My first novel, as yet unpublished, was an exploration of the effects of childhood abuse throughout adult life, highlighting how you can make progress but never entirely escape the shadow and the systemic modelling of a skewed upbringing. As it progressed, it also became a close look at complex PTSD, the almost inevitable result of an authority figure abusing a dependent child.

I chose to write this as fiction because, as an autobiography or a factual book, it risked being a misery-fest, and I didn’t want that. I wanted an unflinching examination, but one with some levity, some humour, and some inspiration. It had to be fiction, even if reflecting reality. Two weeks ago, I put the finishing touches on it, proofed it, and formatted it for submission.

It was only then that I suddenly saw the truth. ‘Unflinching’ had become ‘raw,’ and the explicit nature of the text had caused it to veer into dark psychological fiction, which was not what I had set out to do. I wanted it to be accessible, despite its deep message.

Meanwhile, my historical romance was also ready to be proofed and formatted. This story is essentially an exploration of the disempowerment of women, but written with those same objectives of accessibility, inspiration, humour, and general appeal. But again, I had that exact same insight: it was too raw, too explicit, too demanding. Certainly for a romance.

I don’t generally make a habit of flogging dead horses, but I had to accept that for the last few years, I had been trying too hard to shoehorn both of my books into existing genres, refusing to accept that they just wouldn’t fit. It was high time, I thought, to let reality intrude and finally accept that these two books as they stood were not going to make it. They had no established genre and no clear market.

It was a heavy blow. Six years of work written off. At least three of them spent chasing an impossible dream that I perhaps should have seen through much earlier.

Happily, I have managed to reframe it. Writing these books has been a continuous learning experience, and if I overshot the mark, well, that is better than churning out mediocrity. With fresh insight, I understood that the core stories behind both projects were completely valid—it was just that the elements breaking the boundaries of genre and acceptability were actually unnecessary. Skilled writing doesn’t need shock value to tell a story; that had been my mistake.

Had I grown up enough as an author, I asked myself, to tell a story with the same level of depth without crossing those boundaries? Could I adequately portray the difficult subject of childhood abuse without being horrifying? Could I do it within the container of a socially acceptable genre?

I decided I could. I can write both stories as book club or upmarket women’s fiction, wrapping a little cosiness around the sharp edges. Not only does this comfortably push my writing into an established genre, but it makes it more relatable. And that is key.

Perhaps, after six years of self-study, I have finally come of age as a writer. I hope so. I do want this to work out.

I suffered abuse from my parents, and had a rough time for one reason or another in early adulthood, too, knowing hatred and abandonment. The scars remain, in the form of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD). Childhood parental abuse is a nasty one because it is in childhood that the brain creates a model of the external world which it then uses throughout the rest of life to navigate that world. How to behave, expectations about how other people should behave and interpretation of their behaviour are a large part of that modelling. Trust, confidence and self-esteem all depend on these models. In childhood abuse, those models are disrupted because the authority figures who should love you don’t, or act unpredictably. This leads to issues in trusting, in holding self-esteem and in forming relationships with others, whether for love, friendship or business.

With disrupted models, the brain attempts a process of repair or recalibration, effectively trying to update the models to allow them to function well in life. To a certain extent, progress can be made, but the new rules don’t get written deeply in the model. They seem to never penetrate the surface, and in moments of stress or distress, get washed away. The result is fragility. A lack of robustness and resilience compared with unabused people. A tendency to have or to frequently revisit low self-esteem. A tendency to depression when the models are overwhelmed, and a tendency to dissociation when the entire being is overwhelmed.

I have been describing in writerly terms my journey to become a writer, but today, I will talk about the dark side.

My mental health issues have created in me a need for perfection. It’s a survival strategy. Criticised and punished too often by an exigent father, my models created a rule. Don’t make mistakes so you won’t get into trouble. It doesn’t hold very well. I can easily be blamed for things which either I am not responsible for, or my inner self doesn’t believe I’m responsible for. When this happens, there is a whiplash reaction because the world had defied my models. The rest of the time, perfectionism creates a brittle and driven personality. Good for being a professional, especially in a responsible position, not much good for making and keeping friends or having any kind of life beyond work. My models also tell me to trust no-one, and that everyone will let me down. They tell me danger is always around the corner, and that I need to be on high alert, every moment of every day.

