How is Covid-19 Messing With Your Plot?

I suggest you convert your novel to either a fantasy - set in another, but similar world, or an alt-reality where the pandemic never occurred (or already has and is over with).

If you choose to place in the actual present, perhaps your story is of a musician struggling to make a living in a post pandemic dystopian world (IOW a fantasy).

I'm finishing work on my latest historical book, and then I'm going to tackle this problem in the contemporary stories I'm writing.

While I think I'm going to avoid the virus, and I'm hoping that if/when those books are published the pandemic is over … Well, everyone keeps talking about how society will change forever. And at this point none of us know what those changes will be.

I'm going to finish my manuscripts as I planned them and then let them sit for a while, to be tweaked when the world is a bit more certain, and when we know what the future might look like.

I'm lucky I have the advantage of being published in historical fiction first. You can't change the past, and it's a genre I can go back to whenever the present is this bad.

indianroads said:

I suggest you convert your novel to either a fantasy - set in another, but similar world, or an alt-reality where the pandemic never occurred (or already has and is over with).

If you choose to place in the actual present, perhaps your story is of a musician struggling to make a living in a post pandemic dystopian world (IOW a fantasy).

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All fiction is inherently a fantasy. None of it happens in the real world and nothing that happens in the real world affects it. If you don't want to write about the pandemic, don't write about the pandemic. COVID doesn't exist.

I've seen other threads that suggest not specifying a year. In your headcanon, it's 2019, or an alternate reality, or whatever. Right now it's too soon to know how the real story ends, much less anyone's fiction.

delb0y said:

And how are you dealing with it?

My current WiP is set in the present, and involves a main character being a gigging musician. Obviously right now there are no gigs...Perhaps I should set the story in 2019?

Seems to me there are an awful lot of plots that are going to have to be rethought - no international travel to many places, no bars open in which to have key scenes, lock-down here in the UK which curtails a lot of activity, sporting events cancelled, majority of non-essential businesses closed... I can imagine a lot of thriller plots set this year that suddenly don't work. Romances, too.

And for any books set a few years in the future will you include references to Covid-19?

Derek

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That's exactly what Stephen King is doing with the novel he is currently working on. He was planning on setting it in 2020, with a sort of "normal contemporary" backdrop where people do the things that have been normal to all of us for the past few years at least. But given that many things happening in this book won't work in the real 2020, he figured setting the "contemporary" clock back to 2019 works fine.

https://www.npr.org/2020/04/08/8292...feel-like-youre-stuck-in-a-stephen-king-novel

I suppose another option would be an alternative time line, but that probably makes more sense for speculative fiction than something meant to be 100% contemporary/real world.

In some ways, it might be more challenging to work this into a near-future SF novel that wasn't originally going to project or incorporate the sorts of social changes that will likely come out of this pandemic (but that we can't entirely predict at this point). Of course, that's always sort of a risk with near-future SF, because events in our contemporary world could unfold in a way that would feel odd if they are unacknowledged in the story world. When I read near future (or far future, for that matter) SF that clearly didn't anticipate some major development, I try (as a reader) to get into a place where I think of it as an alternative timeline, so it doesn't keep knocking me out.

delb0y said:

And how are you dealing with it?

My current WiP is set in the present, and involves a main character being a gigging musician. Obviously right now there are no gigs...Perhaps I should set the story in 2019?

Seems to me there are an awful lot of plots that are going to have to be rethought - no international travel to many places, no bars open in which to have key scenes, lock-down here in the UK which curtails a lot of activity, sporting events cancelled, majority of non-essential businesses closed... I can imagine a lot of thriller plots set this year that suddenly don't work. Romances, too.

And for any books set a few years in the future will you include references to Covid-19?

Derek

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What we're going through is bad, but it won't be bad forever.

I understand how you feel, but trust me, it's gonna be ok. I was working on books before and after 9/11, and I didn't change much. In the end, life went back to normal amidst a few modifications. There were small changes to daily living, but in the end, we kept on living. Your characters will do the same.

So, I suggest writing your story the way you planned it. If something related explicitly to COVID-19 comes up, it's okay to include that, but don't fret over it. No one read Ulysses thinking, "Yeah, but what about the Spanish flu?"

