Posts Tagged "dystopian fiction"

• Writers Anonymous

  Wolf Pack of One?

  I’m always been interested by authors who co-write, because it’s something I can’t imagine doing. I don’t think I could give up the level of control needed to collaborate, even though collaboration can be incredibly inspiring. Writing feels like a solitary pursuit, and if it were a full time job (oh far, far distant goal!), I don’t doubt that I’d find it a lonely one as well. For me, writing is vocational; something I always have done and always will do, whether as a professional career, for friends and family, or only for myself. When I write, I put a piece of myself on the page. You can call it heart, soul, worldview – but it’s both the creation and reflection of a certain period of my life, be that a week or five years. Writing is a way of reaching out, searching for people who share a way of thinking, a way of perceiving and understanding the world. The process of writing is solitary, but it’s ultimately about connection. And of course, when you do find someone who connects with what you write, that’s amazing.

  Producing work I feel is worthy of being read, however, is inevitably a long road of self-doubt and self-critique. I have moments of believing I’ve written something amazing and moments of believing it’s utterly diabolical. Often those thoughts are about the exact same paragraph. So writers may be lone wolves, but we need perspective. We need someone to say: ‘You know what? That’s okay. That’s working.’ And occasionally: ‘That, my friend, is really not working.’ Willing friends help: my go-to lady is the marvellous Clare Bullock, who has cast an eye over various works-in-progress for me over the years, and invariably offers sound editorial advice. But there’s only so much feedback you can ask for, and the other thing I find useful is workshops.

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• Falling into science fiction

  Introductions

  I’m E J (Emma) Swift, author of OSIRIS, which is released June this year. It’s lovely to be here at the Bazaar! I’m particularly enamoured of the Bazaar theme. It’s the sort of thing you might stumble upon unexpectedly, not quite knowing what you might find, and that kind of encapsulates how I feel about the creative process of writing OSIRIS.

  It’s introductions week, so in the traditions of such things, a bit of background about me and how I got here: I’m an English writer, nowadays living in South London with two cats and a long-suffering housemate. My day job involves communications-type-things for performing arts training, and although the pointe shoes have long since been relegated to the back of the wardrobe, I’ve become obsessed with aerial circus skills. (That’s definitely a future novel. And yep, I have a lot of love for Angela Carter’s NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS.) As I’m sure is the case with many writers, my road to publication is littered with discarded novels, but at the end of last year I had my first sale, a story called THE COMPLEX, in UK magazine Interzone. And that was awesome. A week later I found out that Night Shade were interested in OSIRIS. And that was beyond awesome.

  Finding out that you’re going to be a professional writer is, whilst being the culmination of a lifetime of dreams, in equal measure terrifying. It’s no longer possible to simply fling the book out into the ether and hope for the best; the Internet is waiting, and it’s full of tigers. My immediate worry was: I don’t know enough. I don’t know enough and I haven’t read enough, or not the right things. But you can never read enough. The only way I’ve found to deal with that worry so far is by a) making decisions and b) trying to turn it into an opportunity. There are books and writers waiting to be discovered, recommendations to be made. That’s something to be excited about.

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• The role of dystopian fiction in a changing world

  From Hunger Games to The Windup Girl. Is Dystopia the new black?

  Dystopian fiction is a time-honored tradition in genre. Beginning with HG Wells and continuing with Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Atwood, and right into the present day with Bacigalupi and Collins, dystopias fascinate and frighten us with what is possible in human society. A well-established subgenre of speculative fiction, they pop up on our bookshelves every few years to bring forth a new set of ‘what if’ questions.

  Dystopias provide a view into the maximum extensions of political, religious and other motivating beliefs. While in real-life societies rarely reach that logical end point of an argument (and when they do, it is always ugly and strictly not encouraged by me), fiction can do it again and again. What if we lived in a theocracy that followed the exact word of the Bible? What if we lived in a society in which the government controlled every aspect of our lives? What if women were denied agency over their own lives and forced to reproduce for strangers? A dystopian novel can take those questions and build them into a world we can examine, discuss, and question. (more…)

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