When I attend Zoom meetings with other writers, someone always asks if we’ll write about the current pandemic in our fiction. Invariably a couple of people reply they’re so so tired of COVID-19 that when it’s over they won’t want to write or read anything about it. They hope to move on and write stories that imagine the pandemic hadn’t happened.

Given publishing timelines, most novels published the past year were written before the authors knew about COVID-19 or anticipated its enormous impact. This winter I’ve read a few novels set in our contemporary time and have had no trouble reading about people meeting in restaurants, attending parties and generally living like it’s 2019. The only novel that jarred me was one that specified the year was 2020 and mentioned COVID-19 as a past event. I assume the author added this topical reference on the assumption we’d be done with the pandemic by the book’s fall release. My conclusion is you can write a contemporary novel that ignores the coronavirus, but it’s best to either keep the year vague or indicate that it’s set before March 2020, when only someone living a cave would have missed the great changes to our society.

Other writers in my Zoom meetings expect they will explore the pandemic in their fiction, as they would do with anything that affects them profoundly. Some have already written short stories and poems about it. COVID-19 can be central to a story or simply part of the landscape. Your protagonist might be working from home, instead of going to her office. She might engage with friends and family on Zoom, in addition to the usual phone calls, letters, emails and text messages. When she does meet someone in person, his mask–or lack of mask–becomes a descriptive detail like his hairstyle or baseball cap. She might suddenly realize she’s standing too close to him and leap backwards. The pandemic could provide our stories with fresh descriptions, until they become overdone because everyone is writing about COVID-19. There’s a risk of saturating the market with too many coronavirus stories for readers who will have largely put the pandemic behind them.

Writers can avoid dealing with all this by setting their stories after COVID-19, which, hopefully, won’t be far in the future. But, in the post-pandemic world people won’t necessarily be partying like it’s 2019. How soon will it be before we’re comfortable shaking hands with strangers and hugging acquaintances we meet? Will we stop doing these things for good to avoid catching all kinds of viruses? The common cold can drag someone down for weeks. The regular flu can kill. Is a handshake worth the risk? For these same reasons, will stores maintain some of their protective measures–plexiglass at the checkout counters, socially distanced lineups, one way aisles and hand sanitizer stations? Will buffet dinners be a thing of the past? Will airlines require passengers to keep wearing masks on planes or will most passengers choose to to wear them to avoid sharing diseases? Writers will need to know these details if they send their character to an exotic location or to the grocery store.

This makes me think that writers of realistic contemporary fiction will have to deal with the pandemic, whether they want to or not. I suspect that when we’re over COVID-fatigue most writers will find themselves processing the experience in their memories and work. Already, I feel a bit of nostalgia for the early days of COVID when few people wore masks in public and grocery store shelves were often picked clean of canned goods, frozen vegetables, milk, eggs and, of course toilet paper. One store I went into had a clerk guarding a stack of toilet paper to make sure no hoarders grabbed an extra package. That’s a detail future readers of COVID-19 stories will find bizarre and informative about our pandemic.

One of my projects for this winter of COVID-19 is to clear clutter from my house. I’m starting with boxes of writing stuff I’ve accumulated during the past 30 years. So far, I’ve filled several recycling bins with papers, although I’m still holding onto more than I should.

Easy to dump are old query letters to publishers and their form rejection letters. I’ve never understood writers who talk of papering their den walls with rejection letters for inspiration. My instinct is to shove the depressing messages out of sight, although rejection has prompted me to write better, and still does. I am keeping the occasional rejections that complimented my writing and place them in a binder with other encouragements I received on my journey to publication.

I’m also throwing out critiques of chapters from novels that I subsequently revised and published, since there’s no point in rereading the comments now. In the pre-digital days of writing classes, we had to print copies of our submissions for each of our classmates to scrawl comments on. That’s a lot of paper for my recycling bin. Now and then a page of positive remarks by an instructor or writer-in-residence jumps out at me. I add these to my encouragement binder. It turns out this de-cluttering project is partly about jettisoning negative and irrelevant memories, while preserving ones that boost my spirit.

