When life seemed stranger than fiction, I thought of oxen
When the pandemic hit, I was in the twelfth year of writing a novel set in the near future. The long period of its composition meant the future caught up with it a number of times, forcing me to rethink and replot.
I’d last set the book aside in 2013, but I returned to it the summer before COVID-19. I was just beginning to feel a flicker of confidence in it when the first case turned up in Toronto. A month later, I put the novel aside again.
“Stranger than fiction” is a phrase that’s been on many of our lips since election day 2016, but Donald Trump didn’t make it impossible for me to write. I just made sure that, for four years, I heard his voice as infrequently as possible. I could read his utterances, but if I heard his Styrofoam-peanutfilled voice, it burned out a few of my fiction-writing brain cells.
For four years, the existence of Trump scrambled the mind of any person who made plots for a living. His excesses and their ever-complicating plot lines gave people like me a kick right in the story structure. Sean Spicer hides in the bushes only to reappear on “Dancing With the Stars?” I guess my antagonist better strangle two kittens or no-one’s gonna believe there’s evil in the world.
Trump amped up my choices when I was writing (I’m counting on Biden being a good editor); COVID-19, however, shut me down. It made writing fiction feel like shining a flashlight at the sun. When they put us into lockdown last March, I thought: Well, at least I’ll get more work done on this endless novel. Um, no. My confidence in its fictional world evaporated. COVID-19 and its massive chain of cause-and-effect — ie, its awesome internal consistency — made everything I’d written look like what it was: madeup crap.
Real life has a way of making the imaginary feel thin and that’s why writers revise: to seek the depth of interconnectedness that prevails in life, and to somehow capture some of its undercurrents. The tool is twenty-six symbols.
But fiction is stronger than the words it’s made of. When a book or story succeeds, it’s often because it touches on something that is kept in our vault of shared human experience. That odd familiarity you may feel with a text, as if you already know the secret it holds, is because of what’s in the vault. Plague stories are in it, as are stories about naked emperors and the ones about getting to high ground.
The vault contains the trope of being lost in the wilderness or in the desert and of falling in love. When we encounter some of these mythic tropes, we instantly connect to something we already know a little about. That’s what I want my own fiction to do: make the reader feel like they’re returning to a place they remember.
But the huge narrative engine of reality, during the first six months of COVID-19, outstripped my puny imaginings, and I joined the rest of the stunned race and watched Netflix. During this period, I also finally decided which company makes the best Chicago mix (President’s Choice), and I culled my T-shirts by half. I grew a garden, edited other people’s work, and had some students, but I didn’t write.
In March 2020, I was already confronting a lot of changes in my writing rituals, anyway: the previous summer I’d gotten married, and just before the pandemic I’d moved in with my wife and her two teenage sons. Soon the structure of my days changed: I had people to cook for, someone to pass my evenings with. My mother and brother live around the corner from us and connecting a few times a week for distanced walks was and still is an important survival technique for us all. So while I was not writing, I was living a story full of new extremes, a life that almost obviated the need for fiction.
I’ve tried to study my experience during this time. I’m paying attention to how I and others feel and behave amid an invisible threat. I didn’t know how that felt, even thought I’ve tried to write about it. Now I might be able to. And my fear of loneliness, which had become abstract after meeting my wife, reared up again. Fear of being alone, fear of dying alone. Just remembering the feeling of loneliness and knowing how many people were having it day in and day out. I’ve tried to keep up with friends and family who live by themselves, but I worry the sporadic contact might only be compounding their isolation. And there have been weeks when I’ve failed to reach out to anyone, feeling too steeped in worry to invite the worries of others, and this makes me feel guilty. But COVID-19 is also teaching me how limited I am.
Also, I’ve been studying the boredom. Once upon a time, it was a regular feature of life, but we’ve created almost as much distraction as we need to keep it at bay. That is, until week seven of a second winter lockdown. That’s when even literature won’t cut it. Forget television and movies. During a pandemic sitcoms have the quality of wish-fulfilment. Can I drink coffee indoors with my friends now? No? Then I’m not watching. I don’t want any more longform television either, it only reminds me how slowly the present is going.
Sometimes I think I might have to lick a battery for stimulation. The cure for that, though, is a picture I have from the late 1800s of a French family, in their home in the Pyrènnèes. It’s winter and their cramped ramshackle hut is entirely buried under the snow, and they’re stuck indoors until the thaw.
With their two oxen. When, during the COVID-19 lockdowns I think I might go mad with boredom, I think of that family. And those oxen. That life was not stranger than fiction, it was just life. So is this, for the time being. As we get closer to the end of the pandemic, which I believe is still too far off for comfort, I don’t wake with as much dread as I have in the past. I feel gratitude for my life and I’m thankful for the community of friends and family I live with.
This life is all a lot more complex and beautiful than what I can get onto the page, but it’s also been refilling me: earlier this month I went back to the novel that takes place in the near future. Some of what it’s missing is in the experiences I’ve had in these anxious times. I hope I can get it all down before the world changes again.