This all combines to make me a self-sufficient (or should that be self-insufficient?) person, a survivalist and driven like the devil is on my tail. Nothing to do means time for introspection, which is never good, so keeping busy doing something I am good at is my best long-term strategy.

Which is where writing comes in. During the pandemic, I found myself looking at spare time, horror of horrors. Time with nothing to fill it. But I felt strongly that I had something to say. The effects of childhood abuse, the stigma of mental health issues and the inadequacy of therapy were things I wanted to talk about, shout about, shove down people’s throats. I wanted to raise awareness because much parental child abuse is unknowing or at least, unthinking. Because the solutions are not neatly bundled into a dozen therapy sessions, a format designed for practicality. Because society is harsh and divisive, because kindness is too rare. As a welfare society, we could do better.

Many of the extreme moments of my life and my distress were caught in the cameos I have discussed earlier. I wanted to collect them together and create a hard-hitting whole, a scream. I did do that work, too, paying the price of depressions and angers working through it. When it was done, I realised that no-one wants to be shouted at, or lectured, or told they’re doing it all wrong. If I wanted to get a message across, if I wanted to change, in some small way, people’s lot, I had to make the agent of change desirable, accessible, entertaining and interesting. At this point, my perfectionist saw a challenge and my soul saw a project, and I became a writer.

But first, I needed to cut my teeth on a book which was not so emotionally charged. My historical romance came into being. And where this account differs from any other descriptions of mine about the how and the why of choosing to write, this is the impolite truth, the unacceptable truth, the one normally kept hidden. Today, I’m sharing it with you.

As an engineer with a latent interest in industrial heritage, it wasn’t hard to point a finger. The real roots in mass consumption and therefore mass pollution came from the early ‘great engineers’. Those who invented ironmaking in the Black Country and those who invented steam engines to drain tin mines in Cornwall and coal mines in northern England. They became the men who invented railways and mechanised the cotton mills, creating the technology which underpinned the later onset of mass production.

The age was one of rampant masculine competition, a quest for power and glory. The landed gentry found they could make, or lose, fortunes by investing in the new technological ideas. The natural engineers and those schooled in engineering found themselves at the forefront of breathless revolution. The devil took the hindmost - the unskilled, the ungifted, and women.

To illustrate and highlight this process with a story which was entertaining, thought-provoking and emotionally rich didn’t call for a dreary historical fiction detailing the cruelties of the workhouse nor for a Regency romance based on the social etiquette of the rich. I did need to touch on the poverty and hardship and I did need to show the power-hungry, gaming, gambling echelons of higher society driving it all. I thought that the sweet spot which most illustrated the change in human nature and society lay between the cotton mills of Lancashire and steam railway development in Tyneside.

My idea was born. I would put a feisty female protagonist close to George Stephenson, arguably the greatest and most influential of the natural engineers. She would rail at the hurdles before her and she would face the worst of the deprivations of the time. I would put a man with compassion but without competitive drive at the other end of the scale among the titled industrialists, with a coal mine and railway interest near Manchester, the cotton capital. I would add a cotton mill for flavour with a third love interest. My protagonists would feel burgeoning and impossible love while they fought against their class divide and their own destiny, the one to greatness, the other to poverty.

I struggled for a while with some of the basic concepts of fiction. I knew I should write within genre, but I didn’t see a genre which covered the scope of my planned novel. Historical Romance of the period is inevitably Regency Romance, all ball gowns, dukes and rakes. The genre says nothing of the Industrial Revolution, serving as a vehicle for some chest-beating romance. Historical Fiction lay much closer to my objectives of close examination, but would rob me of the emotional context romance offers. I decided to ignore the issue and just carry on, using the catch-all of Romance as my genre.

Putting Dorothy, my feisty protagonist, very close to George Stephenson raised questions about how close could one invent fiction without appearing to rewrite history. His life is well-documented, as I knew well by then with a shelfful of history books focussed on him, all stuffed with post-it notes. If I shoved a feisty redhead into the middle of a documented encounter with another great man, there would have been a record. I had to leave history undisturbed, I saw, and set about planning the closest possible path I could reasonably manage. Dorothy sits with George in his cottage kitchen as he mends clocks and only just avoids being there when he blew himself up with his pit safety lamp experiments. George waves to her and her father at the grand Stockton and Darlington Railway opening, the world’s first public railway. She helps her father on Chat Moss, he surveying for the Liverpool to Manchester railway line, one of the first inter-city passenger railways. Today, you can travel that line, over that Moss, on the trackbed which George built, at the very forefront of engineering technology.

