Making the most of a grey London July
Thoughts on writers at risk; writing as meditation; social media for writers; and writing my book.
Paying subscribers can hear me read this newsletter aloud here, or in any podcast app.
Due to a holiday and some family things, I’m taking a short break from hosting the In Writing Creative Hour: the next session will be on Sunday 6 August. I would love to hear from you sooner than that, however, so please tell us how your writing is going in the comments (feel free to include triumphs, challenges and dark nights of the soul).
Summer has gone grey here in London, but I have to admit I’m enjoying it. My flat has lots of windows, which means that if we have more than two days of hot sun in a row, it warms up like a greenhouse and takes weeks to cool down again. I become sweaty and lethargic, thick-headed and uninterested in work; I can’t sleep, and then I’m annoyed all day. Right now I have a lot of reading and writing to do, and am appreciating the opportunity to focus on it. So here are some bits and pieces I’ve been thinking about since I last wrote to you.
The Pillowman post-show Q&As continue. Next Tuesday I’ll sit down for the second one, with Stella Assange (lawyer and wife of imprisoned WikiLeaks journalist Julian Assange) and Burhan Sönmez (novelist, lawyer and President of PEN International).
I was asked to do these Q&As because of my podcast and experience of interviewing writers, not because of any expertise in freedom of expression – but familiarising myself with the issues around the persecution of writers has been really affecting. The thought of somebody risking prison and torture in order to write and share a novel, some poetry or an essay – as many people do every day – is deeply inspiring. It says something, I think, about the power of the will to communicate and the will to create.
This morning, listening to this BBC World Book Club interview, I was moved as Burhan described the mutual support that exists across borders between writers involved with PEN International. Burhan himself was arrested and tortured by police in Turkey in the 1990s, and went into exile in the UK. Many writers are exiled from their countries right now, and I’ve also been reading about the German branch of PEN, which runs an important Writers in Exile program:
The unique aspect of the program lies in the fact that we PEN members share the bond of our common profession. This bond is strong no matter what country the scholar had to leave behind. To our writers who are persecuted, mistreated, jailed or even tortured in their home countries we want to offer refuge in Germany. On their way into a new life away from their homes, we reach out to them in companionship.
This brought tears to my eyes. I feel very lucky to have been invited to work on these events, and I’m so looking forward to the next two.
At the last In Writing Creative Hour, I wrote a journal entry for the first time in a year.
I’ve kept a journal on and off for as long as I can remember, but I mean really on and off – sometimes there have been many years of nothing. I had a couple of weeks of low mood earlier this summer, though, and that seemed a good reason to start the habit again, and I think it has really made a difference to my state of mind.
My head is always very busy, but to put thoughts on paper (or screen) allows me to contain and grasp them with more clarity. It gives me enough distance to recognise connections and patterns of thought and behaviour, and to move forward and break any circular thinking. I think this is similar to the effect that meditation can have – creating a little healthy distance between us and our feelings. It’s made me very grateful for writing as a tool to just… help me through life.
The more I work on the project of In Writing in all its forms, the more the practice of writing unfurls for me, and I see how central it is to being a human, and how deeply it can tap into all areas of life: how we celebrate, how we love, how we suffer and how we cope. I haven’t quite got to the bottom of this feeling yet, but I think it’s connected to my emotional response to PEN International. It goes back to the will to communicate and the will to create.
I recently had a wonderful conversation for Grazia magazine with the writer Yomi Adegoke. Her new novel, The List, is about social media, and its effectiveness or otherwise in meting out justice. It’s commercial fiction with a broad appeal (it’s being made into a major TV series) but it explores the issues without landing on simple answers, and I loved that nuance.
Yomi is also really interesting herself, as an author who had great success in her twenties aided by Twitter and Instagram, but now looks forward to abandoning them altogether. ‘My long-term plan is absolutely to divest myself of social media,’ she told me.
I have similar fantasies myself. When everyone started talking about the demise of Twitter and the rise of new app Threads, I felt exhausted. If Twitter dies, I thought, I’ll take that as a gift: one less excuse to waste my life and my attention span. I don’t want to replace it with another thing.
But I probably don’t have the integrity to actually stick to that. All being well, I have a book coming out next year, which I will have to promote. It’s hard to make a living as a writer these days – it feels risky to try it without social media, which is the modern shop window. Yes, there are plenty of big, wise names who don’t bother with it, but they tend to have carved out success before Twitter existed, or to have abandoned it as soon as they hit the big time. Can a new author support themselves now without social media? I don’t know.
You can read my interview with Yomi in the current issue of Grazia (UK) – or, I don’t know, you could lean in very close to your screen and read it here.
Meanwhile, I’m working on my book. The best thing about it is having permission to spend an extended amount of time on something I really care about, so I’m happy.
At the same time, I hope that I’m going in the right direction with it… and that I’m as far along the path as I should be, with five or so months until my deadline... It’s a bit difficult to tell… but hopefully if I just keep plodding, it will all work out.
I hope you’re plodding happily, wherever you are and whatever you’re thinking about. Good luck with your writing this month!
Hi Hattie. A publisher requested my full m/s and on Tuesday emailed to say they are going to offer me a contract! I am over the moon and it is literally my dream come true to have a novel published by the traditional route. With a little luck and lots of hard work, this is just the beginning for me as a novelist. I’m not giving up my day job just yet though!
Loved this post, the journaling mention, the important freedom of writers and what many go through to hold on to that freedom. And I related to the grey days and the relief of them, maybe their interiority? Finally, your comments on social media really hit home for me, as I begin to promote a new novel coming out in fall. I have such a love-hate relationship, and you're right, it's exhausting. My only consolation and why I continue is that I can give some encouragement to others like me, the writing community out there, since we are all struggling. As you do in this newsletter. Thank you.