Roxxsmom said:

In some ways, it might be more challenging to work this into a near-future SF novel that wasn't originally going to project or incorporate the sorts of social changes that will likely come out of this pandemic (but that we can't entirely predict at this point). Of course, that's always sort of a risk with near-future SF, because events in our contemporary world could unfold in a way that would feel odd if they are unacknowledged in the story world.

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You have no idea...

My WIP is also a contemp. and also revolves around musicians. My problem is not immediate as I'm still on Book 1 which is set in 2018. But the way the story was panning out book 3 was probably going to be 2020 and they should have been on tour. Whilst the story is not set in stone as I pants this has certainly thrown a huge spanner in the works. Part of my story involves the media and using real events in addition to my fictional ones. So I either need to embrace it and adapt that entire book, or move the entire series back a few years. I will admit though, I kinda like the idea of sticking them in in quarantine together in one house and letting the sparks fly.

Mental note to make more of an effort to keep a journal so I can draw on some of these emotions later if needed...

There was a similar thread a couple of years ago about Donald Trump. Someone mentioned 9-11 above.

Your story doesn't have to incorporate current events, unless that's what you're specifically writing. You don't have to mention the year, unless you specifically do.

A huge amount of readers read to escape reality, not get bogged down in it.

A huge amount of readers read to escape reality, not get bogged down in it.

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Especially these days.

The bright side is that my book sales are up.

ETA: How has covid messed with my writing? I hate the sequester - reports around here indicate that the local police are getting heavy handed with their enforcement.

A woman, driving her car through her neighborhood, alone and with the windows rolled up, was pulled over and issued a ticket for violating the governor's stay at home order.

We were told that it's ok to walk dogs, or walk alone (with the 6 foot buffer zone), and even be in groups of 4 at the local park... but when a father took his wife and 6 year old girl to the part to play catch, 3 patrols cars arrived, and he was hand cuffed and placed in the pack of a patrol car for an hour. He was eventually released, but still - for a little girl to see her father treated that way? Not good.

So... I may start work on a modern version of Orwell's 1984.

I started a post-apoc serial several months ago, setting it in April of 20. I'm igoring COVID for that story.

I'll be working on a contemporary fantasy story pretty shortly (still worldbuilding ATM); I may refer to it, but it won't be a part of the plot.

It's messing more with my head really, my creativity got zapped three weeks ago from the stress and anxiety. I was lucky though, I have an essay due at the end of the month for my archaeology degree, so I've focused on that. Only yesterday did I begin to get the creativity back to get past my saggy-middle that started all this off.

Realistically (I work for the NHS), this first draft won't be completed until the end of the year. So potential publication won't come until this situation is long consigned to the textbooks.

- - - Up

cmhbob wrote: I started a post-apoc serial several months ago, setting it in April of 20. I'm igoring COVID for that story.

I'll be working on a contemporary fantasy story pretty shortly (still worldbuilding ATM); I may refer to it, but it won't be a part of the plot.

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Currently, I'm finishing up a 5 novel dystopian SciFi series. In it, the world has been a ruin for many generations - nations have fallen, leaving only a few walled city states. Early in the series the fall of civilization was painted using very broad strokes... and now with what we are enduring, government overreach, rationing, sequester, and the like, I'm vaguely considering a prequel that uses a pandemic as part of what brought civilization to its knees. It's at the stage of, that might be interesting and fun to write; I have a couple projects ahead of it, so I'll wait to see if the story grows strong enough that I am compelled to write it. We'll see.

My main novel project is set on an alternate Earth where magic openly exists, so I don't need to worry about current events affecting it. I do have a horror story I'm working on which is set in the real world but I intend to completely ignore COVID-19 in that too. It's not that I couldn't incorporate it, but I'm so sick of hearing about COVID-19 that the last thing I want to do is write about it, and a lot of readers probably feel similarly. Plus by the time the whole thing is written, edited, and submitted all this will probably be over and mentioning COVID-19 would just make the story quickly read as dated.