James, my man of the gentry, runs equally close to real history, his estate mirroring a real estate, his friends almost identifiable among the great and the good of Manchester at the time, several years after Peterloo, its repercussions still in evidence.

And so Hearts on the Line was brought into fitful being. What I needed next was some writing craft at my disposal. Time to begin learning.

I had all my cameos of life seen and experienced, and considered an autobiography. I didn’t consider it for long. I am a pretty special person to me, but I doubt very much I’m that special to anyone else, my husband excepted. An autobiography would be boring.

It actually took me a while to break through to considering I could write fiction. I’d been set on real life, wanting to share it, wanting to use my experiences to hopefully enrich and inspire others. What is creative art about if not to achieve this? Slowly, I began to understand that this is exactly what fiction does. The story gives a framing which is personal to the reader where autobiography or recounting of experience is framed around the writer.

A whole new world opened up as understanding seeped in, all those stories I’d read where I’d tumbled into a world which was more real than the real world, simply because it was unreal. Because by not being real, it escaped the constraints of real life and let a reader dream, escape, go on a directed journey.

This felt like an amazing gift from life. I had been granted the time and opportunity to indulge in such creativity, to create such worlds within worlds. But what, exactly, to write, I wondered, and did I have the capability to do it?

I shelved the capability question because as a complete beginner, that was obviously a no. As it was for every novice writer. I’d have to learn, as I went along. Considering the what question lead to a whole set of new questions.

Was I embarking on a mission, one driven by passion, trying to change the world or some of the people in it? Was I undertaking a business venture, securing a semi-retirement income so I didn’t have to welcome the tourists again? Was I trying to provide much-needed escape routes for people to enjoy? Or was I looking for a new passionate interest for my own sake, to keep me happy and contented?

I couldn’t separate these elements out. It was all of them, I realised. That’s how big writing is.

I’m not a dabbler. I don’t practise things, I get straight in and do them. I need that motivation, that end goal. I had some evidence of an innate writing ability or style from my well-received cameos and that was enough, my reasoning said, to launch into a full-length novel. Just as well I didn’t know then what I know now, about how long and arduous the journey would be.

I had been a professional engineer when I started my working life, developing heart valves. There’d been many different jobs since, although all had been at fundamentally practical and often human-centred problem-solving. I ran a specialist hospital clinic. I became life coach, with particular interests. I campaigned against climate change in the eighties and nineties. I spent time in an intentional grass roots community. I was a founding director of a sustainability advice and action group. I became briefly a hand-holding contractor with a team of highly skilled craftsmen. And I ended up running a tourist business, the least fulfilling thing I’d ever done.

What genre of fiction did all that experience add up to? What genre of fiction allowed me in some way to explore climate change and our response to it? What genre of fiction allowed me to help individuals along their paths of development or overcoming their struggles?

No obvious answer stared me in the face, and no obvious answer presents itself now, seven years later.

I considered climate change and thought about where it came from, when the damage really began. In the Industrial Revolution. Maybe writing about that period when we moved from farm to factory held a key to our future. Historical fiction, then. But romance, because romance would let me explore deep issues in a light, accessible way. A mix of escape, entertainment and deeper stuff for those ready and willing to look for it.

My USP, then, could be my engineering background looking at that industrial change, letting my life coach side consider how it affected people. And so my historical romance project was brought into being.

When I decided to begin writing in earnest, back in 2020, AI wasn’t a thing. By the time its age began to dawn, I was spending a lot of time writing and feeling heavily invested in the process. I watched with amusement as the first chat bots came into public use, but later with horror as I saw them begin to write slop and then whole books’ worth of slop.

I am, however, a pragmatist and an opportunist, and turning my back on AI wasn’t going to make it go away. If the writer’s marketplace was going to be flooded with machine-derived slop and make writers’ lives harder, then the best thing writers can do is to harness AI themselves, where they can do so without damaging the quality of their own writing. And so my stance has become to focus on quality writing in the face of AI, but to exploit AI as much as I can in the process to even up that tilted playing field.

