To anyone reading this in the
future: In 2020, a virus called Covid 19 spread throughout the world, and a lot
of people caught it and died. People were advised to self-isolate to slow the
spread, and most of us did, and it worked, and it was a really weird time. Sad,
of course, and for some of us absolutely devastating. But the survivors learned
things about ourselves that we didn’t expect, and the experience changed us
forever . . .
It’s only natural for writers to
want explore a worldwide lifechanging event like Covid 19. Writing about such
events are good ways to process feelings and can be cathartic. Flannery
O’Connor’s famous quote – “I write because I don’t know what I think until I
read what I say” – applies here. For so many of us, writing is thinking
and feeling, and the bigger and more complex those thoughts and feelings are,
the more we need to write about them.
But just as some people are
expecting there to be a baby boom following our time of self-isolation,
publishers are already fearing an onslaught of novels and stories about Covid
19. If you write about the pandemic just for yourself, with no intention of
ever seeking publication, then it doesn’t matter what you write about Covid 19
or how you do it. So just let it rip! But one of the things I’ve learned after
teaching English Composition classes for thirty years, is that there are shared
human experiences that, while transformative for individuals, are common as
dirt, and often as interesting to read about. Every mother has a birth story.
Most people have accident, injury, or illness stories. The first time a person
experiences death, loses their virginity, falls in love . . . Of course, a
talented writer can make any subject into an enthralling piece of literature,
but how many novels do you think publishers want to bring out each year
exploring the same basic concept and theme, even if each writer has done so
brilliantly? How many of those stories will readers want to read? Not a lot.
So if you feel compelled to explore
your experiences during this time in your writing, and you want to try
to get the resulting work published, considered listening to Emily Dickson’s
advice from one of her poems: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” Don’t
write an essay detailing how your hair got long while you self-isolated, played
Animal Crossing for several months, and hoped to hell you and your loved ones
didn’t get sick. That’s telling the truth straight-on. Instead, try to find
other ways to write about your experience, ways that disguise the real subject
while at the same time digging into the actual emotional truth.
The following areas are can be
explored in any genre: horror, fantasy, mystery, romance, mainstream, literary,
thriller . . . You can interpret them through any lens, but no matter how you
tell your story, your pandemic experience will be the seed from which your work
grows.
First off, don’t write your version of The
Stand, or The Andromeda Strain, or Outbreak, or . . .
This is the first thing writers are going
to try to do to disguise that they’re really writing about their own pandemic
experience. There will be an absolute glut of pandemic books hitting editors’
and agents’ inboxes within the next year or two. No matter what you do, a
disease story will still be a disease story, and everyone and their cousin will
be writing one.
On the other hand . . .
You could find an analogue for a virus.
(Not a zombie plague, though, unless you can come up with a really original
twist.) Vampire plague, werewolf plague, a violence plague (ala The Crazies)
. . . Your analogue could be an ideology or a false belief that spreads and
causes damage. Any type of contagion analogue could work.
Fear of death
You can write about this on a small scale:
an individual fearing for his or her life or the life of a loved one. Or you
can write about it on a larger scale: a threat of death to a family, a group of
people, a town, a region, a country, the whole damn species . . . The threat
doesn’t have to come from disease. It can come from anything. An alien
invasion. A rogue asteroid heading for Earth. Mutant cockroaches. You name it. You
can write about what an individual facing death might do, as in Breaking Bad,
or how humanity will behave when they know the world’s coming to an end, as in
Bryan Smith’s extreme horror novel Last Day or the Seth Rogan-starring
comedy This is the End.
Fear of strangers
People fear catching Covid 19 from others,
so write about the fear of the other. The classic Twilight Zone episode The
Monsters are Due on Maple Street. The 1981 film The Wave, about a
high school teacher creating a real-life “Movement” to teach his students how
Nazi Germany happened. Don’t forget the racist reactions some have had – and
are still having – to Asian people during the pandemic, either. Issues of
racism, persecution, scapegoating . . . all of these can be themes to explore
without you ever having to mention a disease.
