by Olyn Ozbick
As you know I have spent heaps of time since March 11 sitting in on Zoom calls, teaching Zoom classes, meeting with colleagues on Zoom, and taking Zoom courses myself. The reason I am certain you know this, is because I am as certain that you, yourself, have had the exact same experience in your own connections with the world.
And it’s all been great, right? A refreshing learning curve at first. A chance to see other faces during lockdown – my daughters for instance—finally. My writing colleagues—hallelujah. My students—hello again, yahoo!
Now of course, it’s all simply, day-in-a-life stuff, post 3/11.
Very recently I had a great Zoom opportunity, along with a group of writing colleagues, to meet a person who is legendary in the publishing word—because, wow, the connections we can now make via Zoom and internet. Ordinarily I would be chuffed to name this person, except that I’m going to disagree with them in this bit, so, you know… writerly self-preservation and all….
This legend, whom I continue to be super impressed with and would love to work with some day (just saying!) offered the following advice: Don’t write about COVID.
Wait just a second.
Whaaat?
Back up, back up!
How is that possible?
How do we writers move forward and NOT WRITE ABOUT COVID?
As I left the call thinking about this advice, what I could decipher was that it just was a bit of very well-intentioned business advice, not fully conceived.
Let me skip to a writing exercise I recently gave to my (Zoom) Creative Writing Class. John Gardner (another legend) in his book The Art of Fiction, offers up a fun little exercise:
Describe a lake as seen by someone who has just committed a murder and do not mention the murder.
Not possible, right? Not the tiniest bit possible to write a picture of a lake without injecting the emotion, the perspective, the reality of the Point of View Character having committed murder into every bit of every scene, every inuendo, mood, description, and emotion. If you know the POV character has committed murder it is THERE. Whether you name it or not. It happened, and so it pervades everything.
I actually offered my class the following homework assignment, inspired by Gardner’s exercise, even before having received the pronouncement from that well-meaning literary legend. Maybe give it a try yourself.
Describe a lake as seen by a character sitting at the water’s edge.
Now try this.
Describe the lake as seen by a character sitting at that same lake during or post the COVID pandemic and don’t mention the pandemic.
