Week Forty-Six: Fiction in the Age of Coronavirus

We live in unprecedented, rather than interesting, times. In a few short weeks, ordinary life has become, well, extraordinary. Not to mention frightening. We have no idea what will happen next. Worst of all, some of us may die, or have loved ones who will die, a grim new reality made clear to us by politicians and news bulletins alike.

As writers, and especially perhaps as genre writers, we are accustomed to presenting the everyday and mundane in our novels, as an anchor for the otherwise outlandish world of our plots. As part of our skill set, we construct an accepted - and acceptable - fictional version of 'reality' as our characters know it and as our particular genres demand.

But what should we do when that 'everyday reality' has shifted sideways - almost overnight - and is now far from anything we have ever known in our lifetimes? When our realistic characters are now more likely to be in lockdown for anything up to half a year, and therefore unable to commit or investigate murders during that time frame, to meet friends or loiter in cafes, go to concert halls and theatres, travel anywhere beyond the end of their garden path - if they're lucky enough to have one - have sex, or fall in love? When apocalypse has actually become a thing?

We are at least used to the solitary life as writers. Self-isolating holds fewer terrors and issues for us than most other people working from home, I should imagine.

But as writers we are faced with a choice, it seems to me.

We stick our literary fingers in our ears - 'la la la' - and pretend we still live in that Other World, the one we inhabited roughly three weeks ago, and write characters who fit that lifestyle, despite the fact that it's becoming harder to envisage going out for a latte or booking a flight to Greece or dropping a book off at the library or sticking a knife between the vicar's shoulder blades ...

Or we accept that the world has changed, and therefore set our books in a speculative future world, when (hopefully) the coronavirus crisis has passed but is definitely still a thing. A world where characters may well be happy to murder each other - perhaps more so than ever! - but police are less well-equipped to investigate because of reduced numbers or shaky infrastructure, when sleek, Armani-clad executive heroes are few and far between because even the biggest companies have lost billions, and friends are less ready to shake hands or air-kiss on meeting, or new lovers to fall into bed together (just in case the infection is still around), and the world is financially on its knees.

 One of my writer friends said recently that it was becoming harder and harder, as she wrote her current novel, to remember what used to be normal everyday behaviour in a normal everyday world. Because that life and that world are both rapidly slipping away from our memories ... We are already adjusting to our new reality. Soon, even the most insistent coronavirus denier will find it hard to depict our world before the plague with any confidence, nor will readers believe in their now unrealistic reality.

And yes, what about reading fiction?

It seemed at first that people were eager to reach for plague fiction, for disaster and apocalypse novels, out of a ghoulish desire to mock this new reality with previous fictional versions of it.

But actually, it seems to me that people want to read about apocalypse because they are experiencing it first-hand, and instinctively need a fiction that reflects their strange and uncertain new reality.

Of course, as the horror continues, that urge may change. People may grow weary of finding reality in their fiction, and will turn to fantasy instead. Even though that 'fantasy' may simply be a contemporary book set before the virus, in the comforting pre-2020 world they remember ...

I think we ignore coronavirus at our peril as writers. (Though agents and publishers may well ask us to, fearing the saleability of any genre fiction that flirts too closely with reality.) Even historical writers may find themselves instinctively choosing plague periods for their next novels. Of course, we may all have pre-corona novels in hand, and can't suddenly introduce global death and disaster partway through a light-hearted romance or a chilling murder mystery, even though that is exactly what has happened to all of us, out here in Corona Land.

All of our lives have been INTERRUPTED by the virus and nothing will ever be the same again. How could it be?

We won't all come out from self-isolation or lockdown in four to six months and find life continues as usual. The virus may slow, but it won't disappear completely. And by then, many things we once took for granted - food chains, coffee shops, street vendors, household names, even global transport infrastructure - may have been irreparably damaged by a long income freeze or simply gone bust in the meantime. And some publishers and bookstores may even be on that list ...

I don't have any answers, I'm afraid. I only have questions.

But when we've finished writing our current books, do we continue in the same vein, as virus 'deniers' in fiction terms at least, on the grounds that most people, terrified by what is happening around them, must inevitably want to read about a world BEFORE the virus, because they find that lost reality easier and more comforting to experience?

Or do we start to write books set in the real world, in the post-virus world, where our characters and their choices reflect our own uncertainties in the age of coronavirus?

P.S. My latest publication is UNDER AN EVIL STAR (oh, a prediction!!) out last month, first in a new crime thriller series.

Only 99p/99c for the ebook.

Please consider buying if you'd like to support my writing. Thank you.

Under An Evil Star on Amazon UK

 

Under An Evil Star on Amazon com (USA)

Week Five: A Sense of Place

Is there a link between where we are when we write, and what we write?

The Romans believed in the 'genius loci' - the god or spirit of a place. But does it exist for writers too?

