There are certain historical events that are impossible to ignore, world wars, 9/11, the moon landing. Specific dates that if mentioned in a book will evoke a response in the readers. They will expect to see your perspective and the characters’ lived experience through the lens of that historical event.

But even those dates above didn’t touch everyone in the world. The only thing that has done that, is the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. It’s one of the only events that has effected every continent, every country and nearly every person on the planet.

So when you’re deciding to set your book anywhere in the 2020 and even 2021 era, there is no getting around mentioning the pandemic. There are a number of ways to approach the subject, but that moment in history is forever cemented and creators now have to consider it cannon.

Do you want to write a book set during the pandemic?

The first question you have to ask yourself is “Do I want the book I’m writing to involve the pandemic?” Perhaps you have other reasons for setting your book in 2020. Reasons that don’t necessarily have anything to do with Covid-19.

So you have to ask yourself, do I have to set it during this time? Do I want to set it during this time? Would a couple years earlier or a couple years after still allow the story to be told without the “distraction” so to speak, of the pandemic.

Is the pandemic the hook?

Perhaps you feel it’s time to tell the story of those years. Some authors, have already done so. Andi Bart’s most recent novel, The Spare Room, created claustrophia for her characters and closed them in with each other using the lockdowns as the reason they couldn’t leave. Others like Nicole Chung have written memoirs, covering the medical experience of having sick parents at time when the healthcare system has never been in more turmoil.

How you use the pandemic to tell your story is up to you. But whether you choose to make it a small part of the story or the whole story, it’s going to be present.

Are you ready to remember the feelings?

Even just a few short years later, it’s easy to forget what things truly felt like. The fear, the confusion, the anger, the distrust, the hopelessness. In the U.S., Covid was just one of many, many earth-shattering events transpiring at the time. If you’re going to embody this period in your story, it’s important to get back into the mindset of those days. From the early weeks of March to the strangest holiday season any of us have ever experienced, to the Black Lives Matter protests and the election, it’s such a highly concentrated year and a deeply traumatizing one that many of us have forgotten as much as we remember about that time.

In the research phase, revisit news clips from the time, look at social media posts, if you have them, read your journals/texts/emails.

From the quarantine snack phase, the toilet paper shortage and Zoom happy hours, there’s some comedic threads for a more humorous book. Then there was also the death ticker on TV, fights in grocery stores and families split in half.

The medical industries shortcomings were on full display. Loved ones died alone and funerals were skipped. On the other hand, people started businesses, wrote books and rediscovered valuable time with their families that had been wasted driving to jobs they hated.

The pandemic wasn’t one thing. And it wasn’t one experience. Everyone was changed, but no one in the same ways.

If you’re setting your story during this time, there are so many angles to take and depending on your genre, you may see things much different from someon else.

Will you need trigger warnings?

For some people, this period is horrifically triggering. For others, they may just be ready to move on. Though you should always try to tell the story that’s in your heart, it’s important to know that a subject like this is going to isolate you from certain readers. The same way other triggering subjects like suicide, abuse, and drug use is just not going to be readable from certain trauma survivors, the same will be true for the pandemic.

This may be a new branch of use for sensitivity readers. Determining where that edge is between art and exploitation is just as important here. Are you using the pandemic for shock? For marketing? For lack of a better idea?

Making sure you have a very strong why behind your reason for setting the book in this time will help secure your sensitivity around the subject matter.

All pandemic books are changed forever.

If you’re not writing about the 2020 pandemic, but you are writing a plague book of sorts (usually in the dystopian sci-fi/speculative fiction category) then there is no escaping the fact that your reader has some experience in this area now. The world before 2020 was a different landscape and now you have to take into consideration that there’s a lot less speculation in this genre of speculative fiction.

So odds are, the next pandemic books will look very different from the ones that came before. Every one of them will be compared to what we all just went through.

During that year, shows and movies like Station Eleven, Contagion, and Utopia, came out and they were all met with a very critical audience and highly mixed reviews. If you’re trying to write the next pandemic, post-apocalyptic, infection story, your take is going to have to be unique and perhaps a little distanced from our lived experience. Too close to Covid-19 and people will feel a deep and personal connection and could be deeply critical. Too removed and it will feel unrealistic.

There’s no escaping this moment in history, so if your book is going to be set during the early 2020’s a lot of care and consideration has to be taken as you approach the subject matter (either directly or as a backdrop).