I remember ages ago back when the global pandemic started a lot of people were very firm that it wasn’t something that should happen in fiction— that on Eastenders or whatever they’d still go on having non-socially distanced dramas, and that this was important so people could escape from the horrors of the world.
I Did Not Agree With This, and still do not. Reflexively, a lot of people might not want to see a world where lockdown and the pandemic are a reality— but I suspect actually watching people live in an alternate 2021 where none of it ever happened might suddenly be even worse. The world feels different now; we’ve all both grown and changed. We’re not the same people with the same concerns. I don’t know that I’d relate to the people in that universe, not really.
Like apparently in the New Year’s Doctor Who what drives Yaz to find the Doctor is that she’s really bored of life in 2020? And I’m like, “well, that sounds like a nice problem to have, Yaz, in this script you’re in from before any of this had happened.” And here’s the Doctor talking about hope, which is easy to do if you live in a fiction where these world-shifting events don’t actually happen. I don’t think any of this works; I don’t think it’s tenable. You can’t deny human reality when you want to write stories for humans.
That’s not to say that I’d ever want to watch something like that new thing where lockdown’s still going on in 2024; that sounds like the worst. But there is a difference in drama that plays on our fears and drama that acknowledges them, and I feel the second of these things is necessary in order to write anything compelling. So the pandemic needs to happen in a literal or not-literal way to ground what I write in what I’m feeling now, but that seems to involve coming to terms with things a reader might really want to avoid.
It’s hard. A lot of writing advice says you should write about what bothers you most about being a human, but a lot of other writing advice says you shouldn’t focus too much on what’s hard in the here and now. Having a satisfying resolution to this feels important to me in writing anything worthwhile in 2021— but I’m not sure I really have one yet. I’d like to hear your thoughts.
Robert Shepherd: Writer 