wise. The real version. What is the pen actually doing for a scared person in a basement, with the power out?

That question has been studied more carefully than you might guess. And the first thing it turns up is not what I expected.

Because the urge to write does not behave the way you would think. It does not simply rise when things go bad and fade when they get better. It has a shape of its own - a strange, almost clockwork shape. And that shape is where this gets interesting.

References

• Kuperman, V., et al. (2025). The Narratives of War (NoW) corpus of written testimonies of the Russia-Ukraine war. Language Resources and Evaluation, 59(3), 2415-2426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-025-09813-8
• Garfield, S. (2005). We Are At War: The Remarkable Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times. Ebury Press. (Drawing on the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex.)
• Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex. https://www.massobs.org.uk/