The Thing About Boundaries
Balancing writing from, and protecting, your heart.
Way back when I was a baby writer, publishing a distant and barely formed dream, someone gave me this advice - decide now what you would be comfortable talking about on a stage, and what you wouldn’t. Draw those lines, and stick to them all the time, everywhere.
I never forgot that advice, and I’ve had cause to be very grateful for it.
I think boundaries are something that should be discussed more as part of Author 101 advice, because I have seen so many published authors talk about feeling compelled to over-share in their early years, or feeling uncomfortable and vulnerable in spaces where they should have been instead simply enjoying the moment.
Whether youtube videos, instagram lives, blog Q&As or festival panels, author events should be fun. Right? These are moments where we get to share our books and our love of writing with people who are equally passionate about it. Where we meet readers and realise that, wow actually someone other than my mum enjoyed my book!
What they should never be is a place where an author is pushed into talking about parts of themselves that they would rather keep private. But if you haven’t set firm boundaries in your own mind, this can easily happen. Particularly if you write about emotionally weighty subjects, because those themes become obvious questions for a chair or audience member to ask about.
This is the place I find myself in.
I write about things that matter to me. Sometimes those things stem from personal experience, and sometimes also I don’t want to talk about that personal experience thank you very much. One of the quickly apparent downsides of the move for ‘Own Voices’ narratives was an expectation that someone must prove their authenticity to write about a subject. You must show your scars, you must bleed, to demonstrate that your story is valid.
No. No no no. We owe no-one our blood. We owe no-one the emotional cost of having to stitch ourselves back together after an interviewer has cut us open.
And yet, readers want to know that a story is true in its representation, they want to know whether there is a beating heart within the pages, especially if that heart hurts in the same way theirs does. So how do we balance our right to protect ourselves with our readers’ wish to understand where a story came from?
These are my strategies:
Each book I have written has drawn on different issues and provoked different forms of interview question. For my first book, I got a lot of questions about my politics; for my second, my experience of grief; for my third, my experience of depression and my perspective on post-colonial ethics. I imagine The Last To Drown will prompt a lot of questions about disability, and We Are All Ghosts In The Forest … actually I’m not sure yet, we’ll see…
My point is, with each book I have had to confront and define my boundaries on different topics. Assert and reassert them within my own head so my brain is well trained enough to throw up a big red flag if a question strays close to the line.
In written interviews, it’s easy enough to either alter a question, or answer it within your own safe zone.
In recorded events, it is absolutely fine to stop if you feel uncomfortable and ask the host to cut that section. Any good host will be more than happy to do so.
Live events are where it gets trickier. Good moderators and event chairs will speak with their authors in advance, and establish any no-go areas. They will then redirect any audience questions that stray too close. But what if they don’t? What if someone asks a question that cuts right through your boundary line?
You’re going to feel pretty off balance, in that moment. Your brain is throwing up red flags everywhere but there’s a room full of people staring at you waiting for an answer. So what do you do? Here’s a few tricks, but I’d love to hear your suggestions:
Before the event:
Practice answering tricky questions. I cannot emphasis enough how useful this is, even as it feels mildly ludicrous. Think up the obvious questions someone might ask - ‘what did you draw on in your depiction of X sensitive thing?’ for example, and practice answers that stick within your comfort zone. Focus on your characters, or perhaps books you were influenced by.
Even if the host didn’t ask, you can still say to them quietly ‘hey, mind if we avoid questions about X?’ - they are not going to refuse you, unless they are setting out to be arsy in which case see option below.
During the event:
A polite ‘Nope’ is always on the table - say ‘I don’t wish to answer that question, sorry.’ and wait for everyone to move on. This takes a certain amount of courage though, which I so far have lacked!
Answer the question you want to answer, not the question they asked. If they asked about your personal experience, answer about how you developed the character.
Redirect the question to another panel member. Audience questions at panels are often general, so you can either gracefully let fellow panellists answer & then say ‘I think they’ve covered it.’ or ‘Actually I’d be really interested to hear what Person A thinks about this.’
Be blunt and final. Say ‘I drew on my own experience, but I’m not going into that - the things I want to say are in the book.’ Or ‘I drew on my own experience, but I’m more interested in the wider discussion than going into specifics.’ That’s a totally valid response.
The truth is that our scars bring power to our stories, we become better writers for knowing the darkness as well as the light. And writing those darknesses can be profoundly empowering, both for us writers and for readers who may feel alone in their experiences. Connection and empathy is one of fiction’s most potent tools, and fictionalising difficult themes can help bring poorly understood experiences into public awareness.
One of the reasons I write through the lens of disability in The Last To Drown is to uplift conversations around that existence. As part of that, I’m pretty happy to talk about my own health in terms of how it impacts my writing and daily life. I’m not, however, going to be talking about specifics of the illnesses themselves.
One of the books I’m planning explores gender based violence. Again, this issue matters deeply to me, but my lines on it are going to look very different to those around disability. I am going to keep my discussions very firmly at a societal level rather than an individual one. Which is still a powerful thing, in my opinion.
In both cases I hope my books speak to people who share those experiences, I hope they make someone, somewhere feel seen and understood. I also hope they make others a little more aware of lives unlike their own; perhaps a little kinder, or angrier, or even just more comfortable talking these things over.
So it matters that we write these things, but to continue to do so we must first guard our hearts. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with this, so please do share in the comments. Thank you.
I’m in the middle of putting together posts on spinning plates as an author, on the arms race of submission & my salty feelings on that, and publicity while the world is burning. Please subscribe & keep in touch. Have a lovely weekend.