EVEN if you end up not writing a story about it, please write down your experience of the pandemic COVID-19.
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For most of us, this is a first real experience of fear, panic, and helplessness, of this magnitude.
It’s only April, but I think that the words (and phrases) like lockdown, quarantine, PPE, social distancing, handwashing, toilet rolls, thermoscanner, facemasks, and coronapocalypse will, hands down, be The Words of the Year 2020.
Perhaps, new words will be invented like ‘coroned’, or ‘coronized’.
You have to watch out for when these things happen.
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Twenty years later, if the world survives (and I think it will), what you write now could inform the next generation about life in disaster unpreparedness, government inadequacy, and mass hysteria, among others.
I think that you should write about your personal experience, even if you don’t get sick.
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Journal about what’s said on the news.
And what’s the reality in your own home, on your own street, in your own heart.
Write about your coffee time, and the changes you have to make about it from Day One of the lockdown until whenever this thing is over.
Write about your isolation (caused by government orders), and how different this is from your usual isolation (caused by your gadgets).
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Write about the things you start to think about that you haven’t thought before.
Perhaps you can formulate a new philosophy about how to live more fully, and to love more without regrets.
It’s not too late to start a few more new year’s resolutions.
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The number of cup noodles you have hoarded is a good detail.
Or what you overheard in your panic buying.
Like those rich people who were worried because there were no more fucking rosemary for their father’s favorite steak.
What did you buy with your last P500?
Who was that who overpriced alcohol?
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This corona event will change the literary landscape of the early 21stcentury, if it hasn’t already.
It would be wise to take down notes, and do your note taking well.
I know there is still a story to come from handwashing.
(I already did a micro-story with the facemask!)
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Observe the world, and write everything down.
Some things will draw you to look more closely.
That hanky mask, that bra mask, those stupid memes.
There are stories behind those things.
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I can think of faulty scanners, the PUIs who got away, the last toilet roll, forced social distancing with the one you were one inch of kissing last week.
Stories about wipes?
Panic buying?
Being stranded somewhere?
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Doctors dying, politicians positioning, military trucks, rows of coffins, mass graves.
Empty streets, closed malls, cancelled weddings.
Mass goers drinking from the same contaminated cup, endless calls for Jesus to heal the world.
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We always speak of imagery in fiction and poetry.
Beautiful, striking images.
Beautiful because of their emotional truth.
Well, pandemia is a good time to look.
I can only think of the Little Christmas Tree when I see that only alcohol sanitizers two days-worth are left on the grocery shelves.
Other images: stupid politicians wasting test kits on their healthy selves!
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Now is the best time to flex those writing muscles.
Write If-I-Don’t-Survive-This-Shit letters.
Write your Last Will and Testament.
Say sorry to the ones you hurt like you won’t survive this plague.
Write a time capsule story.
Or not.
But take down notes.
It’s an exercise on the real writerly life. (500tinaga@gmail.com/PN)