Fear of doctors/medicine/hospitals
No one wants to get sick or injured, and
doctors are not only the bearers of bad news – I’m afraid you have hypertension
– they often cause discomfort and pain while treating us. Just relax.
This’ll all be over in a few minutes . . . Medicines that have rough
side-effects, painful surgeries with complications . . . Medical fears and
anxieties are fertile ground for fiction.
Fear that you’ll be unable to save a life
Think how overworked and stressed-out
medical staff feel knowing that no matter how hard they try, they can’t save
everyone, and may in the end be overwhelmed by the sheer number of patients.
Can you find a way to base a story on this fear, one that doesn’t take place in
a hospital? I’d argue Sheriff Brody in Jaws feels this pressure. The
same for the American President in Fail Safe.
Fear of not being supported
Medical professionals aren’t being
supported by our government in America and feel lost and abandoned. Again, can
you find a way to draw on that emotion to write a story without using disease
or medicine? What about how an individual feels knowing they’re not supported
by family, friends, their partner. . . ?
Survival
Write a survival story. (Avoid zombies.) Open
Water. The Gray. Deliverance. Alive. Cujo. No disease in any of
those stories, but the struggle to survive is front and center. The classic Alfred
Hitchcock Presents episode “Breakdown,” in which Joseph Cotton plays a man
paralyzed and seemingly dead after a car accident. He struggles to get someone,
anyone, to notice he’s still alive before he’s taken to the coroner for an
autopsy. Jack London’s famous short story “To Build a Fire.” Someone trying to
survive a soul-crushing job or an abusive relationship. In many ways, survival
is the ultimate story of our species, which is why it’s such a rich theme for
writers.
Fear of running out
Of supplies (toilet paper, anyone?).
Necessities: food, water, money, a place to live . . . Any or all of these
things can be threatened by circumstances other than disease. Vampires that
fear running out of blood. Angels who fear running out of good souls for Heaven.
The days become shorter – 24 hours becomes 20, then 14, then nine – as the
universe literally runs out of time. The fear of not having enough – whatever enough
means to your characters – and what people are driven to do by this fear, can
make for enthralling fiction.
Isolation and Separation
Bird Box. Castaway. The Shawshank
Redemption. Cabin Fever. Buried. Room. Silent Running. The Shining. The
Lighthouse. The Breakfast Club. The Martian. Cube (and its sequels). It
Comes at Night. Gravity (also a survival story). All of these movies deal
with one of humanity’s worst fears – being alone (or nearly so) and being cut
off from others. Sure, some of us are misanthropes who prefer our own company,
but in general, humanity is a herd animal, and we suffer when we’re too long
apart from others. There are many ways to tell stories of isolation and
separation as there are people.
Dying alone
One of the worst parts of Covid 19 is how
many patients must suffer – and sometimes die – alone, quarantined from friends
and relatives. This is the ultimate in isolation and separation, I think, and
it’s such a strong fear that I think it deserves its own category. Choose a
different situation than a deadly disease for your character and tell the story
of their facing the ultimate human experience on their own (which is perhaps
all our fates in the end, regardless of how and when we die).
Shutdown/Breakdown of society
There’s large-scale systemic breakdown of
countries, but states, cities, and families are all societies. A workplace can
be a society. Same with a family. What happens when the system – whatever its
nature and size – starts to show stress, break under the pressure, and shutdown
in whole or in part? Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, Children of Men,
The Handmaid’s Tale . . .
Empty world
There have been a lot of the Earth is
empty (or mostly empty) stories. The Quiet Earth is one of my favorites.
The Langoliers is another. So is A Vanishing on 7th Street.
If you can find a way to give this trope your own unique spin, it could work
well for you to write about how empty our streets and cities seem right now. Or
you could write about how empty your house or apartment feels.
Untrustworthy, cold, calculating, incompetent,
evil leaders
I think this one is self-explanatory, but
the leaders in your story don’t have to be world leaders. They can be a boss, the
head of a family, the dominant partner in a relationship . . .
