On Writing What's Still Happening

Some trauma barely makes the local news anymore. Is it that nobody cares? Or is it that it's stopped being rare enough to count as news? We seem to have built up a kind of statistical immunity to certain harms, simply because they happen so often that "shocking" has had to move somewhere else.

Forty years ago, a single tragedy in a town would lead the local paper for a week. Now it might not make page nine. Nothing about the event itself has changed. What's changed is the backdrop it happens against.

Does fiction follow the same pattern? There's an enormous, well-worn literary landscape for urban trauma - estates, gangs, exploitation, violence. Worth telling, all of it. But the sheer volume has done something to it - made that harm legible, recognisable, almost expected, in fiction the way it's expected in the news. If I sat down to write an urban trauma book tomorrow, I don't think it would unsettle me the way this did. The ground's been walked so many times it barely feels like ground anymore.

Rural trauma doesn't have that landscape. No well-worn shelf for it. So when it appears - a family losing a farm, a child watching the only world he knows collapse - there's no script for how a reader's supposed to receive it. Nowhere to hide in it. I started writing about exactly that straight after the 2024 Budget changed agricultural inheritance relief. I could see where it might lead - what kind of decisions get made when a farm can no longer simply pass from one generation to the next. I wrote it as something that could happen.

Then, midway through the book, it started actually happening. Not to characters. To real farming families, working out in real time what the policy meant for the land and the people who'd worked it. And that's when it hit me, somewhere around the middle of the manuscript: who the hell do you think you are to write about us?

Not a question about craft. A question about right. These weren't distant statistics I was borrowing the shape of. They were people living through the actual thing while I sat at a desk turning it into fiction.

I didn't have a tidy answer then and I don't have one now. I considered it throughout the writing and editing process - kept asking myself the same question at every pass. I kept going, stayed true to finishing what I'd started, and later made a decision about what the book would be for once it existed, where its profits would go, who it would actually serve, beyond me. I hope what I produced highlights, and in no way exploits.

Whether I've earned the right to have written it, I still don't know. I only know it's the choice I made, and the one I've had to live with since.