The Challenge of Writing in a Woke World

Writing your way to mental health.

It was the esteemed psychotherapist Wilfred Bion (should be a Sir in my opinion) who coined the idea that a thought is awaiting the thinker. Having stopped writing for a few years – there’s nothing like aiming for the stars and instead colliding with the ground with the grace of a jelly to diminish all ambition – I now realise how much I miss it, how it loosens your personality; I feel less uptight. I’ve recovered from the fallen aspirations, I’m no longer aiming for the stars but instead the eaves.

However, if there’s no audience then there’s no readers and without readers there’s no writers, right? Well, perhaps not. Do writers need readers? Writers just are. The readers arrive as a welcome addition, even if they’re often tapping their fingers and wondering when you’re going to do anything, but like therapy, writing is sitting with yourself. Our influences have spun an invisible cloak around us, and it’s in peaceful recollection and reflection that we might inspect its yarn.   

Writing is an excellent way of discovering what it is you might have been unknowingly thinking. It’s a chance to know yourself. I know this sounds like poor jacket blurb when punters want, well what is it punters want? Cosy cliched murder mysteries it would seem right now, sand to fill their ostrich ears while the life they once knew is eroded away inch by subtle inch. Nothing wrong with escapism of course, but always keep your head up; if you head’s in the clouds whose hand is on your wallet?  

I used to promote my books everywhere, generally with the toe-curling ineffectiveness of scratching a head itch whilst wearing wooden gloves. Now I can’t be bothered. Although it’s at new levels of disinterest; now I can hardly be bothered to write a book particularly since I read that AI can write a novel as good as Dickens (although I guess this depends upon your view of Dickens) in four minutes. And that’s before the agents get hold of it to reject it on basis of it lacking in ‘lived experience’. This is the latest objection to aspirations of a carefree existence from the dyed-hair-neon-jeans-perpetually-offended woke brigade.  

Yes, woke fiefdom has now stretched to the imagination. Woke and its seemingly bottomless puritanical self-righteousness is now forbidding writers to , well, to make stuff up. That’s what writers do! But apparently, according to the self-appointed stewards of Woke, one can only write about a Brazilian truck driver, a disabled person, or a court judge if they have that lived experience. Damn, it’s become so crucial that our apparently cash-strapped NHS are advertising for Lived Experience managers on £70k a year, because, well, you’d have to ask them. I guess it’s an effective way of burning through taxpayers money. It’s either that, or policing grade 3 nurses to ensure they are not writing about grade 5 nursing experience, I mean imagine that? It’s almost as if modern society finds meaning in life only through problems; which if you look for them, like ducks on a lake, you’ll invariably find them.   

Writing only from lived experience means that writers can only write about being a writer and their trip to Sainsburys the other day. We can only write our autobiographies. How upset would I be with someone claiming to be me and writing my autobiography - good luck with that and don’t forget the close shave in the Philippines - I’d likely shake their hand, pointedly fail to correct them over my century at Lords, and ask for a tenner. 

This is about who has the right to a story. Not someone’s actual story, which presumably manners would dictate getting permission for, but a fictional one. One writer recently had the publishers interest withdrawn once he admitted to not having had experience of child sexual abuse himself. He should have said yes. I guess female writers can populate their books only with women, and vice versa. What a wonderful world these puritans would have us live in. Perhaps Roald Dahl should have piled on the weight in method acting style to write Augustus Gloop. And let’s not even get started on how a man might know how a woman feels before transition; do puberty or the menopause mean nothing? Mind you, woke logic is the equivalent to a stuck writer resorting to time travel as an explanation for where they had none.

There’s an irony that publishing houses previously priding themselves on putting out boundary-pushing work (whatever the fuck that means) have become pearl-clutching Victorians, while its smaller presses like Swift, who are embracing the playfulness and open-mindedness inherent in creating rewarding art forms. Thankfully writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro are speaking out for the freedom of expression, presumably aware of how characters at the end of a talented writer’s nib take on their own life (if it’s going well, if not they take their own life) in a miraculous and awesome manner regardless as to whether the author has their lived experience or not. Stories come from a godly place, perhaps that’s where this modern prosaic and unimaginative doctrine comes from; in another attempt to kill off the Divine.  

In Operation Mincemeat Matthew McFadden observes rather wearily that everyone seems to be writing a novel – ‘Writers. we’re surrounded by them’, he says out of Ian Fleming’s earshot. Seemingly nothing has changed. I had a message today from someone asking if I knew any agents or publishers for a friend of his. I don’t really mind being asked - the answer is no, not really - but the response is also, not another bloody writer.

The older I get the more writers there are. And how many are censoring themselves? How many sit in the grip of a woke tedium forbidding them from exploring the lives of others? Or even worse, relish the opportunity for conformity, that most frightening of human instincts. We saw the danger of that over the last few years. If people are running the instinct is to join them; it might be a sabre-toothed tiger.  Surely, as ever, the only measure of an author should be how good the writing is. It’s not as if they don’t spend far too much time researching characters. And how is it best to understand ourselves by finding empathy with others, fictional or real..?  

It occurs to me the only safe place, and my, don’t they love their ‘safe places’, to write freely is in the future. Everyone can write about a space freighter engineer, so long are are the same genders as the writer. Science fiction lies beyond their pathetic grasp. For now.