Writing impossible worlds to understand the real one

By Joanne Anderton

Fiction reading and writing is a deeply emotional experience. Even though we know the places and people aren’t real, and everything’s happening in our heads, we can’t help but care about them. That’s the whole reason for doing it in the first place, the joy and the heartbreak.

This game of make-believe is even more extreme for speculative fiction (by which I mean science fiction, fantasy, horror, and everything in between) as these genres rely on our intellectual ability to imagine how impossible things might function if they were true. So now we’re doing two things: we’re wrangling impossible physics, or the rules of a magic system, and getting deeply embroiled in the day to day lives of the invisible people in our head, hoping desperately that they’ll be okay in the end. And this goes equally for readers and writers.

So, what difference does it make if I’m writing a ghost story or a far-future world and one of those imagined characters is not ‘fictional’, but actually me?

To answer that I’m going to talk about my new novella, Pixerina: A haunting. Pixerina is a ghost story, a haunted house, a story about the tensions in a marriage and the drive to create art. It’s about Rebecca, an artist struggling to deal with her own block and her husband’s changing life plans, and Angelica, a lonely and neglected little girl desperate for a friend.

Like so many stories, Pixerina started life as the combination of two unlikely things. The first, an obituary I read in The Economist for Angelica Garnett, daughter of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s niece, and ‘keeper of the Bloomsbury flame’. The obituary described her as a lonely child who, mostly unsupervised, haunted her mother’s rundown house in the Sussex countryside, and the artists, writers, philosophers, and intellectuals who gathered there. I couldn’t stop thinking about this little girl, lost in a rambling house full of art. Sacrificed to it, in a way.

The second was the end of my own marriage. You see, the events in Pixerina are, thankfully, fiction, but there’s a lot about Rebecca’s marriage that honestly reflects my own. Writing this book was very personal and not always easy as a result. I told a friend once that it felt like I was finding the places that hurt the most so I could poke them with a stick. But it helped, in the end, more than anything else has.

And that’s because language and story have the power to get us closer to a kind of truth, our core, emotional truth, even as it appears to add distance. The metaphor of speculative fiction can be a powerful way to tap into emotional honesty. Because of its allowances for otherworldly invention, speculative fiction is a way for me to turn myself ‘inside out’, take a step back and look at myself and my experiences in the world and go, ‘huh’ and get to know myself better.

And also, I hope, tell a good story in the process!