Stuff I can’t bring myself to toss out includes notes and newspaper clippings that might have value for future writing projects. I file these in boxes and folders with labels so I can find them easily when I want. If I ever move to a smaller place, I’ll instantly get rid of my folder for the mythology workshop I didn’t understand at the time, and still find baffling from my perusal of the notes. For now, these folders and boxes don’t take up much space on my shelf, where they’ll stay until I’m ready to dive into them or downsize.

The best finds are bits of clutter that might have an immediate use. I created folders for my current novel-in-progress, my next three story ideas, editing, and book promotion and tuck relevant notes and clippings into the folders. For instance, my germ of an idea for next mystery novel includes a ghost in ways I haven’t figured out yet. This prompted me to hold onto a comment by a creative writing instructor about Shakespeare’s Hamlet. ‘The ghost is a catalyst, and is the ghost telling the truth?’ When I sit down to write this novel, this question about Hamlet’s ghost might or might not trigger thoughts about the ghost in my story. If it doesn’t, I’ll send the instructor’s observation to the recycling bin or to another folder, where it might apply.

Also useful in the near future is advice for presenting my work in public. I’m collecting my scattered notes and handouts on this topic into one labelled box, along with printouts of past readings I’ve done. One tidbit of advice that I’ve taken to heart is to not read from the book itself. A printout of the scene enables me to enlarge the font for easier reading, revise the scene for audience interest and engage better with listeners than I can with my nose in the book. The next time I’m called on to do a literary reading I can leaf through printouts for a scene that suits the occasion and refresh myself on the advice, conveniently located in one place.

Nowadays, advice for public presentation tends to focus on Zoom and similar platforms. A couple of months ago, I attended an excellent webinar on this subject and made handwritten notes. The ‘Readings’ box will be the logical place for the notes, if I can find them in my recent piles of writing clutter.

Happy Holidays, however you celebrate this year!

Some years ago, I participated in a reading event at a local bookstore. The theme was short stories. During the question and answer period, an audience member asked the bookstore owner if people bought short story collections. He answered, “No, even when the author wins a major award.” His example was the recent winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s glitziest literary award for fiction. A Giller win typically results in a huge boost in book sales, but his customers weren’t interested in buying the winner’s short story collection.

Giller Prize glitz

Short stories used to be popular. In the 1950s and 60s, writers could make a living by publishing them in magazines. When I started writing around 1990, big mainstream magazines like Redbook and Seventeen included a short story per issue. Neither magazine now publishes in print. A friend who writes short stories says that today online magazines provide many opportunities for short stories, but they often don’t attract readers.

My writing has focused on novels, but I got into short stories in my first creative writing class. Short works suit a class or workshop structure better than novels do. I suspect the proliferation of classes is one reason the short story genre has survived. A student can write a story in a week, the class critiques the whole work in an evening, and then the student revises and submits the story to journals that exist to publish the work of emerging writers.

I’ve enjoyed writing short stories for reasons other than the relative speed from start to completion. They’ve been a chance to experiment with styles, characters and locations I couldn’t sustain in a novel. I’ve written short stories with magic realism, a sociopathic narrator, and settings I’ve visited but don’t know intimately. Other stories have led to novels. My series mystery sleuth, Paula Savard, had her origins in my short story, Adjusting the Ashes, about an adjuster dealing with a wacky insurance claim.

The best explanation I’ve heard for the decline in short story readership is that television killed it. People in the mood for a short fictional experience have the option to relax with an evening drama or comedy. I’m guilty of choosing these over reading. I wonder if short story writing has responded to the drop in readership by shifting away from popular fiction toward poetry, which tends to be less satisfying to general readers.

Short story exceptions that prove the rule include Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam. Sales of the book took off after it won the 2006 Giller Prize. A literary pundit noted that this collection of linked stories about medical students reaped the Giller benefits because the writing is accessible, the characters relatable and the stories have plot. Another exception is E. Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, a long short story that had enough going on for it to be adapted into a hit movie, although I don’t know how many people read the excellent short story.

My home province of Alberta, Canada, played the role of Wyoming in the movie, Brokeback Mountain

Enterprising authors say the practical value of short stories today is to use them to draw readers to your novels. You can produce and sell a short story e-book online for 99 cents or offer it for free. If readers enjoy the story, hopefully, it will lead them to buy your novels. I’d like to try this one day with a couple of my longer works. Perhaps foolishly, I would also like to gather the stories I’ve written and published over the years into a short story collection, even if nobody reads the book.