How people behave in a crisis
Do people turn toward each other or
against each other? Do they work together or go it alone? Do they play it safe
or take a risk? Do they calmly and rationally debate the best way to handle it?
Do they argue? Come to blows? Do they continue to abide by cultural norms and
societal rules, or is it Mad Max land? You can explore these ideas
through any kind of crisis: a natural disaster, a war, a large-scale accident, an
economic crisis, a familial crisis, a hostage situation, a home invasion, kaiju attack . . .
Trying to live daily life/find a new
normal
One of my settings that I’ve revisited for
stories is the World After. I first wrote about it in my novella The Last
Mile. The premise is that the Masters (basically ancient, all-powerful Lovecraftian
gods) have returned to reclaim the Earth and are now its new rulers. The few
human survivors find ways to adapt to and survive in the insane hellscape their
world has become. My theme in these stories is that no matter how bad things
get, humans will find ways to adapt, ways that might once have been
unthinkable, but which – like it or not – are necessary. We’ve all been
striving to adapt and create a new normal in the wake of Covid 19, but that’s
what we’ve done throughout our history. It’s a quality that you can explore in
all kinds of stories, not just ones about pandemics. And trying to
distract/entertain/teach/manage children during Covid 19 is something that
parents have had to do during times of great change and societal upheaval,
which adds a different wrinkle to the theme of adaption.
Trying to maintain mental health
The world is far more aware of the
importance of maintaining mental health than at any other point in history, and
people are working to take care of themselves and their families both physically
and mentally during self-isolation. You can explore all kinds ways characters
deal with normal mental-health challenges, but you can explore more uncommon –
and interesting ones. How does the crew on a generation spaceship maintain their
mental health? How would a superhero deal with PTSD after failing to save
someone’s life, or maybe the lives of many someones? What sort of mental and
emotional challenges would a psychic medium who regularly sees and interacts
with dead people have to deal with? Think Larry Talbot, the tortured Wolf Man
who suffers from guilt over the murders his fur-covered alter ego commits. The
living vampire Morbius, who is driven to feed by bloodlust and then regrets his
actions afterwards. How do characters like these keep going? How do they hold
onto some shred of humanity? Or is it even possible to do so? Think about all
the shit adventure characters go through. The various Star Trek crews,
the different incarnations of the Doctor . . . it’s a wonder they’re not all
locked away in mental institutions somewhere.
What’s the emotional reality of YOUR
pandemic experience?
If you really want – or need – to write
about your individual experience during these difficult times, ask yourself
what that experience is, and write about it. What fears have you had?
What mental and emotional challenges? Make a list, and then go through it and
consider how could view the items on that list through different lenses, how
you could tell them slant. Then start writing.
And we all know that writing is one of the
cheapest forms of therapy, right? And sharing our stories is a positive
community-building act, whether we submit them for publication, post them on
our blogs, share them with friends and family, or just go back some day – when
all of this is long over – reread our words, and remember.
FREE STORIES!
Want some free stories to read/listen to
during self-isolation? I’ve got you covered.
I have several stories available to listen
to at Tales to Terrify:
·
My
Bram Stoker-nominated story “A Touch of Madness”: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tales-to-terrify-427-gwendolyn-kiste-tim-waggoner/id492711030?i=1000470370767
· “Portrait
of a Horror Writer”: https://www.spreaker.com/user/9319595/tales-to-terrify-show-no-106-tim-waggone
· “Picking
Up Courtney”: https://www.mixcloud.com/talestoterrify/tales-to-terrify-no-129-dowker-waggoner/
· “Do
No Harm”: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/256-tales-to-terrify-30961232/episode/tales-to-terrify-no-39-tim-32909543/
I also have several stories posted on my
website:
Text: “Picking Up Courtney,” “Met a
Pilgrim Shadow,” “Portrait of a Horror Writer.”
Audio: (read by Julia Morgan): “Water’s
Edge,” “Foundling,” “Hungry Man.” (All Lovecraftian stories)
Free Story Collection: My third short
story collection, Bone Whispers, is currently out of print. If you email
me at twaggon1@msn.com, I’ll send you a
free PDF of the collection.
