The world will never be the same after this and it’s going to affect fiction in unpredictable ways as well.
Ben Winters wrote a recent article about how the pandemic upended the novel he was 80% finished, much of which takes place in the spring of 2020. And Lawrence Wright has a novel coming out this month… about a pandemic.
I’m curious how it’s affecting what you’re working on. What does a post-pandemic “contemporary” novel look like? Even if you’re writing science fiction or fantasy or something totally unrelated, are there threads you’re weaving into the world of your novel?
For my part, I’m finding it eerie that my current novel hinges on a virus, and the sequel (if there is one) is/was going to involve a lot of people wearing masks. But I’m currently on hold on writing at the moment.
What about you? How is this affecting your writing?
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Art: Detail of Zeichnender Knabe am Fenster by Anton Laupheimer
It hasn’t so far since the first 60 pages take place 12 years in the past. But moving forward when it skips to present day, I might have to weave masks, etc. into it. Thanks for the suggestion!
Super question! I’m more in the ‘can’t write due to National trauma’ camp. I feel the tectonic plates in my unconscious– where themes and ideas are generated–shifting. The wheels of my gristmill have been knocked akilter by national trauma. Any literary production ground out now is lumpy and unrefined. While the ground under my feet is shifting, I can’t process and refine events through Art.
I have an odd twist on this. I’m on my second revision of my historical novel set during the First World War, and the Spanish Flu plays a part in the plot. I worry that when I do query the book, agents will assume I inserted that plot point in response to the modern pandemic, even though I finished that part of the novel over a year ago. (And I, too, am in the “can’t write, too much distraction” group.)
My novel in progress is set 200 years after a pandemic killed 90% of the Earth’s population. While the current pandemic won’t interfere with my story, it will provide some firsthand insight into a pandemic and how society tries to mitigate the damage. But all things considered, I’d rather do library research.
No. I figure if it gets published it will be years into the future. 2 years at earliest, if I’m kidding myself. I don’t have space for it. It already takes up too much in my real life.
It hasn’t affected my current wip, a memoir since it’s set in 1964. But another world-changing event, the assassination of John F. Kennedy does, though not to the extent as the cv 19 has and will. Most of the change was in the mind and heart and the perception of how our world operated. It was a time of transition from innocence to reality. Nobody other than President Kennedy (and of course later Lee Harvey Oswald ) died. No widespread sickness, no businesses closed, nobody sheltered in place or quarantined. Yet there was fear, the fear of global nuclear annihilation and of a building war in a country far away and unknown by most of us young people. That is not the subject of my memoir, but it is a theme that runs in the background and occasionally surfaces.
I finished my historical fiction in December, one #1 or 3 in a companion series. I put it out there for beta readers and by mid-February had great feedback, most ready for Book #2. I incorporated each readers (10) ideas I felt on point. But at the SFWC I realized Chapter One would not sustain the interests of my boy-readers that I intended to be the target audience.
Then pandemic broke as I bulldogged researching the material for the fix I know it needs – a new Chapter One that will tweak most of the other 24 chapters. I’m currently stuck in the wonderful metropolis of Research City. The concept continues to swirl but language that I will know is the right fix is still evasive.
And by the way, Mother/Sara dies by Chapter Five of Consumption, a persistent plague of kind in New England during the 1860s. Medically, it changed treatment remedies post controls. It was later to be known as tuberculosis.
My book is set in the 2000’s mostly so I can have a character that accurately predicts the future. Having such an important global event in 2020 to reference probably just gave my prophetic character a lot more credibility.
No viruses in my current WIP. Just a volcano destroying a city in the near future, the biggest suicide cult in history, terrorists armed with thousands of tons of binary explosives, etc. But I could maybe squeeze in a pandemic or two…
I had just started the querying process when the world stopped for a pandemic virus. My novel is about a pandemic virus that wipes out 85% of the world’s population, and only the women survive. I’m having a hard time asking agents if they’d like to read this when I feel like we are all living it. Got some great feedback from one agent with an invitation to revise and resubmit, and am trying to be kind to myself as far as pressure to produce. I’m reconsidering how to work the realities of Covid into the novel and don’t entirely trust myself to be reflective enough right now.