COVID Life Stories

As we live through COVID for a second year, I write to you from France where we’re in another month-long lockdown. This is a situation repeated worldwide in country after country. Your situation may be better, but wherever you are, you can’t help but be exposed to story after story of people dealing with—and dying from—this epidemic.

I wrote a column a few weeks ago about writing COVID stories—and the importance of doing so. If you missed it, here’s a link—give it a read: http://screenwriterspath.com/blog.php?Post=223

It’s important to remember, though, that you don’t have to have a personal story about dealing with this pandemic. Go online to your favorite newspaper, and every day there will be more than one story about a person—an official, a doctor, a prisoner, a teacher, an ambulance driver, a child—who is living through the fallout from COVID.

If you’re of a mind to write a story that involves the pandemic, I’d encourage you to read all the personal stories you can find. And then you have two avenues to a story:

[1] If you’re particularly moved by one of the stories, you can contact either the writer of the story and/or the person it was about and ask them if they’d give you the rights to dramatize their story. You can draw up a simple option agreement [I have a sample in the Screenwriter’s Path book] and you can move forward to write their story.

[2] You can use all the stories you read as inspiration to come up with a story of your own that’s set during the pandemic.

And think outside the box. Love time travel? Maybe you can write a story about a scientist whose wife dies from COVID and who uses the time machine he’s been working on to go back in time in order to stop her from being exposed… and he gets the disease instead. If I wanted to pursue a COVID idea, I’d brainstorm about 20 of them—just one-sentence summaries of my thinking—then I’d put those ideas aside for a few days. Then I’d come back and look at them with a more critical eye to select which one to pursue.

Telling COVID life stories—whether they’re true life stories or fictional ones—gives you the chance to focus on elements of this unique time in history and how these times affect your characters.

Think about it—people who lived through WWII have been constantly asked, “What was it like? ” We all want to know how people dealt with everything that was thrown at them during the war. And as a writer interested in WWII, I sure wish I could have lived during that time. But I do lots of research and use my imagination to create possible story ideas. Well, you’re actually here at a time when—in the future—people will say to you, “What was it like living through COVID?”

So give that some thought. What story would you like to tell that could be set in these times? You could end up telling a story that helps people—for generations—to know what it was like.

Copyright © Diane Lake

11Apr21

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com