Writing In The Time Of Pandemic

Writing In The Time Of Pandemic

Distraction is the enemy of any writer.You sit down at the desk or open your laptop with the best intentions of working on your latest manuscript. Instead, you find yourself called to play online games, scroll through Facebook, Twitter feeds or Instagram. To obsessively check your latest book’s ranking on Amazon. Shop. Answer e-mails. Get up and play fetch with the dog. Feed the cat treats. Make tea or coffee. And so on.

Now we have another distraction. A big one. COVID-19, commonly referred to as coronavirus, has arrived like a giant asteroid blocking the light of the sun and threatening to destroy life as we know it, and in some cases, life itself. It has brought the horror of serious illness and potential death into our lives, and exposed the vulnerabilities of the most comfortable and secure of existences. It has reduced us to terrified peasants in the path of the Black Death.

But those peasants only had hints and rumors of what was coming. We see it marching towards us in Technicolor, with real time maps of people infected and dying. Sensing we are watching a doomsday event unfold, it’s almost impossible to look away.

Our distraction is likely worse because as writers, we tend to be obsessive about acquiring information. And once we learn about something, we naturally extrapolate from that to a logical future outcome. We’re storytellers and it’s easy for us to take the facts and invent a tale, including an ending. We’re always plotting. Always following the natural story arc to the end. And no matter how hard we try, when it comes to this story, we’re struggling to find a happy ending. Even a satisfying one is looking more and more unlikely.

Suddenly our lives take on an epic feel. We know we’re living in a time that will be more than a footnote in future history books. It might even be the defining event of this century. So, how do you top the stakes in this plot? More important, how to you get back to writing when the threats your protagonist face are less compelling than the challenges mankind faces now?

You might take inspiration for your characters from some of the real life heroes we hear of in news stories. The medical professionals, police and firemen, and yes, stockers and delivery people and poorly-paid service workers, who have to keep going no matter the risks, so that the rest of us can have some semblance of a normal life.

The intensity of the crisis might add a new feeling of urgency to our writing. We can see the pandemic as a reminder of the fragile, fleeting nature of life. A brutal reckoning that forces us to realize every minute is precious and we should not waste it. We dare not put off or procrastinate writing that book any longer, because we don’t know how much time we have left. Goaded by this awareness, we may be driven to write more furiously and with more passion than ever.

Or we might want to escape. To find peace away from the nightmare. To delve into an imaginary world that we can control, unlike the runaway freight train of events gathering steam and careening down the track of our world. To forge a happy ending, or at least satisfying and meaningful one. To imagine a world where good triumphs over evil, justice prevails and we not only find out whodunit at the end, but the murderer is appropriately punished.

Storytelling is about finding meaning, and story arcs and plotting are some of the ways we impose order on an imaginary world. Catastrophic events only make good stories years afterwards, when we have perspective and can shape what happened into a coherent narrative. But while it’s occurring, real life seldom makes a good tale. It’s too random and capricious. Too senseless and messy. It works as news, but it would never sell in fiction.

Because even the darkest, grimmest dystopian novel functions within a clear framework. There must be conflict, setbacks and struggle of some kind. But there must also be triumphs and “Yes!” moments when things go the way we expect them to go. We crave reassurance in our fiction. No matter how many twists or turns there are in the plot, when we close the book we want to feel emotional closure as well. The best books take you on a wild ride. They may even leave you weeping and distraught. Sometimes they’re close enough to real life that they break our hearts. But they all have meaning and purpose. They make us think, but in a good way. They open our eyes and expand our perspective.

No matter whether you run from the reality facing us, or confront it and obsess about it, as writers, we should let it be a reminder of what we do as storytellers. We create order out of senselessness. Meaning out of chaos. Heroes out of ordinary souls. We have a mission. The world needs us to write our tales.