I’m a writer who has repeatedly considered situations in which the world might change beyond all recognition; as someone who writes urban fantasy, it’s pretty much built into the job description.
Now it darn well has.
I’m half-way through writing a book which starts in 1945 and finishes in the present day. But by the time I finish it, we will (hopefully) be living in a post-COVID world. So how do I deal with that? Am I going to have to go back over a 120,000-word MS and re-write all the “present-day” scenes for a post-COVID world? When I don’t even know what that is going to look like yet?
I guess I am. But then every other author who writes anything remotely contemporary is going to have to do the same.
So alright, we know there are going to be a million Literary novels written about life in Lockdown. They will be beautifully written, psychologically meaningful and devastatingly depressing. Only the literary critics of the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph will read them. Lots of people will buy them, because they got good reviews in the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. But they won’t read them, because a lot of people who buy books on that basis very rarely do*. Then these books will win the Booker Prize and lots more people will buy them and not read them, because that’s what happens when you win the Booker Prize.
* Actually, I buy books on that basis. But only if they are non-fiction.
The sort of writers I know (albeit only online, but that’s real too) don’t write that kind of thing, What I want to know is how COVID is going to affect the Little Coffee Shop On The Cornish Coast; or Jake Blanchard and his close-knit team of ex-Special Forces private investigators; or Susie Maxwell, torn between two handsome men and her career in a tiny flat in Hampstead? Those are the books that people actually read. And their writers, like me, are going to have to figure out a way of dealing with this thing in their fiction, too. Because this is world-changing. Just as it’s impossible to write a novel set in the 1940’s without mentioning World War Two, it’s now impossible to write a novel set in, or around, or even shortly after 2020, without mentioning Coronavirus.
We’re all going to have to deal with that. I hope we manage it. We need to manage it. Not just for our own sake, but because people need a way to deal with events like these and fiction has always been a way in which we manage that.
Good luck to you all, support the NHS, and stay safe.
PS – the sound of distant laughter you can hear is from all those authors who chose to write historical fiction, heroic fantasy or hard sci-fi and therefore can carry on just as before. Rotten lot.