Make the most of your Aftermath

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Aftermaths

COVID is sometimes talked of as if it were a war, which it isn’t. But many have died and there will be an aftermath. Some are already living through one.

Not long after the First World War ended in 1918, the US economy in particular entered a time of great prosperity – the Jazz Age. And ‘Will the Twenties roar?’ has been a lure that’s proved irresistible to many columnists and commentators as a headline for their pieces today. We don’t know.

It’s interesting to see the explosion of literary modernist masterpieces that came after 1918. The Great Gatsby (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waste Land (1922), Ulysses, published in its entirety for the first time that same year.

A hundred years later, and here we are at the beginning of the data age. Technology has liberated many from the office, science has risen to the vaccination challenges. We can summon cars, shopping, pizza at the touch of a virtual button. Then there are the darker possibilities. Employment challenges, new strains of disease, a society permanently divided and the tensions that may bring.

LinkedIn is currently full of invitations to HR conferences about how to deal with post-COVID anxiety. Literary agents and publishers are receiving fiction manuscripts of stories that end just before February 2020 – the implication being that we have not yet, as a culture, decided or accepted how the pandemic will be treated and discussed in fiction.

Literary greatness awaits

Turning harrowing events into something interesting and attractive can be hard, but it can and must be done. See this great animation from the Tate show from a few years ago: Aftermath – Art In The Wake Of World War One. In fact, we like tension, injustice, tragedy, struggle, violence and shock in our stories. Just look at the plots of popular Netflix shows.

In 2012, the British writer Rachel Cusk created a literary sensation with her book, Aftermath: on marriage and separation, an account of the breakdown of her marriage. Not everyone sympathised with her apparent openness, but she has since followed it with the startling trilogy of Outline, Transit and Kudos, in which she appears to have invented a new literary style all of her own. Cusk is in her mid-fifties now and at the top of her game. Somewhere, a Millennial must put their arms around these tumultuous times and write the great novel of a generation. It’s time.

Client dilemmas

We are living through a period of history where inconvenient and difficult truths are being faced up to, or at least the conversation and debate about whether they should be confronted or ignored is very much alive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of our clients are wondering how best to police controversy and contention within their content.

They want to manage and control controversy but understand that erasing or steering clear of it entirely is a mistake. These are issues-driven, anxious times. If your content never references some of the pricklier topics and themes in circulation, it risks being eclipsed by content that has more fight, more heart.