In the early days, Grammarly came out and I leapt upon it with joy because I had my first manuscript ready for proofing. But Grammarly had little grip on context and it took me longer to spot Grammarly’s mistakes than to spot my own. Next came Pro Writing Aid and it was streets ahead of Grammarly, although it was very easy to get lost in its many different analysis tools.

It was to be a few years after those first proofing attempts that I was again ready to proof a manuscript, several weeks ago. This time I engaged the AI, Claude. And, my goodness, was it good! It understood context almost perfectly and it knew to look for other faults such as hanging indents and trailing spaces, although all it could do was warn of their presence in the manuscript. I had no intention of making it agentic and getting its hands on my work.

This was simply icing on the cake, however, because as it read the manuscript, it could track characters and turning points. It checked in with me. Did you intend this turn here? Did you intend this progression of stakes here? You have a name switch here. Some of the comments were amusing because, being incapable of emotion, it didn’t understand humour or misleading plot twists, and would earnestly tell me that my narrator had been inaccurate when that had been the whole point. Reassuring.

Not only could it manage that, but I could then demand from it both a synopsis and a blurb, the bane of many a writer’s life. Both were absolute rubbish, but the synopsis did have all the right points in all the right order and the blurb did give an outsider’s overview which I, as the writer, struggled to see. Both made excellent starting points for crafting something better.

It took me less than a week to structurally edit and proof a 70k manuscript, and another week to produce synopsis and blurb. My own efforts on the synopsis and blurb were purely creative because Claude had done all the sifting and sorting. It had been months of painful work before.

ChatGPT does my research well. It can get deeper into internet resources than I can, and it will summarize well. It could never replace the year I spent reading thick history books to seed my first historical romance but it made fact-checking later fast and easy.

I can use both to discuss progress and chat about options. I used to crave being in a group of active authors where we could all bounce ideas around, but never managed to find any suitable resource. Living halfway up a remote Spanish mountainside doesn’t help in making actual contact with other authors. AI helps me focus my thoughts and ideas, almost becoming my muse.

I see all this as some recompense for knowing that the LLMs have stripped the human canon without consent or due payment, and will continue to do so when my work is in there. My real hope is that the ‘human-authored’ tag, which is an essential way forward, doesn’t preclude using AI for the kind of work I have described above. Let’s not tie our own hands behind our backs, but use the resource available with responsibility. Let it underpin and strengthen our creativity wherever it can.

None of the AI use above contravenes the Society of Authors’s definition of a human-authored book. I quote their requirements in relation to this:

The text of the work was created by you as sole author or together with other human beings and that it is your own intellectual creation as the result of the exercise of your skill, labour and judgment.

The text, therefore, represents the expression of your creativity as the human author and it has not been produced by the use of a Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) model e.g. by the use of prompts.

The use of GAI or tools with AI-embedded features does not disqualify a work from being ‘Human Authored’ under this scheme provided that the tools have been used for assistive purposes only e.g. the use of GAI-powered tools like a word processing programme, spelling and grammar check, for research, brainstorming or outlining, or any other use that does not generate text.

I see that this definition does not prohibit AI prompt generated imagery either, although many sales platforms ask the simple question was AI used in the creation of the book or the cover? and if you say yes, it can add an AI tag to your listing. Not a great idea. It may be as well to dig deeper into their terms to see whether the ‘use’ of AI in respect of the text means generative AI or assistive AI, as per the SOA definition.

I feel some optimism for the protection of human creation as generative AI now watermarks their output, and in a foolproof way, too. The problem will be to avoid human creative work getting drowned in the sea of slop. I think getting our work registered as human-authored is an important step for us all to take. Here is the link to the SOA human-authored declaration. You do need to be a member of the Society of Authors to make the declaration.

Be that as it may, LLMs are good at copying the styles of human writing, and each week, get better. But humans write emotionally and LLMs cannot, for they have no emotion.

The best way for humans to fight back against the rising tide of LLMs, then, is to write well. To write with authenticity and a deep understanding of the craft of writing. An LLM cannot compete with this kind of writing, and one can only hope that readers will increasingly turn away from slop and seek writing worth their time and effort reading.

So, a call to action. Write well. Don’t turn to LLMs to write for you, but be better than them.