“Ooh, you could use that in one of your books!”

Well-intentioned friends tell me this from time to time. Funnily enough, they are nearly always wrong. They are usually pointing out something like a mossy graveyard or a murky, old antique shop. Such things feel story-ish because they have already appeared in so many books and films, which sadly means that they are too clichéd to be usable.

On the other hand, people are often surprised by the details that do trigger my writerly instincts. Tell me more about this gang that asked for protection money to be hidden in cabbages! Is it okay if I ask you about that time you got severe sunstroke while stranded on a boat? Wait — you have a friend who raised a magpie chick? Yes, yes — put us in touch!

I love off-kilter details that I can build upon, exaggerate, and fashion into something new. Bizarre traditions, weird historical anecdotes, unexplained events, strange objects in museums, evocative place names, eccentric inventions — these are my catnip. But quirky oddities are not the only aspects of reality that find their way into my books.

“Will you write about COVID at some point?” a friend asked me during the first lockdown of 2020, and I had to give it some thought.

“Probably,” I answered at last, “but not yet, and not on purpose.”

First and foremost, I am a storyteller. I don’t sit down to write a polemic about the real world — the story is always my first concern. However, while I’m writing, the bees in my bonnet sometimes come out for a little buzz.

Much as I love fantastical world-building, I am aware of the world in which I live. I also have a policy of writing with as much emotional honesty as I can. My stories channel ideas that I find exciting, frightening, concerning, enraging, interesting, or heartbreaking. I deliberately cut close to my own bones and write in ways that make me emotionally uncomfortable. Because of this, themes that matter to me tend to creep into my stories from the darkened corners.

When I wrote A Skinful of Shadows, a seventeenth-century ghost-story spy-thriller adventure, most of my research was historical. The action took place during the early stages of the English Civil War. As I read about the country’s descent into hostility and division, both sides learning to demonize each other and being fed totally different versions of reality, it started to feel unnervingly familiar. I was, after all, living in the UK not long after the Brexit vote.

Did I set out to discuss new divisions and the culture wars? No, I wanted to write about spies, evil aristocrats, and angry ghost bears. Was I unconsciously drawn to a Civil War setting because it let me explore my response to current rifts? Quite possibly.

Deeplight is set in a fantastical archipelago, where the horrifying deep-sea gods are all dead and the once-cowed seafaring folk of the islands have started scavenging fragments of dead deity and using them to develop new technologies. As I wrote the book, though, other ominous shadows appeared beneath the surface of the story: nationalism, the rise of populism, and a poisoned nostalgia that feeds both.

Fantasy is Carnival. This is where all the shapes of reality throw off their ordinary seeming, and dance for a while under the colored lanterns. The masks provide freedom and sometimes show the true nature of things more clearly than the daytime faces.

When these extra layers emerge in a story, I don’t discourage them, but I can’t let the tale become a hollow allegory either. Readers know when there’s nothing behind the set-dressing, when the characters are puppets of a Message, reading off cue cards. The characters must breathe. The story must have its own wild energy. The world must feel as complex, startling, and ridiculous as our own.

Do I draw from my own life too? Yes, I put myself into my books, but you will not find me there in any recognizable form. I can be ruthless with my own emotions and memories. They are resources I can draw on if the story requires them, like colors on my palette. A lemony splash of deep-seated unease, a dark purple smear of half-forgotten pain, marmalade-colored speckles of stubborn optimism, etc. These must serve the story, however, rather than taking it over.

My books are not autobiographical. I am not the picture — I am the paint.

From the May/June 2025 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Perception and Reality. Find more in the "Reality Reimagined" series here.

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