Friday, July 10, 2020

Pandemic: inciting incidents

I posted this on social media a while back, but I keep thinking about it. There's a long history in children's literature of war, disease, natural disaster, or some other catastrophe providing inciting incidents in stories, often within the first ten pages. A few examples:
  • In The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the Pevensie siblings leave their home in London to stay at Professor Kirke's relatively safe house in the country "because of the air-raids" of World War II.
  • In The Secret Garden, Mary Lennox is sent from her home in India to the house of an uncle she's never met in England after both her parents die in a cholera epidemic.
  • In The Borrowers, the unnamed Boy who has lived in India gets rheumatic fever when he comes to England for the first time; he is sent to a great-aunt's house in the country to recover.
  • In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy Gale doesn't make it to the safety of the cellar in time and a huge cyclone carries her and her Kansas farmhouse away.
  • In the Tripods novels, Will Parker is about to be Capped when he hears about a society of humans resisting the alien entities that have enslaved the Earth.
  • In the Series of Unfortunate Events books, the three Baudelaire siblings are cast into -- well -- a series of unfortunate events when their parents die in a mysterious fire that burns their house to the ground.
  • In The House With a Clock in Its Walls, Lewis Barnavelt goes to live with his Uncle Jonathan after his parents die suddenly in a car accident.
I could cite more examples, because there are gobs of them. But I wonder: how many kidlit books of the next 20 years will use the COVID-19 pandemic as an inciting incident? It would definitely work as one. Kids being stuck inside, masking up to go out on necessary trips, parents being out of work or being forced to work in dangerous conditions through the pandemic, not being able to go to school or visit friends, having to jerry-rig all kinds of things to keep them working, getting sick, family members getting sick, parents or grandparents sickening or dying, etc., all sound like plot points that create the sort of change that pushes Our Heroes into action. I don't think it's a question of whether the pandemic will be used, but how often.

The Secret Garden book cover

No comments: