They say explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. No one wants to do it, and the frog dies. (See footnote.)
The same might be true for reviewing the process of writing a novel.
But here we go.
I first got the idea for writing a novel about coronavirus in mid March, right after they canceled schools. Everyone was panicking. Even the people who weren’t panicking because of the virus, started panicking because of the panickers. And that’s how we, as a country, ended up with no toilet paper.
Somewhere, I saw it say this was a “novel coronavirus.” That might have influenced me. I wanted to switch it around: Coronavirus, a novel.
Plus, I figured everyone would be googling “coronavirus.” My story would be a huge hit.
As a it turned out, we stopped calling it coronavirus, for the most part. I think that was just too long. We started calling it COVID-19 instead, even just COVID for short.
I told my family. I don’t know how on-board they were with it. I talk a big game about a lot of stuff. My problem is following through on it.
But this kept coming up. I kept coming back to it, one of those nagging ideas that won’t go away.
- I wanted to be able to look back on this time and have something to show for it. While everyone else was panicking and settling into Netflix for hours at a time, I wanted to be able to think back to coronavirus and remember, “Oh, yeah, that’s when I decided to write a novel, publicly.”
- I wanted to be able to explore the fears that surrounded the pandemic, both the health side and what it was doing to our economy. I didn’t agree with how anyone was approaching things. But that made sense too, because I didn’t even know where I stood on it. I wanted to explore that from the safety of calling it fiction.
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Footnote: Turns out, it was E. B. White who wrote a version of this first. He’s one of my favorite writers. Maybe I knew that, subconsciously.
