What Will Writers Write About After the Pandemic Ends?

With such a current focus on writing about COVID-19, we may forget how to write about much else once it comes to an end

Remember when we wrote about anything and everything? Remember when we read for inspiration and ideas, to learn how to write better, and to grow personally and professionally by discovering all sorts of new things to explore?

Those were the main things that drew me to Medium in the first place. There was such diversity in terms of what was published here. The wide number of topics that writers covered was amazing to me when I first started learning about the platform. This variety was evident when you were given the list of interests to choose from when signing up.

There were posts on medicine, leisure activities, culture, food, style, travel, leadership, gadgets, technology, health and wellness, space, virtual design, arts and entertainment and of course, writing among a host of others. The sheer variety of topics represented was like a smorgasbord offering mouth watering selections to tantalize my mind and stimulate my creativity.

“Wow,” I can remember thinking. “There’s so much here, I don’t know how to narrow down the topics I want to see on my daily feed.” Writing on a platform where practically anything went, including fiction and poetry was exciting.

For the past two months, this diversity has decreased day by day. Some days it seems like I can’t find an article on anything by COVID-19. Many of these posts similar things and as time goes on the overlap among them has grown greater. And admittedly, I find it hard not to write about the topic myself. But as I recover from the virus, I admit it is practically all I think about

One of the big debates in the writing world has been about whether it’s better to write in a niche or diversify. You have those writers who swear by writing in a niche. They believe that making a name for yourself in one or two areas will gain you a loyal following because readers will know what they are going to get.

Others are committed to writing about many different topics and sometimes they also write in different genres. These writers say that it’s the variety in what you write about that keeps readers coming back for more, plus it helps the endeavor remain interesting for the writer. I have always fallen in the middle of this debate.

These days however, the “niche, no niche” debate has died down. To a large extent we’ve all become niche writers. It’s hard to find anyone at this point who hasn’t written anything on the pandemic and many writers have covered the topic in several articles while others have started writing exclusively ably it. We’ve all become niche writers but we’re all in the same niche.

This is understandable to some extent. We’ve been forced to remain in our homes 24/7 which becomes trying under the best of circumstances and which contributes to us thinking about what it is that has caused this. Then there are all the things we’ve lost due to pandemic such as jobs, opportunities to participate in activities and the ability to change locations and environments to provide experiences to write about..

We’re also getting burnt out because of all of the pandemic information out there that we can’t seem to escape. We talk and read about it constantly and because of this, we think about it all the time as well. Since our writing is a reflection of our thoughts, it’s natural that so many of us have begun writing about it quite a bit.

There are other reasons that some of us are focusing on this topic as. For some it may be a matter of trying to take advantage of the moment by producing content on the area of the hour.

Others have found that the pandemic helps them write more consistently. This is because the stress of having to choose a topic is gone.

Generating new topics daily can be one of the most stressful parts of writing. The inability to continually come up with interesting ideas to write about can become its own source of burnout. It can leave writers frustrated and unable to write for days or longer. The inability to write new work ties into self esteem and can generate impostor syndrome convincing the person that they are a fraud.

But now there’s no struggle over finding a topic to write about. Now our writing calendar looks like this:

But what happens when this whole pandemic is over? What happens when all of a sudden the topic we’ve spent so much time writing about, that provided us with the ability to get up in the morning and automatically know what we’d work on is a thing of the past? While some may turn to writing retrospectives about the virus, continuing to milk the topic, I imagine many may feel lost, becoming mired in writer’s block.

Now that this health emergency has been going on for a couple of months, the novelty of it has worn off, and we’ve all hopefully established a safe routine for going about our daily life, I think it’s a good time to expand our thinking and our writing. That’s not to say we shouldn’t continue to write about COVID-19 if we have something to say, just that this topic shouldn’t be the backbone of our writing efforts. This will help us now as well as later.

Searching for new things to write about will help continue to grow. We will go back to learning new things as we research possible topics to explore, and find new avenues and directions for our work. This means our writing will grow and expand as well.

For those who write more personal posts about their life experiences, looking within themselves and around their new boundaried lives for possible topics will lead to new discoveries and ways of coming up with things to discuss in their posts. For all of us, searching online or in books that we have around the house will help us develop new knowledge and interests and also provide a meaningful activity we can engage in regularly as the quarantine goes on.

In the future, once the restrictions are lifted and we can return to a normal life, the ability we have developed to generate new work without many external stimuli will give our writing greater depth than it had before. We will be able to integrate the external world around us with our internal world for writing that has more facets. I think that learning to generate new work without the benefit of social interactions, activities that trigger ideas and being able to observe the world around us will mean that once the pandemic is over we’ll discover there’s no end to the ideas we formulate to write about in our new world.

Natalie Frank has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and often writes about how to create a more satisfying and successful writing life. She is an editor for The Partnered Pen & One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity & Mental Gecko, both of which she created. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found here on Amazon.

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