Readers always want to know what ended the world. Nuclear war. Plague. Climate collapse. AI. The event itself matters, but not as much as what it sets in motion. In post-apocalyptic fiction, the collapse fades faster than expected and leaves behind outcomes that are both obvious and easy to miss.

No matter how dramatic the end, it quickly becomes background. In most enduring stories, the apocalypse happens off the page or long before the narrative begins. Think of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. What happened is hinted at, never described. Because it doesn’t really matter. The novel isn’t interested in the mechanics of collapse. It’s interested in the lawlessness, the violence, and the daily effort required to stay alive afterward.

The aftermath is the real subject.

What happens when the systems that quietly hold modern life together disappear and do not come back. When money stops working. When there are no police, no hospitals, no supply chain refilling shelves overnight. What remains once it’s clear that normal is gone for good.

A surface reading suggests that the inhabitants of these worlds are worse off. In many ways they are. But there is a subtler undercurrent running through post-apocalyptic fiction. The suggestion that some parts of life might actually be better without all the machinery we’ve built around it. Phones. Feeds. Money. Metrics. Expectations. Most adults, if they’re honest, have imagined stepping away from it all. A skilled writer can sketch an almost idyllic existence nestled alongside violence and vulnerability. It’s a dangerous fantasy.

My upcoming short story collection features a few characters who are trackers. Bands of younger people who hunt through the soft decay of the previous world for anything still useful. In the After the Second Wave world, batteries, fans, filters, and books that haven’t rotted away are worth carrying. Their lives are basic and uncluttered. Find what you can. Bring it back to the community. Sleep under the stars. Eat when there’s food. Move all day. No social media. No news cycle. No retirement plans.

Which is why I’m always a little envious of my characters. Sure, they don’t have air conditioning or Amazon Prime. But they do have time, and the ability to focus on what is directly in front of them.

Strip away the noise, the metrics, the constant sense that we are behind, and survival itself begins to look like clarity. These characters don’t get to optimize their lives. They don’t curate or perform them. They wake up, solve the problems immediately in front of them, and go to sleep tired in a way that makes sense. It’s odd to think that it takes an apocalypse to make this visible.

When I am feeling creative, ideas for characters, worlds, situations, and stories appear constantly. Inputs are everywhere: a great movie character, a strange news item, a walk around the block. But how long should a raw idea sit before it can turn into a story? In a perfect world, we would dream of a story at night and write it in the morning, like McCartney and Yesterday. But most ideas need time to germinate in the back of the mind.

George Saunders has talked about how “The Semplica Girl Diaries” stayed with him for fourteen years before it finally worked. He circled it for ages, constantly pruning until the real story emerged. His experience suggests that some ideas need a long stretch before they can be touched. Diane Cook describes taking notes on The New Wilderness for a few days, then shelving the idea for years. When she returned to it, the world of the book had settled enough for her to enter it fully.

I can relate to the slow-germination approach. Two stories in my upcoming collection After the Second Wave lived in my head for years before I wrote them. One involved a young boy on a landfill overhearing a conversation he cannot understand. Another followed a young man trying to reach the crypto paradise of West Palm Beach. The finished stories drifted far from the initial sketches, but at a high level they stayed true. Both ideas needed about two years before they found their way into something coherent.

So what happens during those two years? Pattern matching. The idea sits there, incomplete, like a puzzle missing a few essential pieces. Then one day another idea or event clicks into place and the pattern snaps into view. It feels sudden, but the mind has been searching for those missing pieces all along. In the case of ATSW, the missing piece was the family at the heart of it.

I am experiencing this now. I have wanted to write my own take on John Cheever’s The Swimmer for years but never saw “the hook”. Thanks to a recent life event, the elements I needed emerged. My mind had been running a quiet background process for a long time, waiting for the right puzzle piece.

Related Reading

Further reflections on how ideas, place, and continuity shape creative work.

