The economics and financial strains of our global pandemic crisis cannot be avoided. We’re all feeling it. If we’re fortunate enough to be employed, our situations have still changed. Many of our day jobs have transitioned to remote-location jobs.
Except for journalists, by and large, writing has always been a remote job, so many of us already had a knack for adapting. If you write fiction, you may have already been able to write your stories without ever leaving home, although many of us made regular trips to the library or to the scenes of our fictional crimes.
In my own fiction-writing research, I always found it helpful to get the expert advice, the inside stories, through correspondence. I’ve had wonderful, insightful exchanges with medical examiners, forensics specialists, Coast Guard officers, and even an expert on obscure 19th century maritime law.
If we’re writing fiction from our own experiences, or writing worlds of our own creation, we may find we can dispense with personal interactions altogether. Even then, we may need to check details of what brands of cereal were actually available in 1970, or what the functional components of a broadsword are, or why the event horizon of a black hole stretches you into infinity as you approach it. Still, that can all be found on the internet with a little cyberspace digging (avoiding the nut sites, of course).
What about nonfiction? Memoir can be crafted from memory and internet searches. But writing a travel piece presents challenges if you can’t travel. So the versatile travel writer will adapt and tailor articles to the needs for traveling with caution in a pandemic and post-pandemic world.
We’re all on a learning curve with this remote online meeting thing, but we get a little bit better at it each time we do it. If I need to write a short article about a startup publisher in St. Pete, I could do as well as I could before. Maybe better. If I couldn’t previously justify four hours driving time, a tank of gas, and a meal for a five-hundred-word piece, I would have managed it with a phone call or two and some emails. Now, through online video chats, I can get the facetime and much of the feel of an in-person meeting, and might even have a recorded video afterwards that we both can share to our mutual benefit, something that might draw viewers to our websites.
We all want normalcy again but there’s zero chance that some things won’t be handled differently, and many ways of doing things are already experiencing a sea change. Writers, editors, and publishers need to adapt to this brave new world, and if possible, take the vanguard. Roadblocks are thrown up in our accustomed paths during this troubled time. Yet unexplored avenues and opportunities for writers present themselves. Accept them and find a new way forward.
