The way I personally stay true to the story I started down on is to
give myself permission to not teach anyone anything. I’m not writing a
manual. I’m not delivering bromides. I know that a lot of people do take
enormous pleasure and relief in lines or phrases or ideas from stories
that ring true to their own lives, but it’s important for me that I tell
a story and that I’m not writing Chicken Soup for the Necromantic Soul. It
is getting harder and harder again, especially for authors from
marginalised places or backgrounds, to write works where the takeaway isn’t ‘this
is to succour all my marginalised people’. For anyone on the
female-identified axis this is especially hard because it seems to me
that most books by anyone female-adjacent have an expectation that they
will comfort the uncomfortable and discomfit the comfortable etc.,
whereas a guy can just tell an adventure story and be done with it. This
ties in with an idea that I think <is prevalent> nowadays that good art is moral and
bad art is immoral: i.e. if a story is bad it actually has to be because
the lessons are bad, and if a story is good it must somehow be
beautiful on the moral scale. We go looking for why the art we love is
moral even if the art we love is a donut. I think this is the pressure
of capitalism on time – that everything has to double or triple up in
benefit compared to the time we take on it: if we’re prepared to waste
eight hours on a book we had better be able to tot up at the end how
that book was also feeding us in some way. That’s brand time we just used.
I am writing for my younger self and it would be disgusting of me to try to teach her anything.
Tamsyn Muir, Interview with Ciara Seccombe, 2/5/22