Plotting the Pandemic… or Any Other Catastrophe-Movie

Talk at MCH2022

Only three years ago you wouldn’t have had a chance to get this so-called reality past any decent editor. Now, plotting a book or movie has become increasingly hard and the next years in publishing will be interesting, since our standards in what is scary or believable or how dumb can one be to do XY as a book character, to get into whatever problems, have tremendously changed.

I’m an author, writing crime novels and scifi and during the last three years, some collegues and I have often said the phrase „if this was a book, you wouldn’t get that past an editor“. But it seems, our standards on what is real, believable or doable have changed somewhat over the pandemic. This does not only afflict society itself (fake news, mobs, conspiracy myths etc.), but also (pop) culture and the its creators like authors of books or movie scripts. I have no forecast, on where we might end up or if movies and books will return to story worlds of our old believes, but I can share musings about society, tech and humanity’s deepest desire in stories and authors who have to face a different kind of basic understanding of the world to start from when writing stories.