I Came Here to Write Fiction…

Then the World Wouldn’t Shut Up.

On finding your voice in a world that’s running out of honest ones.

I had a plan.

It was a good plan, actually. Modest, considered, the kind of plan that sensible people nod at approvingly. I was going to write fiction. I was going to build worlds on the page, create characters who did interesting things in interesting circumstances, and find my place in that long, noble tradition of storytelling that stretches back to whenever the first human being sat down next to a fire and said, “Right, let me tell you something.”

That was the plan.

Then I started paying attention to the news. Not the news as most people consume it… the headlines, the hot takes, the algorithmically optimised outrage delivered in ninety-second segments between adverts for things you don’t need… but the actual news. The stuff underneath. The stories that don’t trend. The crises that don’t get the breaking-news banner because they’ve been breaking, quietly and consistently, for years, and somewhere along the line an editorial decision was made that “ongoing catastrophe” doesn’t sell as well as “sudden shock.”

And I found that I couldn’t be quiet about it.

I’m not sure “found” is even the right word. It was less of a discovery and more of a slow, gathering irritation that eventually became impossible to ignore, like a stone in your shoe that you keep telling yourself you’ll deal with later, until you realise you’ve been limping for six months.

The Fiction Writer’s Problem With Reality

Here’s the thing about being a writer… any kind of writer… that nobody tells you in the early days when you’re still romantic about the whole business: you develop an acute sensitivity to narrative. You start to see stories everywhere. You notice when a story is being told badly. You especially notice when a story isn’t being told at all.

And once you’ve noticed that, you cannot un-notice it.

I’d sit down to work on something fictional, something invented and safe and entirely within my control, and I’d keep thinking about real things. About a country collapsing in the Caribbean that barely makes the news unless a foreign national gets kidnapped. About the careful, deliberate way that certain stories get framed and certain others get buried. About the fact that most people, most decent, intelligent, curious people, are walking around with a version of the world in their heads that has been curated for them by organisations with financial and political interests in what they do and don’t know.

The fiction could wait. It felt, suddenly, almost self-indulgent. Like arranging furniture while the house is on fire.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not dismissing fiction. I don’t believe that at all. Stories… imagined ones, invented ones, the kind with characters and plots and made-up geography… have always been one of the primary ways human beings understand themselves and each other. The novel has done more for human empathy than most political speeches ever will. I still believe that. I still intend to write that way.

But right now, in this particular moment, with this particular set of eyes that I have and this particular voice that I seem to have developed… the most useful thing I can do is point at real things and say: look. Just look. Tell me you already knew about this. Tell me you’ve been following it.

Most people haven’t. And that’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the information environment we’ve all been dropped into.

Who Actually Controls the Story

Let me say something that used to sound like a conspiracy theory and now just sounds like a business model: the media, by and large, tells you what its owners and advertisers need you to believe.

That’s not a revelation. That’s just… how it works. It’s not even secret. The ownership of major media outlets, the political affiliations of their proprietors, the advertising relationships that make certain stories uncomfortable to run… all of this is publicly available information. You can look it up. Most people don’t, because most people are busy, and because the news that reaches them has been made to feel complete. Comprehensive. Like you’ve been told the important parts.

You haven’t, necessarily.

This isn’t about left or right. This is about something more structural and in some ways more troubling than simple political bias. It’s about the stories that don’t fit any agenda and therefore get told by nobody. The crises that don’t have a Western geopolitical angle and therefore don’t merit the correspondent with the flak jacket. The issues that are genuinely complex, that resist the hero-villain simplicity of a good news segment, and that quietly affect millions of people who don’t have the luxury of finding them complicated.

The media, broadly speaking, has never been particularly good at those stories. What it’s good at is urgency, conflict, and familiarity. Stories that look like stories it has told before.

Everything else falls through the cracks.

And in the cracks… in that unseen, uncovered, persistently ignored space… is where I seem to have taken up residence.

What “Speaking Out” Actually Means

I want to be honest about something, because honesty is more or less the entire point of this enterprise.

