Ah, 2020.
So much mis- [ and dis!]-information! And still so much truth remains unknown. So much has been conveniently hidden. Masked.
Let me give you an example. Yesterday I learned the street I lived on in Toronto was named for a ruthless slave trader. What a shocking revelation for a very exclusive Canadian neighbourhood!
So now that city officials have that knowledge, what will they do with it? Change the name entirely? Leave things as is? Put up an educational plaque to remind people of a dark and cruel part of Muddy York’s history? We’ll have to see. Meantime, for a murder mystery, what a great motive. Imagine a respectable leader of the community learning the family’s fortune has been based on slave-trading. What would that person do to keep that knowledge form being widely spread? And on the other side, how tempting it might be for someone to try and blackmail the respectable citizen! Another motive!
Character Traits
So dark histories are coming unmasked. What if, during the madness that is 2020, you learned something very unpleasant about a person you’d known for years? Maybe a family member? Maybe a close friend?
The writer of course will have to decide how soon the character reveals their ugly side. To make a villian interesting the author could describe how the character has been goaded by the stresses of worry, confinement, isolation, fear, lack of privacy, or all of them, but there are plenty of unhappy character traits the writer can unmask with the setting of of lock down.
The Masque of the Red Death
How could one have a character reveal unsuspected, unsettling parts of themselves?
Take a composite of examples from the internet: one of my characters is a composite of two people who have been frivolously sharing disinformation from uncited sources regarding everything to online safety for minors to absolutely unsubstantiated medical procedures for “curing Covid”. This character (who may end up a victim in the story) will be depicted as safely isolated from the plague and to hell with anyone else. Perhaps her penchant for not checking her sources will spell her doom?
Then there are the statistics that cite the rise of violence perpetuated by people while in quarantine. Could the pressure of all of these factors provide grist for a character’s dark actions?
Showing who they truly are
Also consider the secondary characters in the story. What are their reactions – finding themselves a bit troubled; dismayed, distancing – wondering what the hell is wrong? Asking themselves: who is this person I thought I knew? Worse: is this really who they have been all along?
Characters hiding behind a mask; imagine building this charaacter, dropping clues as who they truly areas the masks come off. What do you do during the Year of Covid?
Write.
