Writing for Social Justice

I’m an older gay man who has been around the block, an educated guy who had to work in jobs and for companies I was not drawn to through choice but necessity; we all need to make a living. It was the deal I made with the status quo, stepping — never willingly but begrudgingly — into what I have always considered indentured servitude. The deal I made to survive through more accepted means defines what I write about and why I write about it. I lived a counter-cultural life for about ten years which is never easy in a city like London, but it was just about possible in the 80s and early 90s. I was never more alive than when I was living hand to mouth with the freedom to protest or create — as a visual artist during those years — as I was during this period of my life. I was resilient and determined to live outside the system for as long as I could but when it came to having to take care of someone I loved, I decided to make the deal with capitalism and corporatism to improve our circumstances. If I am honest — and we never make any headway without some level of honesty — I’m certain I would eventually have wanted a safer, more secure, more reliable form of income and all the comforts associated with it. Most of us can be worn down by the adversity of never knowing where the next meal is coming from, whether the roof over our heads is secure or if the people we love can access the care and attention they deserve. I cut myself — and the majority — some considerable slack here as anyone who is forced to make this calculation and acquiesces to the status quo is a worker and workers are an exploited group whether we collectively recognise it or not.

Not unlike a lot of other writers, I had a sense of who I wanted to be as a writer and that’s not who I turned out to be. I wanted to write kitchen sink dramas; novels filtered through my own formative experiences. Somehow, either the material was always either too raw or mercurial for me to work into an effective story or — and here I may need to be as brutally honest as I can be — I just wasn’t particularly interested in writing that kind of story. The writing was constrained through its being quasi-autobiographical. What I wrote always felt at least somewhat forced — held by the grip of my own history — I limited where I allowed the narrative to go, and the stories therefore never developed organically.

I’ve spent hours and hours and hours writing about power and control and it’s about time I acknowledge I’m a bit of a control freak when it comes to the stories I write. In my defence, what else would a writer want to have power over than their writing? I wanted to be in control of the themes and ideas, I wanted to engage my imagination and impose a narrative structure to the work, and I wanted to ‘get over myself’ when it came to being associated with a specific genre.

There’s an elitist literary snobbery surrounding writers of dystopia and science fiction and I was a casualty of this restrictive bias for longer than I care to admit. Only after I decided to overcome a self-imposed prohibition against writing the kinds of stories I liked to read, did I feel as if I could lose myself in the work and write naturally from both my experience and my imagination. Dystopia allows me to create worlds — always extensions of the recognisable world we currently share — where I can focus on themes of social injustice and the consolidation of power in an ever smaller “elite”; the one percent. So, if I was to define who I am as a writer, it would be someone invested in dissecting socio-economic, political and environmental issues. I’m obsessed with gaining a better purchase on why we allow a tiny minority to govern and control us, knowing they’re so often a dangerous group of unbalanced or even deranged people. Finally, I’m fascinated by the nature of being and what makes us who we are, the always flawed beings who do the most wonderful and dreadful things. If we aren’t invested in understanding the nature of being as writers, then I don’t know what we are writing for.