Worrying and wondering – where is my writing going?

Amidst the busyness of Christmas preparations I’ve caught myself reflecting on the writing I’ve done this year. Considering all the editing work and promotion I did for The Utopia of Us, my ode to Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, I’m proud of myself for having managed to write a novel in the gaps around editing, launches, cons, essay-writing, as well as the usual family responsibilities.

In some ways, writing my new novel was quite straightforward because I knew how I wanted it to start and end, when it would be set (and where) and what it was about. And I don’t think it diverted too much from my plan. But we’ll see! I’ll only know how much editing it needs when I read it through.

Despite 2024 being a year of rejections (or silences) for my fiction and poetry submissions, there have been many, many highlights – one of them being winning a British Fantasy Award! I also particularly appreciated catching up with friends at conventions and other events. Being able to talk with honesty about the publishing business, as well as discussing writing in depth, is ever so refreshing and enriching. I feel very lucky to count so many talented authors and creatives as my friends – friends whose blogs I read thirstily, knowing they will meet my need for inspiring insights on what it means to dig deep and push oneself as a writer. Indeed, just the other day I found this particular nugget of wisdom from the blog of the wonderful Nina Allan, who wrote:

People have sometimes asked me if writing a book is something that gets easier with time, and there are ways in which it does, or at least it should do. You know you can go the distance, and you know you can always write more sentences about pretty much anything. But in the deeper sense, I would say no, it does not. With time comes the knowledge that writing good sentences is only the beginning. For writing to mean anything, it has to go further, into areas that might not feel comfortable, or easy. You have to make your writing count for something.

Which is terrifying, but entirely as it should be.

I’ve done a lot of worrying this year, wondering where to focus my writing energies; what kind of writer I am. I’ve reflected on what readers have thought of Umbilical and Waterlore and tried to gauge what people have liked, what they haven’t liked. Not that this would greatly inform what I write in the future – because I always seem to end up writing whatever takes my fancy! – but I still don’t quite know what kind of novelist I am, whether my works are closer to the commercial or literary end of the storytelling spectrum. Only time will tell.

I’ve realized that common themes keep recurring in my work: the experience of being a woman, a mother, a wife, a daughter, a Christian. What it means to have a messy, but incredible, human body. The drudgery, and sometimes healing quality, of household chores. The wonder of science and human ingenuity and nature and the power of art. I am fascinated by addiction and how people free themselves of addictions. Most of all, I see that my stories are about enduring, overcoming, connecting, forgiving.

One of my favourite books is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro has often spoken about this most beloved of his books and, in essence, he says it’s about how people who are constrained by terrible circumstances go on and try to make the best of their lives. In short, it’s about endurance. That said, I do remember getting to the end of Never Let Me Go and feeling very angry on behalf of the characters. I was also angry with the characters. Why didn’t they rebel and break free of their constraints? Ishiguro would most likely say that he’s not interested in the overthrowing of their dystopian world, but rather how they live as well as they are able to within the confines of their situation. I think there’s probably an argument to be made about how one of the recurring themes of Ishiguro’s writing is restraint.

As I’ve seen the themes of my own writing emerge and begin to crop up repeatedly in my new novel and the few short stories I wrote this year, again I’ve worried if maybe I should be breaking away from these themes, writing about other things. But I think my writing wouldn’t connect with readers if I were to write about topics that don’t cause my heart to beat faster in either joyful excitement or fear. I often find writing painful – emotionally or mentally. Emotionally, because I push myself into imagined dark places I’d rather shy away from, and mentally because I keep asking myself the following: have I expressed myself clearly? Elegantly? How can I extract what’s in my head and convey it in such a way that I don’t lose the essence of that imaginary scene?

I probably don’t need to worry about returning to my favourite themes. In an interview, Ishiguro admitted that his novels were iterations on questions that continued to fascinate him, so I think I can probably get away with it!

Interestingly, I recently got spammed with an email entitled: “Take the pain out of writing forever with this AI”. As readers of my work will know, I am NOT a fan of AI pushers. And this, for me, absolutely summed up the problem of people pushing large language models. It does take the pain out of writing. It takes the challenging emotional exploration and the mental hard graft out of the process and robs us of the joy of finding a flow state and the glow of achievement when we’ve spent a long time working hard on a piece of writing. In short, LLMs do not feel.

And to quote Robert Frost:

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

Most of all, I want to move my readers. There are no shortcuts to achieving this. There is only the one road, and it is long and often rocky.

I am excited about what I’ll be writing in 2025. I’d like to pull together another short story collection, some kind of poetry/art pamphlet, as well as embark on another novel. Publishing-wise, I have no idea what will happen to the longer fiction I’ve written so far but I’m (mostly) philosophical about this. What will be will be.

As ever, the main thing is to keep on creating.

Wishing you all a Happy Christmas!