How Soon We Forget

In one of my recent stories, I bounce scenes through various times from 1997 to the year 2092. Without thinking much of it, I originally had a date that coincided with the 2020 Covid pandemic. However, I didn’t address the effects of the lockdown in my scenes. My daughter pointed out how disruptive it was for many people, and anything occurring during that time needed to make the COVID shutdown the background of the scene. She said it’d be like having a story set in 1942 and never mentioning there is a world war going on. I agreed with her, but in somewhat of a coward’s way out, rather than modifying anything in the story, I simply changed each year so that each scene worked around the pandemic. Maybe it was a bit of a cop out, as we used to say in my day, but I’m a big proponent of the quick and easy fix so that I can move onto the other to-dos on my list.

However, to my defense, as an IT guy, I held the strong opinion that I could have easily done every job I’ve held from my home office, saving me the sometimes up to three hours of commute time I wasted each day. And in no way taking away from the suffering and massive disruption to families during the lockdown, for me, with no children at home and at the end of my working days, I was as happy as a kid at his birthday party when I could kiss the commute goodbye. Also, as a strong introvert with mild social anxiety, being able to do what I needed to do in the quiet of my home and without people around was a relief. I know it’s probably selfish of me to enjoy a time that was miserable to so many others, but guilt aside, being honest with ourselves is something to aspire to. And, as an added bonus, the pandemic shut down allowed me to begin my new aspirations of putting pen to paper and writing the stories that had been bubbling up for years.

To my daughter’s point, if I do set a story line that coincides with the shutdown, I'll be more sensitive to the social disruptions and personal pain those months brought to so many ,and make it a part of the characters, setting, and plot. The authors of historical fiction spend hours researching the particular characteristics of the time in which they write. So too, should we who write about the times not so distance past, pay attention to the unique social, technological, political and cultural forces of the date for nothing happens in a vacuum and our characters should not be immune to the forces surrounding them.