• The Geography of Daily Life: How Place Shapes Stories
• Through-Lines: What Holds Stories Together
• Reading in Rhythm: How Mood Shapes Our Relationship with Books

I’ve written before about how mood affects reading, and how immersion influences writing. But what else shapes our stories? Emotions, the time of year, the room we write in. My unfinished novella was drafted in the early days of the Covid lockdown, and it carries all the tension and fear that hung in the air. How does my daily world find its way into my work?

I don’t write in a quiet New England hut or on a secluded island retreat. My days feature commutes, New York City, and suburban strip malls. Moments of grandeur tinged with decay. This isn’t neutral background noise, it conditions how I imagine fictional worlds. It shapes imagery, restlessness of characters, claustrophobia, the urge to escape, and a feeling that something is off beneath clean surfaces. No wonder I gravitate toward post-apocalyptic stories and settings.

The New Jersey suburbs carries a sense of the uncanny, an uneasiness buried beneath rows of similar houses and weedy lawns fed by gallons of clean water. The dreamlike monotony of sameness sits next to an awareness that all of it might be built on something rotten. Aging pipes, crumbling roads, dated schools, overstretched pensions, the illusion of safety and order. Is a post-apocalyptic world looming in the future, or is it already here, hidden beneath Dunkin’ Donuts plastic?

Commutes create liminal spaces. Ferries are a perfect example, suspended between home and the city, crossing water, physically and mentally in between. The subway is the opposite: nose to armpit with strangers, hot, held up by delays, engulfed by the steady decline of the system itself. Riders shutting down, wishing they were anywhere else in the world. These in-between spaces seep into my writing and create that drifting, epic quality. Characters become people who exist between worlds but never fully belong to any of them.

And then there is the streets of Manhattan. Everything all at once. Crowded streets, endless sirens, horns, the shouts of mentally ill. Sensory overload, followed by an instinct to retreat inward, to write inward, and search for quieter thoughts and clearer prose as a way to push back against the noise. I came up with the idea for my first story, The Inspector’s Legacy, while sitting on a bus outside the Port Authority in New York City, picturing the streets covered in ten feet of sea water.

So it’s no surprise I keep writing characters who bounce between solitude and entanglement. Characters who wrestle with the tension between isolation and connection, and never resolve it cleanly. Modern infrastructure becomes mythology. Ferries, highways, bridges, and subways turn into ancient runes. The built world becomes a relic. And in that relic I keep finding new stories.

Related Reading

Essays exploring environment, attention, and the conditions under which stories form.

• The Half-Life of Ideas: How Stories Change Before They’re Written
• What Writers Mean When They Talk About Immersion
• Rediscovering Bookstores

Part 1 – Definition and Examination

When I first began writing, I was preoccupied with defining my genre. I never reached a definitive conclusion, but the process led me to study genre conventions more deeply—especially post-apocalyptic (PA) fiction, with its thematic clarity and recognizable structural patterns.

PA narratives often follow a familiar framework. There are foundational expectations, and beyond those, a set of recurring tropes that many stories employ—whether out of tradition or narrative necessity. Below is an examination of these patterns through a small, modern selection of works from both literature and film. This is not a “best of” list, but rather a personal frame of reference. With the exception of The Last of Us, these stories avoid zombies—an adjacent subgenre with its own distinct conventions.

Works considered:
The Road
Station Eleven
The Way
The Ancients
Children of Men
The Last of Us

(Note: I refer only to the film/TV adaptations of The Last of Us and Children of Men, not their original source material.)

Baseline Expectations
Every PA narrative begins after an identifiable collapse. This event—whether political, biological, environmental, or technological—marks a distinct rupture between past and present. In some stories, the collapse is explained in detail (The Way, The Last of Us); in others, it remains vague or entirely unspoken (The Road). Regardless, the precipitating event is the foundation upon which the genre is built.

