Peek inside my notebook to get inspired, make new connections, develop your craft, and grow as a children’s book writer.

Early in the pandemic, I was talking with my writing bestie about how the pandemic would appear in art. That was when we thought quarantine might just last three weeks, and we wondered if it “pandemic art” would be a genre or maybe more of a setting like World War II sometimes is now. Would social distancing ruin every YA novel? We had no idea it would last so long that people would be able to start and complete entire projects.

It’s hard to know when the right time to make art about the pandemic might be, especially when so much is changing so quickly, creating phase after phase inside pandemic life. During it, we’re overwhelmed. Is it possible to create something that doesn’t just feel like a highly emotional journal entry? Does it help to have some distance, or does just encourage over intellectualizing the experience? Isn’t self-expression meant to be healing? We don’t want to wait for some hypothetical future wisdom to enjoy those benefits. We didn’t reach a lot of conclusions that day, but watching art be made in such extraordinary circumstances has been a mini project for me.

Pandemic art has come in a few different flavors. There were some really cool projects that probably wouldn’t have happened without the pandemic. Entire industries like fashion are reinventing themselves in response to the last two years. Some art, like Taylor Swift’s Folklore, was made during, informed by, and inspired by the pandemic, without explicitly mentioning the pandemic. Early in quarantine, there was a trend of beloved movie and TV casts doing “table reads” of classic scripts, giving audiences a sense of nostalgia, novelty, and surrealness all at once. There are also have been a few picture books that explicitly address pandemic life, including Outside Inside, And the People Stayed Home, and Keeping the City Going. There’s even Pandemics for Babies, which honestly makes me want to just cry.

What I want to focus on here are the TV shows that gave us something we didn’t know we were craving: a look at how our favorite characters are reacting to the pandemic. Mythic Quest devoted an episode to Zoom life half way into season two. By then the characters had been well established, so the fun was in seeing each character reacting during this intense time. Some were anxious. Some were distracted by kids. Some were angsty and weird. Seeing each character in their home environment added a new layers while feeling deliciously consistent with what the audience already knew about each character. This Twitter thread about characters from The Office getting vaccinated satisfied the same craving. We know and love these characters, so we want to connect with them when we’re feeling vulnerable and scared. We want to see how they react to real life, because it helps us articulate our own thoughts and feelings. We recognize ourselves and the people in our lives in them.

What does all of this have to do with children’s books? These examples from Mythic Quest and The Office show how powerful character-driven stories are. Kids love to read book after book in a series, because it’s comforting and relatable, and grown-ups dig it too, especially during a crisis. We want to know how our favorite characters react in everyday situations (the first day of school, playing a game…surviving a pandemic), because it helps us process our own thoughts and feelings about those experiences.

We need to write characters that are so specific that we know how they’ll react in any situation. We need to know enough about them to predict how they’ll react on the first day of school, playing a game, or in a pandemic. That doesn’t mean they’re one dimensional. Their layers are revealed over time, and they’ll react differently in different situations. But their voices are distinct. They have their own perspectives and motives. The humor comes in how differently each character reacts.

Try This

Think about several characters you’ve written and imagine how each would react to meeting an alien. Are their reactions wildly different? Try writing a scene that takes place on a totally different planet and seeing how your characters react. Even just writing a sentence or two can help you see how differently each character reacts to stress and novelty.