Telling Time Differently: Coaching the Fiction Writer in a Post-Pandemic World

The pandemic did not just disrupt our public health systems and social rituals—it altered the very texture of time. Days collapsed into each other. Months disappeared into blankness. The rhythms of daily life, once shaped by commutes, seasons, or family rituals, were thrown into disarray. For many, time became foggy, recursive, disjointed. And long after lockdowns lifted and headlines shifted elsewhere, that temporal distortion lingers—quietly reshaping how we remember, how we plan, and how we tell stories.

Fiction has begun to reflect this eerie elasticity of time. Novels written in the post-pandemic world often reject linearity. They favor fragmentation, circling, or temporal layering. They evoke a sense of haunting rather than progression. And they do so not through overt reference to COVID-19 itself, but through the lingering psychological atmosphere it created: the feeling of being both suspended and disoriented in a world that no longer moves according to familiar clocks.

For writers working in this moment, articulating that altered sense of time can feel daunting. The instinct to “return to normal” often clashes with the deeper truth that the old sense of normalcy no longer applies. Here is where book coaching services become more than editorial guidance—they become a vital part of a writer’s process in understanding what kind of narrative they are really building.

Book coaches offer support not only in shaping plot or polishing language, but in helping writers make sense of the intuitive choices they are making. A coach might notice that a manuscript keeps looping back to a moment in the past—not as a structural flaw, but as an accurate echo of how pandemic-era memory works. They might help a writer who feels “stuck” in the middle of their novel realize that the story isn’t progressing not because the pacing is off, but because the protagonist (and perhaps the author) is caught in a psychological loop that needs to be explored, not rushed through. In this way, book coaching isn’t about pushing the manuscript toward resolution, but about helping the writer honor the strange, nonlinear experience they are trying to evoke.

Take, for instance, Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, a novel published after the height of the pandemic but infused with its ghostly sensibility. The book doesn’t mention COVID-19 directly, yet its fragmented structure, multi-perspectival format, and recursive reflections on memory and identity feel utterly of this time. Similarly, Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts imagines a dystopia where silence, fear, and familial separation take center stage—resonant themes in a world shaped by isolation and state control. These books aren’t “pandemic novels” in any overt sense, but they are deeply shaped by the pandemic’s effect on time, selfhood, and cultural rhythm.

Writers inspired by this new narrative landscape often find themselves with intuitions they struggle to articulate. They might write pages that feel emotionally charged but formally ambiguous. A book coach can step in to help translate those instincts into purposeful decisions. Is the fragmented structure working to mirror the protagonist’s dissociation, or does it need clearer transitions? Is the novel’s refusal to move forward part of its artistic logic, or is it concealing an avoidance of deeper emotional material? A coach doesn’t impose answers—they help the writer ask the right questions.

Another key way book coaching helps in this post-pandemic moment is by addressing the sense of disorientation many writers feel around what stories are “worth telling.” During the peak of the crisis, many authors paused their projects, unsure whether their work still mattered. Even now, writers may carry quiet doubts: Does this story still hold weight in a world so changed? Is it selfish to write about personal memory when public catastrophe looms?

A coach helps put these fears in perspective. They affirm that literature has always emerged from rupture—war, illness, migration, revolution—and that fiction gains its power not by offering answers, but by making space for ambiguity. A coach encourages the writer to embrace what feels unresolved in their work, not to resolve it prematurely for the sake of marketability or clarity. They help writers navigate that uncertain terrain with confidence.

They also serve a logistical function that is more vital than ever in an era of fractured attention. With routines shattered and digital distractions ever present, many writers struggle to maintain a steady practice. Book coaches provide accountability, structure, and pacing—not as taskmasters, but as collaborators invested in the author’s long-term vision. They help restore a rhythm to the writing process that echoes the deeper work the author is doing to recover a sense of narrative time.

Writers who engage with book coaches during this period often find that they are not just finishing books—they are deepening their understanding of how fiction can operate. Stories that initially felt murky or overly experimental begin to reveal their emotional logic. A coach acts as an interpreter, not of theme alone, but of form—reading not only what a story is saying, but how it is choosing to say it.

Book coaching services are especially valuable for writers who do not wish to write “pandemic stories” in any obvious way, but who sense that their characters, settings, and temporal structures are nevertheless shaped by the emotional residue of the last few years. Whether the novel takes place in a near future, a remembered past, or an entirely fictional world, the pandemic’s shadow might still inflect how the protagonist navigates change, how time is depicted, or how isolation is rendered. A coach helps the writer trace those undercurrents and bring them to the surface—not to make the story “about COVID,” but to allow it to speak more honestly to the moment in which it was born.

Fiction will continue to evolve in response to the slow, strange reckoning that began in 2020. We will see more novels that echo this temporal disruption, more stories that value stillness, interiority, or repetition over momentum. We may see characters who resist change, not because of weak plotting, but because they are still grieving the collapse of an imagined future. These are not signs of narrative failure. They are signs that literature is doing what it has always done: absorbing and refracting the truth of lived experience through the shapes of story.

In such an environment, the book coach becomes a quiet but essential partner in literary innovation. Not a gatekeeper, but a guide. Not a fixer, but a listener. The pandemic has changed how we think, how we move through time, and how we tell stories. Book coaches, when at their best, recognize this. They help writers find new forms that speak, honestly and unflinchingly, to where we are today.