Pandemics, plagues and the human need to write it

Scene from The Last Judgement by Bosch courtesy of Pixabay

These are strange times we are living. I expected to write this blog post at the start of spring and write about the sorts of inspiration that spring has for writers, how to go out and observe and write about nature, or changing seasons - something on those lines. Or I would have tackled a review of the workshops on short story writing that I was involved with during Gibraltar's Youth Arts Jamboree just a week or two ago. 

Coronovirus - image courtesy of Pixabay

Now the workshops seem like forever ago, Gibraltar along with much of Europe is on the verge of a coronavirus pandemic lockdown and the world seems a far more terrifying place than it did last month. So how do writers reflect this? How do we work with this experience?

In some ways, a pandemic, like the plagues of old, give rise to countless stories.  A twentieth century example would be La Peste, by Albert Camus. We are pretty well served by apocalyptic fiction, post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction, fictional epidemics which wipe out almost all human life and others that give rise to different forms of life or even the living dead (I'm not sure we can refer to zombies as any kind of life form!). 

If reading fiction stories using these as a theme is an entertaining form of escapism, writing them is even better. Writing about disease and devastation has fascinated the world for centuries. Stories have been the means for spreading information since time immemorial. Telling stories about experiences, tales from the experiences of other nations, was how information spread from one community to the other in the days  before mass printing and, of course, the internet. Whether about real or fictional plagues, famines, diseases, war or natural disasters, people learn and explore their thoughts, emotions and ideas through stories.

We are flooded at the moment by news reports, much of it sensationalist, some of it false and misleading. What is particularly interesting now, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic the like of which has not been seen by anyone living, is that people have taken to writing about it. Writing down thoughts and experiences - whether electronically or on paper - seems such a natural response. We are recording and interpreting and communicating on a number of levels, especially when we write fictional accounts of the experience.

And, of course, I don't need to go into the therapeutic effects of writing. Even writing a diary entry of your observations on the pandemic will help to rationalise and allay those fears and anxieties, which even the most logical and calm of us will experience. Disease, plague, epidemics, pandemics - these are all emotive words. These are all situations which are extreme and which bring out some extreme reactions in people. 

Think about the scenes replayed on social media of panic buying and empty shelves in the supermarket, and of otherwise mild-mannered people fighting over a bag of macaroni. Panic spreads faster than the virus because human beings are emotional creatures; our instinct for self-preservation often over-rides our sense that self-preservation is best served through social support and communal action. What can I say? As a writer, these are all great themes to use in your next novel! But, on a therapeutic level, those fears and that anxieties and that sense of panic are better worked out on the page than in the streets.

This New York Post piece is an excellent example of what good journal writing can achieve. When you read this, it gives you an instant snapshot of what life was like in Crema in Italy during the lockdown. Perhaps writers in Gibraltar will do similar:

My Lockdown Diary

It will be interesting to see what books and films and poems and artworks emerge from the Covid19 pandemic. I would urge all writers to turn to their notebooks now. If we are having to stay at home for a period, then writing a journal of events, personal and national, would be a starting point. If the writing never goes beyond a journal entry, it will be a concrete, written record of the pandemic in Gibraltar, a part of our history. 

But perhaps, that journal entry will one day inspire a poem, a short story, a plethora of novels, a film, a painting. It will be your unique take on the Covid19 pandemic in Gibraltar, and one day it will be part of Gibraltar's literary history.

What will you be writing about the 2020 pandemic?