To Pandemic or not to Pandemic

Surely any period of upheaval and uncertainty is a difficult one to start a novel.   And  here we are, seven months into the pandemic and with no end in sight. 

Let’s say that you’re a novelist wanting to start a new project.   You can, of course, always go back in time and write a historical piece.  You can go back to the eighteenth century, or the Great War, or the Depression, or 2018.  It’s an attractive idea, for it avoids not only the current issues but allows the writer the pleasure of escaping into the past.  (Escape is for writers, I think, a bigger motivation than they often let on.)

But what if you’re just not a historical novelist.  What if you’ve always written about contemporary life and don’t want to change.  Well, any novel that you begin now will take, say, two or three years to write.  Add another year until publication and that gets us to 2023 or ‘24.  If you’re like me, you are having a hard time imagining what the world will be like in only three years.  Will a vaccine truly end Covid 19?  Will the fires in California and Oregon spread farther?  Will Trump be finished or will he be into his second term, further destroying the country to the south and affecting all the rest of us?  Will Black Lives Matter truly make a positive difference or will there be militias in the streets? 

 All of that makes the problem of writing a novel seem pretty trivial.  But still, if you’re a novelist that’s what you do.  You can write a novel about our experience right at this moment, but you have to wonder how many other novelists are already doing just that?  Surely there will be a small avalanche of literary fiction as well as mysteries, thrillers, romances, etc. set during the first year of the pandemic.   No doubt there will also be science fiction novels that show how this time has effected life fifty or a hundred or a thousand years from now.  Will readers get tired of reading about 2020?  Will you get tired, say a year into the project, of living inside it? 

 And what about those future events?  They might so eclipse what is happening now that nobody—including you—will care anymore about 2020. 

 How about taking a different approach?  How about pretending that none of this is happening?  You could write a novel about a marriage, or about a runaway teenager, or about a group of amateur actors putting on Romeo and Juliet.   That sounds pretty tempting, but perhaps you’ll begin to feel that the story you’ve chosen is just trivial or self-indulgent.  And you might start to worry that the critics will think so, too.

 Of course, there are as many answers to these questions as there are writers. But you only need to find one answer, the one that is going to work for you.  That works for you now and a month from now and two years from now.  You have to avoid becoming paralyzed by uncertainties.  Have I made the wrong choice?  Am I even capable of writing this story?  Will anybody care about it?  Of course, in one form or another, these are fears that writers always face.  Novelists (I assume) are constantly second-guessing themselves over the long haul of getting a manuscript to completion.  Our time has intensified these questions, has made the choice seem even more difficult, but it’s always there.   And in the end you have take the plunge and commit to your story, because writing stories is what you do.