A second baseline is the persistent presence of the old world—its remnants and ruins. Crumbling infrastructure, obsolete technology, scavenged literature, and decaying cities appear across nearly all PA stories. These elements serve as more than setting; they allow the narrative to reflect on the excesses, values, and failures of our current world. The contrast between what was and what remains creates a kind of cultural estrangement, often evoking both nostalgia and critique.

Together, these two components—collapse and relics—form the minimum narrative architecture of PA fiction.

Common Tropes
The Traveling Band
A commonly used device in the genre is the journey: a group of characters traveling through a devastated landscape toward a defined destination. This structure serves several purposes. It provides narrative momentum and allows characters to encounter the full range of post-collapse society—its dangers, its ruins, and its rare moments of order. It also echoes older narrative traditions: pilgrimages, wartime marches, and epic quests.

In most cases, the journey becomes a test of character and endurance. Through this movement, the story explores survival, morality, and shifting interpersonal dynamics.

Examples:
The Road, Station Eleven, The Way, The Last of Us, Children of Men

The Safe House
Closely linked to the journey is the Safe House: a temporary refuge offering physical safety and mental reprieve. These moments often mark a turning point in the story. They allow for recovery, reflection, and sometimes revelation. The characters regroup, reassess, and prepare to continue. Dramatically, these spaces slow the pace and offer interior depth. The bunker in The Road, for instance, represents a brief return to comfort—highlighting how rare such moments have become.

Examples:
The Road, The Way, Children of Men

The Cure
The Cure appears where the apocalypse is tied to disease or biological transformation. It is often literal—a vial, a person, or a set of instructions that must be protected or delivered. It serves as both a plot device and an ethical question: What does it mean to save a world that no longer resembles the one that was lost?

This trope frequently intersects with both the traveling band and the safe house, adding layers of urgency and reinforcing themes of sacrifice, hope, and preservation.

Examples:
The Way, The Last of Us, Children of Men

Related Reading

Reflections on genre, structure, and how familiar patterns shape narrative meaning.

• Post-Apocalyptic Tropes, Part Two
• Through-Lines: What Holds Stories Together
• The Half-Life of Ideas: How Stories Change Before They’re Written

In Part 1, I described my current Irish jag. Earlier in the year, I did an immersion in Japanese books and streams (also unintentional). The Japanese list:

-Shogun

-Pachinko (Korean, but set largely in Japan)

-1Q84

-More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

-Hard Boiled Wonderland and End of the World

-Tokyo Vice

Similar to the Irish immersion, the primary effect was a wish to visit Japan, a place I’ve never been. Crowded yet orderly Tokyo streets bathed in neon, misty shrines, long hikes up mountains and through prefectures, everything.

I am disoriented, though, after hearing and reading (translated) Japanese dialogue. While I love Murakami books I always found his dialogue strange. Like something out of bad 1950s movie. Lots of “Hey man,” or “… in a way of thinking”. This discussion on Reddit picks up examines the issue.

I know little regarding translation, but understand the translator matters. The odd or flat dialogue may be translator choices or the inherent difficulty in porting Japanese dialogue. This dialogue is evident in most Murakami novels (with different translators) as well as stories from Kazuo Ishiguro. The strangeness of the dialogue is magnified when compared to spoken Japanese in any of the above listed shows and movies. Japanese is lyrical, full of inflections, and a beautiful listen. The flatness must come from the translation.

The lack of translation from Irish literature (excluding any written in Irish) lets Irish dialogue jump off the page. I can hear and revel in the lyricism. As a native English speaker, the same doesn’t happen with written Japanese dialogue. Hearing it makes the gap feel wider.

Related Reading

Additional essays on focus, continuity, and the experience of sustained reading.

• What Writers Mean When They Talk About Immersion
• The Geography of Daily Life: How Place Shapes Stories
• The Half-Life of Ideas: How Stories Change Before They’re Written

The best way to learn is to immerse yourself in a subject. Tyler describes a deep reading process. I’ve followed this path over the past few months in a deep Irish “content” jag. I’ve either read or watched

• Normal People
• There are Little Kingdoms
• The Stinging Fly
• Say Nothing
• Cheap Irish Houses
• In the Land of Saints and Sinners
• The Great House Revival
• Bad Sisters

The primary effect of this immersion is a desire to hole up in a cottage in Donegal with my iPad, printer, and notepads and churn out great literature. Soak in the landscapes and split G’s every night at the local pub.