“Speaking out” is a phrase that gets used a lot by people who then say nothing particularly risky. It gets attached to opinions that are merely slightly unpopular at dinner parties. Real speaking out… the kind that matters, the kind that has any chance of actually shifting how people see things… is harder than that, and it costs something.

It costs comfort. Because if you’re writing about the things that the comfortable conversation skips over, you are by definition making some people uncomfortable. Including, sometimes, yourself.

It costs simplicity. Because the stories worth telling are almost never simple, and the temptation to flatten them into something shareable and digestible is enormous, and you have to resist it even when the algorithm is very politely suggesting that you don’t.

It costs certainty. Because honest writing about real, complex situations requires you to say “I don’t know” sometimes, and “this is more complicated than it looks” often, in a media environment that rewards the confident hot take above almost everything else.

What it gives back, though… and I say this as someone who is still relatively early in this particular journey… is something that I find it difficult to name precisely. A kind of alignment between what you think and what you say. A sense that the work has weight. The occasional message from a reader who says they hadn’t known about something, and now they do, and it’s changed something small in how they see the world.

That last one, I’ll be honest, is the one that makes the whole thing feel worth it.

The Reader I’m Writing For

I’ve spent some time thinking about who I’m actually talking to when I write this way. Not demographically… not “males 35-55 with a university education and a Guardian subscription.” I mean psychographically. Spiritually, almost.

The reader I’m writing for is curious. Genuinely, restlessly curious in a way that the current information environment doesn’t really cater to, because genuine curiosity doesn’t drive the kind of engagement that keeps you scrolling. They are tired of being told what to think by outlets that have already decided what the story is before they’ve reported it. They have a functioning sense of justice that gets activated when they encounter real information about real situations, but they need someone to bring it to them in a way that doesn’t feel like homework.

They are not passive. They just haven’t been given enough to act on.

That’s the gap I’m trying to occupy. Not commentator. Not journalist, exactly. Something more like… a well-read friend who gets disproportionately fired up about things that aren’t being talked about enough, and has somehow acquired a platform.

I can work with that.

Why This Moment Specifically

There’s a reasonable question here: why now? There has always been a gap between what’s happening in the world and what the mainstream media covers. This isn’t new. So why does it feel so urgent?

Partly, I think, it’s because the tools for filling that gap have never been more accessible. A writer with a voice and a broadband connection can reach more people today than a regional newspaper could twenty years ago. The infrastructure for independent, honest, non-institutionally-compromised writing exists in a way it simply didn’t before.

But partly… and I’ll admit this is the part that keeps me up at night… it’s because the gap seems to be widening. The consolidation of media ownership, the collapse of local journalism, the dominance of social media platforms that algorithmically reward emotional activation over informational accuracy… all of this is moving in one direction. The space for nuanced, properly reported, contextually honest storytelling about the world’s less convenient crises is shrinking.

Which means the people willing to occupy that space matter more, not less.

The Fiction Isn’t Gone. It’s Waiting.

I want to close with this, because I think it matters for where I’m going and what I’m building.

The fiction writer and the truth-teller are, in my experience, the same person. They both want to make a reader feel something real. They both believe that the right arrangement of words can change how a person sees the world, even slightly, even temporarily. They both understand that the story is the vehicle and the human truth is the destination.

What I’m doing here, in these long-form pieces, in these dispatches from the parts of the world that don’t trend… this is still storytelling. It happens to be true. It happens to be urgent. It happens to involve real places and real people and real suffering that is ongoing and unresolved.

But the instinct is the same one that wanted to write fiction. It just found something more pressing to do for a while.

So here’s what I’m committing to, publicly, in writing, where I can’t quietly walk it back later:

I’m going to keep looking at the things people don’t make themselves aware of. I’m going to keep writing about them in a way that respects both the subject matter and the reader’s intelligence. I’m going to resist the pull toward the safe take, the comfortable conclusion, the piece that everyone can agree with because it doesn’t actually say anything.

And I’m going to trust that the readers who need this kind of writing will find it. Because they’re out there. They’re tired of the noise. And they’re looking for something that sounds like the truth.

I’ll try to make sure that’s what they find here.

Until Next Time