One of the more curious aspects of creative writing – and here I’m predominantly pointing to short story competitions – is how the imagination is railroaded by the news agenda.

Real life is lived outside the highly constructed, framed and decontextualised news. What we see, read and hear on the news is framed to elicit an emotional response and many writers take the bait.

This means that hundreds, if not thousands of short story writers across Australia – in and out of creative writing mills – are churning out stories with various angles, about Covid-19.

Before that, it was the MeToo movement and before that … well, I forget because the news agenda is a moveable feast, which serves amnesia.

While currency is important for writing news, it’s a monorail for fiction. If you take a sample of short-listed stories in writing competitions across this wide, brown land, in the last 12 months, about 80 per cent of them are in some form, about the virus.

This dogged pursuit of currency is rewarded by judges of various merit and experience, who, in the main, like train drivers, don’t expect anything to come from left field. Indeed, entries which don’t focus on the virus, and its various tributaries of loneliness, alienation, angst, etc, are de trop.

So the whole of human history and existential experience is bounded by the psycho-social ramifications of the virus? Fuck me dead.

‘Write what you know’ is etched in the minds of many creative writing students but it appears many know little else but the daily news agenda.