On a more practical level, I notice the lyricism in dialogue. Not Shakespearean iambic pentameter or Mamet’s famed dialogue, but an Irish way of speaking. Even my flat ear can hear the music jump off the page with wonderful jumps and inflections. The dialogue sings in my head.

Sadly, this hasn’t touched my writing. Too many years of living in NJ with our fast-paced, rhotic speech pattern. A lengthy corporate career. My dialogue is realistic but not interesting. Maybe I need a cottage. Or a Guinness.

Related Reading

More thoughts on attention, presence, and how readers engage with stories.

• Immersion, Continued: Attention and Presence in Fiction
• Reading in Rhythm: How Mood Shapes Our Relationship with Books
• Through-Lines: What Holds Stories Together

I began writing fiction during the pandemic. Without travel, gym trips, or work commutes, mornings were the same. I established my morning writing routine; 500 new words per day wedged in between Morning Pages, meditation and a bike or run.

I carried this routine into the immediate post-pandemic world, featuring brief trips in hotels for soccer tournaments, occasional commutes, etc. I wondered if changing the routine but keeping the commitment would unlock creativity (no!). Fast forward to now; as work and life speeds up past it’s previous velocities, the unbreakable daily commitment faltered.

Writing is harder now. Specifically, it is challenging to find the right time and mindset. I still carve out at least 30 minutes for “writing” each morning, but under the pressure of making the ferry and a full day of potential work issues… the needed focus isn’t there. Often I skip writing these mornings.

Writing while away is also hard. Once I broke this unbreakable promise to myself, writing while on vacation with family or friends became an impossible obstacle. And I can only beat myself up so much about it… what’s more important in the long run, scribbling down dialogue between two imaginary people or playing with my niece?

But I feel empty or guilty every day I don’t write. The original mandate to write everyday mandate came from Tyler Cowen. Granted, Tyler writes non-fiction, but is prolific and so good. The other voice scolding me is Julia Cameron, who I leaned on when I started. Hard to argue against keeping the muscle very active and tuned and supplying a large supply of material.

I used to think I needed a mythical writer’s getaway; alone in a cabin in the woods with nothing to do but write for weeks on end. Now I know better. I’d benefit from a routine allowing a couple hours of daily writing and follow-up time (editing, seeking feedback, blog writing) for a handful of hours each week.

I’ve often referenced After the Second Wave, an in-progress collection of post-apocalyptic short stories. The project is moving along, albeit slowly with a writing coach and editor. Progress is slow because my original versions of these stories weren’t very good. The feedback process, combined with a full workload and family, takes time.

I’m not only getting feedback on the individual stories. Not only am I getting feedback on the individual stories, but I am also being challenged to consider how the collection should present as an overall piece. I’ve thought of it as a bunch of stories held together by a common world and common characters, with callbacks and references. But there should be more; the collection needs a through-line. There is a loose through-line as a function of the genre. Any post-apocalyptic story is about our modern world and how we’re destroying it, the true nature of man when confronted with a new world, overcoming hardships, etc.

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell is my guiding light on this project. In his first novel, he assembled a collection of seemingly independent stories interrelated by characters and the world. The stories hang together loosely on first read; each subsequent read reveals tighter and tighter cause and effect. Any reference to an event or character outside of the current story is invariably a callback or reference. But I can’t find a through-line. The last two stories directly reference the Iraq war and an almost global nuclear war controlled by an out-of-control AI (developed by a character from a previous story, of course).

