Why I Stopped Being Afraid of Non-Fiction

The earliest things I wrote were lyrics. I was into rock, punk and grunge, so I called them lyrics to avoid the embarrassment of calling them poems. But alongside those lyrics, which grew into stories and eventually novels, I was always writing something else: observations about life, about my own psychology, about how I and other people behaved, and what I thought it all meant. When I was nineteen or twenty, I even started writing a philosophy book about mind and language.

I had no formal training in psychology or linguistics or any of the fields I kept reading my way into. I read them alongside the writers who were shaping my fiction, pulled in both directions at once. But whenever I tried to write about the abstract ideas that interested me most, I kept hitting the same wall. Three paragraphs in, I’d realise I was wading into water where other people had spent entire careers. I’d follow one question, find ten books trying to answer it, read half of one, and lose the thread of where I’d started. It wasn’t that I had nothing to say. It was that what I was saying was too compressed, too intuitive, and too under-argued.

I’d also been interested in writing for film and theatre, but screen and stage plays felt restrictive to me. They were too focused on plot and action. Writing dialogue and directions didn’t let me get close enough to the internal reality I wanted to put on the page. When I started writing fiction, everything opened up. I could write thoughts and ideas as well as dialogue and exposition. I got to be a writer, director, actor, and cameraman. A novel is a finished sign system: a small universe built from the inside.

So I moved towards fiction. It suited me because, if you want to, it lets you invent as you go. You don’t have to stop every few sentences and check whether you’ve earned the next one. But you do have to learn your craft. My early fiction was almost incomprehensible. Without the discipline I slowly developed, I tended towards long abstractions in which the characters and events barely featured at all. I learnt restraint, found a voice, and had a couple of novels published. The observations on life and the sprawling abstractions were still being written, but they were cut and edited away. They stayed on my side of the desk.

I’ve recently realised that my problem with trying to write up those abstractions in my late teens and early twenties was not simply that I lacked training. It was that my mind is drawn less to specialism than to pattern-making: moving across fields, noticing links, and applying creative structures to knowledge. That kind of thinking can produce interesting insights, but on its own it isn’t disciplined enough to become good non-fiction. For a long time, that was where I stopped.

Large language models may have changed that. I can now set multiple research threads running at once and keep a live flow of ideas and context in front of me. I can say: I want to argue this. Does it hold up? What am I missing? What would be obvious to a specialist that I haven’t considered? And something comes back that I can test, challenge and refine. The model doesn’t give me authority. It gives me resistance. It pushes back against my ignorance in real time, which means I can keep moving without pretending to know what I don’t know. It becomes a kind of real-time Socratic dialogue: one of my favourite forms to read, except now I get to be one of the voices.

That resistance has let me build projects the way I build a novel: constructing a system of meaning, layering themes, shaping an argument so that it carries both intellectual weight and narrative force, while subjecting it to a level of scrutiny I could never sustain on my own.

Over the last couple of years I’ve assembled book-length projects purely out of curiosity: a speculative future of artificial intelligence beyond superintelligence, a history of counterculture traced back to its oldest roots, a deep dive into what simulation theory might imply for selfhood. In each case I’d begin by following a question that interested me, then slowly realise I was assembling something much larger: not an academic book, and not a work of pop psychology or cultural commentary, but a sustained piece of thinking shaped by a novelist’s instincts.

The question then became whether I could push that process further: whether I could use my craft and voice to make a piece of long-form non-fiction worth a reader’s time. That’s what I’m doing now. It’s great fun. I’ve discovered writing all over again. It’s the feeling I had when fiction first opened up for me, except now I’m returning to the abstractions I’ve always had to cut away, and finding that I finally have a way to work with them.

So I’m writing a large fiction project and a large non-fiction project at the same time, alongside a full-time job, a relationship and two small children, which probably means I won’t be posting here as often. The non-fiction may turn out to be a failed experiment. A lot of what I do is. It always has been. I like trying new things, and I feel no regret when I look back over the abandoned projects. I have to go where the momentum is. If there’s something worth pursuing, the only way to find out is to do it.