I have an uncanny situation with one of my WIPs. It's set in 2055 and the MC's a cloned Neandertal. Due to his immune system having missed out on the last 40,000 years of evolution he's susceptible to some modern pathogens. As he's been vaccinated against pretty much everything that has a vaccine (due to this problem), it's mostly cold viruses and harmless (to modern humans) bacteria that he's potentially susceptible to, and it's random which ones don't make him ill or just give him a cold, and which ones make him severely ill. I based this on research into the evolution of disease causing organisms. In the story he ends up in intensive care with pneumonia and sepsis from an illness that started off as a fever and a cough. It's a cold virus that makes him ill, plus a secondary infection with a harmless-to-modern-humans bacteria. Prompt treatment with 2055 medicine means he survives without long term physical ill effects, though it affects him psychologically. And that was all written before COVID-19 was a thing.

I shouldn't be too surprised at the similarity to COVID-19 because I did my research, and part of that was learning that cold viruses can cause some chimpanzees to get potentially fatal pneumonia while other chimps just get a cold. That is also extremely similar to COVID-19 in humans, and it's because that's what happens when things first jump the species barrier and a population has no prior exposure (natural selection, over time, will result in genes that cause increased susceptibility to be lost from the gene pool, and at the same time the pathogen adapts to survive better in the new species - killing your host or making the host severely ill reduces the chances of the pathogen spreading, especially for viruses as they can't breed outside of living cells - mild illness and symptomless spreading is favoured by natural selection.)

I've only made small changes in the story, which is because the similarity of the MC's illness to COVID-19 would not go unremarked upon by the doctors treating him. So it gets mentioned, but doesn't change the plot. But my MC won't get COVID-19 because he would've been vaccinated against it.

Making comparisons with COVID-19 does bring it home how vulnerable the MC is to infection by modern pathogens, which is a good thing as the theme of the story is ethics, i.e. how unethical it would be to clone a Neandertal. And it makes his surrogate parents/scientists who cloned him look bad. They're not bad people and they look after him well, but they didn't think things through. It's very hard not to quote Jurassic Park... "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." - it's so applicable. But as I can't quote verbatum from other writers without permission, it will have to remain unsaid. I'm sure readers will think it.

The plot of my current WIP remains unchanged. The main story (after the prologue) starts in 2105, and I only have three scenes that actually take place on Earth in that year. Additional parts of the story involving Earth take place 65 million years ago and 200 years into the characters' future.

My MC is midway through university, and is rather socially isolated for someone in that position. I already gave her a backstory that accounts for that, but the pandemic can fit into it pretty well. If I set the novel in 2022, she can belong to the cohort that started uni this year and had their normal freshers' experience disrupted. Quarantining in her room should help prepare her to participate in a story where loneliness is a major theme.

The problem of setting it in the (real) future, of course, is that none of us know what else will have changed by then. I'll need to revise the scene that's set in Debenhams, for starters.

It doesn't change a thing.
In the first novel of my series I mentioned a virus that destroyed economies and changed the world.
I'm a prophet... who knew?

I've wondered and stressed over this exact thing since I also have several stories with gigging musicians. But I think I'm just going to press on and live in a sort of denial. My stories don't work in a world with COVID, so they're some other time, past or future, depending on how things go, and I'm not going to specify the time period.

Best with your stories!

CJ

Covid has majorly impacted my speculative fiction book set in the present ... especially the travel restrictions.

I decided to let things settle down before writing the final few chapters, and instead think about how to market the book in the future.

Time well spent

Mine's set in 1989, so I've escaped it for the meantime, but I wholeheartedly agree that a good solution is just setting it in 2019 for now.

I tried querying a sci-fi political thriller last year (Spring -Early Fall 2020). It was set in the distant future, with mankind still mostly stuck on Earth. It followed an engineer and inventor who has finally cracked the secret to warp drives to get us out of our solar system to find new homes and funnel resources back to Earth.

Earth, which had been strip-mined, and was now so environmentally destitute that the air outside was unbreathable and everyone lived in closed environments.

So it was a book, that I was trying to pitch in 2020, about a world where people couldn't leave their houses without significant protection. :|