The Novel of the Future

Forget flying cars. Will there be handshakes?

Hi friends,

Even though I do not celebrate Star Wars Day, I am not anti-science fiction. (Yeah, yeah, it’s science-fantasy, I know.) In fact, I have a deep and abiding love for Star Trek, especially TNG, and for space opera and futuristic fiction in general. I doubt I’ll ever write it, but I love reading and watching it.

The problem I’m running into, though, is when to set the next thing I’m writing: pre-coronavirus, or post-coronavirus?

There’s nothing specifically timely about the thing I’m working on. It’s not about government or elections or the unceasing march of climate change or even the Olympics or a sports team or the Oscars or anything tied to a specific date. Well, there might be birding in it, so I think it will be set around Spring or Fall migration or be book-ended by those things. So, should it start in the Spring of 2020? 2019? If I ever finish it and it ever sees the light of day, it could be 5 years before it comes out. Will 2019 feel like a historic artifact, frozen in amber? Will 2020 be full of meaning all by itself, like 1929, 1941?

Some of the small questions I know I’ll have to answer are: When was the last time my characters went to an airport, rode a bus, took an Uber? Do they have jobs? Is their home safe? Is their family safe? Did anyone they know die? Did they get sick? Do they hug their friends now? Do they still have masks at the bottom of their purses? Does their rather large but not huge Southern city have completely new leadership now? Who is the president?

Did they drive by a hospital on the way to Costco and see a refrigerated truck outside, generators humming? Are they still anxious going into grocery stores? Is there bitterness between them and their parents, after months of fighting about social distancing? Are their kids in school? Is there school?

Did they take up any new hobbies? Did all their plants die? Have they made bread since, and did it feel weird, like eating pumpkin pie in June? Did they quit their gym because they bought an exercise bike, tucked in the corner of the basement?

Or did they get evicted? Were they or someone they knew an essential worker? Did they babysit their neighbor’s kids because they were an essential worker and daycare/school was closed for 6 months? Did they worry about getting the virus from the ice cream truck guy who wasn’t wearing a mask or gloves? Did they lose touch with all their friends because they hated Zoom and the group chats got to be too much? Did they love Zoom and get closer to their friends?

Is there a vaccine? Does it work?

I could go back and read the think pieces about The State of the Novel after basically any major US event: post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-2008, post-2016. They all feel a little stale now, since we know what happened next. The novel did whatever it was going to do and eventually we moved on to the next worry about The State of the Novel. I know this ground has been well trod and any one decision any one of us makes about our one novel will not matter, except to us as we’re writing and the reader when they read the first page and we indicate The is a Novel of The Before or This is a Novel of the After. But still, we have to make that decision and it is just one of the many decisions we have to make when we start out writing.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do yet. It will be easier to set it in The Before, in 2019, before we had any idea any of this would happen. I worry it will feel like it feels sometimes when I read a novel set purposefully before cell phones because the existence of such would make the plot moot. It’s too easy. I don’t want to make a too easy choice. But I also don’t know how to write the future.

Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking about this week. I hope you are all well. That you can still be safe even as our governments ignore our safety. Take care of yourself and one another.

OXOXOX,

Kate