We are all instinctively creatures of place, we say 'Home is where the heart is,' and feel touched at some deep level by the leafy shadows within a forest or the breathtaking view from a hill or clifftop. We may no longer believe that spirits dwell in trees - the 'dryads' of classical myth - or that the ghosts of those who died there walk restlessly about our attics or along old battle sites. But the superstition is there, and it does not take much to rouse it, even in the most hardened sceptic. A whisper of cold air, and the hairs rise on the back of our necks ...

So do we, as writers, tap into this wellspring of emotion and superstition often enough?

We are often asked by editors to skimp on description of place and fill our books with dialogue instead. This makes sense, not least because the novel in the age of television cannot go back to being Hardyesque, opening on vast sweeping paragraphs of beautiful descriptive prose that beg a reader's indulgence. Page after page of dialogue instead is a technique that makes our books faster to read, slicker, more people and relationship-centred, and also reflects big screen narratives where the landscape is a visual backdrop that colours a story without words.

Yet in a book, the setting is still central to our emotional response as readers and we ignore it at our peril.

Setting is hugely important for fantasy and historical writers in particular. World-building is as much about locating a sense of place in a narrative as it is about telling us what these people believed or wore: we want to see the cloud-capped palaces above the bleak wasteland, or a still yellow ocean reflecting two moons. This is because where we are in a novel works hand in hand with who we are. A character cannot be a carefree hedonist in a harsh physical environment - or if she is, it reveals something interesting about her personality. And if we throw someone into a world where they are out of place, a 'stranger in a strange land', we create a powerful dynamic indeed and one which conjures up many striking novels.

Most writers understand the importance of place instinctively and weave it into their narratives with an easy hand. It becomes an inextricable part of their stories, so when we think of their novels, 'place' may be what comes to us first, enmeshed with the characters that inhabit it. The writer has told us who these people are by showing us so completely where they are.

'I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.'

 The opening line of I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith

On the other hand, the setting of a story can be so powerful that it threatens to overwhelm the characters. The vast, ancient and impersonal landscape of Salisbury Plain in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is indisputably larger than the humans who struggle to survive there, rather like the relentless sands of the planet Arrakis in Frank Herbert's Dune. By using such settings, we are saying something about the human condition, we are stripping people down to a level of starkness where truth can begin to emerge.

And it does not have to be about landscape, the age-old pitting of man against nature. Urban settings can isolate a character too, make them struggle for personal identity or power in a place where millions of others are involved in the same conflict. And this struggle for identity can be quirky and ironic rather than merely tragic, as here, when young Kim is dictating his letter to the letter-writer from the bazaar:

'They send me to a school and beat me. I do not like the air and water here. Come then and help me, Mahbub Ali, or send me some money, for I have not sufficient to pay the writer who writes this ... '

 Kim, Rudyard Kipling

So, being creatures of place ourselves, are we affected by our own surroundings when we write? Does our personal 'setting' as writers inform what we put down on the page? Some writers turn their writing desks to face a blank wall, ostensibly to avoid distraction but perhaps also to prevent outside circumstances feeding into internal narrative. We visit the houses of famous writers in order to ogle their likely surroundings during the writing of famous novels, and survey the view from their desks or garden seat, imagining what it must have been like ...

Personally I am more likely to write stories set in wintry places during the darker months of the year, and would find it hard to think myself into a frozen landscape in mid-August when the sun's blazing through my study window or I'm sunbathing on a beach. (I often think it must be hard for people who write only one book a year, or over several years, to deal with the seasonal shift. But maybe I'm alone in that affectation!)

Writing being a portable art, where we can scribble down a scene on the back of an envelope during the hassle of a daily commute to work, or tap away at a keyboard in a busy coffee shop, writers need to be able to block out surroundings and plunge deep into imaginary worlds without regard for what's happening around them.

But is that always possible? Or even useful, when some writers are able to soak up their surroundings like sponges and regurgitate them to great effect in their novels?

I can flick through novels I've written, and remember exactly where I was when I wrote a particular scene. Is this a common experience for writers, and if so, does it suggest a link between surroundings or circumstances and what we produce on paper?

There's a scene in His Dark Lady where Goodluck is injured, lying near to death on a barge on the Thames. I know precisely where I was was when I wrote those words: in a dark and gloomy farmhouse in Normandy, a converted mill, sitting late at night at a bench table, writing longhand with one of those storm lantern-style lights hanging above me.

Did my surroundings affect what I wrote? Yes, I think so. The scene might have been less dark and lugubrious if I'd been sitting on a hot beach at the time, or in the sunny town centre office I used to rent in the Midlands. Is this an important question? Possibly not, but it could be. It could indicate something interesting about the creative process. For instance, about the link between mind and body, between the eyes and the creative brain.

Question to writers: where do you write and does it ever influence what you write?

Answers below, and thanks for joining the debate.