There are a cluster of themes within Ghostwritten; stories about love and isolation and overcoming. And I need to consider the same; readers need a sense of an arc. The initial stories could focus on the shock of a new word, causing pain and suffering. Then, the middle stories reflect change to the new world. The final set could offer a glimpse into successfully, or unsuccessfully, overcoming obstacles and finding a better way.

It’s helpful to consider through lines after most of the stories have first drafts. Much the same way, applying the classic story structures is more effective after the first draft. Starting with a story structure first or set of themes would hinder the natural progression and feel forced (more on this in a future post). Now is the time for me to see the through-line.

Related Reading

Essays on continuity, structure, and how meaning accumulates over time.

• The Half-Life of Ideas: How Stories Change Before They’re Written
• What Writers Mean When They Talk About Immersion
• Common Tropes in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

When I started this blog, I featured pictures of my writing setup. iPad, French Press, mug, glass of water. And my mis-en-place traveled; during the pandemic, we’d take quick trips to Upstate New York in rented Airbnb’s and I’d write each morning. Recent travel with less-than-ideal setup’s in hotel rooms brought my mis-en-place to mind.

I upgraded to an iPad Pro. Bigger screen, nicer view. I don’t notice the better colors or pixels while writing (black words on a white background) but the increased size makes an enormous difference. I can see 20-30% more text on the page. The biggest upgrade with the Pro is the keyboard. Flat, amazing keys, real keyboard feel, no delay or syncing issues, satisfying key stroke sound. Clickety-clack! A massive improvement over the third-party keyboards I used on the previous iPad mini, although I don’t know if the quality of what I type is better.

The coffee system was also upgraded. I love a carafe of French Press in the morning (from Fair Mountain Roasters and ground fresh each morning). One of my pet peeves is cleaning the French Press; getting the grounds out of the bottom of the carafe, etc. About 1.5 years ago I funded Capra Press. Their hook is the removable carafe bottom. The carafe, though delayed, has been life-changing. I purchased it solely for the removable bottom, but the press system and filters create a smoother, tastier cup of coffee (the filtered coffee doesn’t mix with the grinds while resting). And cleaning takes only a few seconds. The Capra press and my trusty mug round out my writing station.

Other items come include books I’m using for inspiration. At the advice of my writing coach, “Room” by Emma Donahue is within arm’s reach. I copied passages from her to work on my child-point-of-view story.

I don’t want to be too precious about my setup. Best to be flexible. A craftsperson needs to know and love their tools.

I re-told a classic story in the “After the Second Wave” world. The original is from Edgar Allan Poe, The Cask of Amontillado. Poe’s narrator lures an enemy into his family catacombs under the guise of inspecting a cask of Amontillado. Once in the catacombs, slightly drunk and coughing badly because of nitrates, the enemy is chained to a wall and entombed while still alive. The tale is spun by a cold, manipulative, and unreliable narrator… very Poe.

Writing a version of this tale in my world was interesting. As written, the story stays true to the original plot. And writing it was… easy? Fun? I didn’t have to spend cycles worrying about what should happen.

Poe’s style bled into my writing. He was from a different era, with a flair for the dramatic, a love of exclamation points and adjectives. In trying to emulate the feel of his narrator, an unstable man who committed a terrible act years ago, I wrote like Poe. It felt natural.. and one character is quite pompous, so this style befits his speech.

After completing a first version of this retelling, I’m worried it’s not interesting enough… and is just a copy, not a re-interpretation. Sure, the details are different, with new characters in a post-apocalyptic future (opposed to the nineteenth-century Italian setting of the original). But it doesn’t have any deviation from the original plot. Does it need… a different, more shocking outcome? When a story is “re-imagined”, how many does it need to deviate to be a unique work?

Often, when a story is said to be re-imagined, it’s just swapping the gender of characters, or setting the story in a different time and place. What is the dividing line… can updated details make the story new, or does the plot and ending have to differ as well?

In the end, I want to revisit this piece after a few weeks or months. I’ll pick up the story new and edit with fresh eyes, rather than trying to match how Poe set up his story.