THE TRUTH IS WEIRD: let me help you write it

The last few years my life writing has been increasingly stuck. My essays have been going well, with great engagement and a high readership, but book projects have eluded me. After publishing my first memoir in 2018, writing about my life somehow began to feel joyless. I had worked so hard to develop an erudite voice but that voice was now holding me back.

After abandoning several book ideas in a row, I finally started to think about what needed to change. I wanted to engage more deeply with my feelings and follow my thoughts wherever they went, however strange or unlikely. Most of all I needed my day-to-day practice to start bringing me joy.

I went back to authors I admired—those who reminded me how to balance fear with laughter. I gave myself permission to write with more abandon and to try new points of view. Gradually I found a voice with more emotional range, more space for the weirdness of my desires and preoccupations. Through writing this way, I became more vivid to myself.

My writing voice needs to be big enough to accommodate my feelings and strange enough to alchemise them

The new voice is bigger, stranger, funnier and more compassionate than the way I've written in a long time. It's also less trustworthy, but in a good way. I'm enjoying it so much, I've written 70,000 words in eight months. In my new book, Keanu Reeves is my spirit guide, Godzilla is my long-lost sibling and Henry VIII is my nemesis. This makes it sound insane, which it is, but it's also amazing.

Last year I also started mentoring other writers—through Faber Academy. This has also felt really good, helping me clarify and condense my commitment to writing in this way. One mentee told me they were thinking of taking something out of a story because it was making them cringe. I invited them to sit with the cringe, to find out where it led.

Uncomfortable emotions are your body's way of telling you you're onto something important, something weird, something true. Your writing voice needs to be big enough to accommodate your feelings and strange enough to alchemise them. If you can find it, this voice will help you stay with your feelings, and so help you find out what's really worth saying.

Since I'm enjoying it, I want to extend my mentoring to more clients. I'm not offering teaching; I ideally want to work with writers with an established practice. I don't mean you have to have published anywhere fancy, just that you've been writing long enough that you can point to a body of work. I want to help you follow your cringe, find your joy, and fully inhabit your voice. If you think this sounds good, email me and we'll talk. You can also see more details on my new mentoring page.

Thanks for reading.