Are we putting the pandemic in our novels?
When I started writing my forthcoming middle-grade novel, I thought I was so clever to write “ahead” a bit, so it wouldn’t be out of date when it was published. So I set it in 2020.
In some novels, the year isn’t important. Changing it later is easy. But in others, the action progresses day by day, holidays happen, full moons rise - and changing the year messes up everything! Writers (and copyeditors) keep a careful chronology to prevent gaffes like “the next day at school” - when the next day has to be Saturday, if anyone is counting.
The COVID-19 virus didn’t fit with my story at all. Who wants to read about kids in masks or doing Zoom school? My twins needed to be out and about, going to school and gymnastics and getting into the kind of trouble that doesn’t happen at home under supervision.
I decided to leave out the pandemic. So far about a dozen people have test-read the book, and only two asked “What about COVID?” I’m guessing that very few readers will be bothered that it isn’t there, but just in case, I’m putting a historical note in the back.
If the book is still in print ten years from now, young readers will have no memory of the worldwide panic that changed lives all over the planet.
But what do you think? Was it a mistake to leave it out?
Leaving the pandemic out of your novel was absolutely the right choice, Carol, just like focusing on the aftermath of the pandemic was absolutely the right choice in my forthcoming MG novel, The Fairy Cottage. Although, as an associate of mine said to me recently, for some of us "the pandemic never stopped," most people, especially kids, need to move on. There is absolutely no reason that every book written for kids in the post-pandemic era needs to mention it. Did every author published in the years after 1918 mention the flu? Of course not, unless the flu was central to their story. Each author has to decide whether they want their work to be topical in the moment or "evergreen." Having read an advance copy, I will tell you that I didn't even notice the missing pandemic. I was too much on the edge of my seat wondering how they were going to get home!