Writing Political Satire In ‘Interesting Times’
When I first had the idea for a satirical novel set in the near future the world was relatively sane. I happily imagined a post-politics system of government where nations are run by randomly selected citizens, just like jury service. The self-evident truth that politicians are the last people you want in charge of anything has taken hold across the globe.
The few idiots left who still think elections were a good idea…well they are now the terrorists. Sortition holds sway in almost every nation, and Queenie, who nobody posh and/or educated would give the time of day to normally, will be Britain’s head of state, like it or not.
This concept made me happy for several reasons: partly because I have long thought it a good idea, partly because it’s an opportunity to get out of my system some of the topics my partner and I would otherwise argue about, but mostly because it’s a great way to put a group of ordinary people into extraordinary circumstances and write a book about them.
But then real life started to nick all the best gags. In Queenie’s Teapot I’d created a character, one of my faves, who became the British Foreign Secretary and had a penchant for opening his mouth and putting his foot in it. As my creation lumbered round the world upsetting the great and the good in each country he visited, beta readers winked knowingly at me because they thought they knew where that idea had come from.
I had planned to pitch my first foray into fiction around as many agents as possible, but as politics on both sides of the Atlantic became increasingly surreal I changed my mind. I needed this book out now, before the chunterings on Twitter about the end of democracy became mainstream enough for everyone to be writing the same story. Did you know #sortition is now a thing? I don’t know whether to be pleased or not.
I decided to self-publish. I was in the middle of formatting the final files, after my editor, proofreader and cover designer had made their contributions, when I realised I should probably reverse-engineer a Trump gag into the text somewhere. It fitted neatly into a short history lesson from one character to another, the final nail in the coffin of democracy and one of the many reasons Queenie’s world is as it is. Much though I wanted the story to be a whimsical romp and not a political treatise, I could hardly pretend such things weren’t happening around us, so at the risk of being accused of having an agenda, in it went.
There was never going to be a second book in the series. There was never going to be a series, just the one bit of fiction before returning to my usual genre, travel writing. But readers wanted to know what happened to my characters next. I’d unwisely given my government a three-year stint at running the country, this book covered year one, and several people made it clear they expected a trilogy. I protested that I was fresh out of ideas, but you can’t not be pleased when people ask for more of your stuff. Book two was born by dint of putting characters in a room together, listening to them talk to each other and letting them tell me what happened next. Thankfully, real life politics left me alone for a while but then, yes, at the formatting stage, I realised I should probably reverse-engineer a Brexit gag into this one.
I am now formatting book three. There was never going to be a book three but when the series was optioned for a movie (which, I feel obliged to mention, really helps a self-pubber feel like a real author) the film company optioned a trilogy. Why? Well, I might have got a tad carried away on the phone. Having been paid for it in advance, I then had to write it.
Should I go back in and add something about the pandemic and the lockdown? If not, I have imagined a near future in which this crisis never happened. If I do though, I already have two books that don’t refer to it, so wouldn’t it be slightly odd to add something so huge to the third? We can’t know how society will change after this awful situation is over so should I continue to assume it never happened? Writing political satire is not getting easier as the years slip by.
I think I might have found a way to add an oblique reference though. Some of book three’s characters play about with cryptocurrencies. The real-world cryptocurrency I spent some time practising with, to learn enough to be able to write about them, has just emailed me to say they are closing down. The current market crash has left them without enough actual money to pay for their servers. This plays right into my hands (imagine an evil laugh here) because I can refer to the collapse of previous currencies during the pandemic crisis without having to imagine what life will look like for us all next.
Would I have plumped for political satire as my first stab at fiction if I’d know what was around the corner? Probably, I’m a glutton for punishment. However, if anyone is considering it, my advice would be not now.
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Carolyn has been a psychologist, a paramedic, a proofreader, a patisseur and several other things, not all of them beginning with P. She began writing the day she decided to try and see the world…doing both just to find out if she could. When excerpts from her first travelogue were published by the Rough Guides she decided to keep on doing both.
The success of Trucking in English, her account of driving 18-wheelers across North America, placed her firmly in the travel writing camp until Queenie popped into her head.
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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips
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