Dan Coxon > Quotes

“The membrane between worlds was thinner out here than the inland-dwelling peoples could ever realise, so they expected no help.”
― Dan Coxon, This Dreaming Isle

“Human nature is a constant – except when it isn’t. In the future society, consciousness, the way in which people understand themselves to be people, might be very different. On the one hand, we might say that people have always fallen in love, made art, worshipped gods, fought wars and engaged in complex forms of political organisation and conflict. But our understanding of ourselves as human subjects today is profoundly different from medieval times, which, again, is profoundly different from Ancient Rome or Greece or Egypt; which, again, is profoundly different from Neolithic times… anyway, the point is, in the future, people might not share our values. Your vision of the future should reflect this and not simply reflect modern attitudes in different clothes. 6: Language shapes reality. Language changes over time. New words are coined, others fall out of use. Social and technological changes produce changes in the lexicon; styles of speaking and writing evolve, what was ‘normal’ in the eighteenth century seems obscure today – your future should reflect this, with new words, new slang, new expressions and colloquialisms, new ways of speaking and articulating. China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011) is a good example of how to do this. Building a new, tangible reality out of language will give your vision of the future a density, credibility and coherence that goes beyond the practical mechanics of story, plot and structure. Finally, be bold – the future is yours to imagine.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Future

“Enough of happy. I’m sick of happy. The prison of it, a weight on my lungs. The thing I should be aiming to feel, and make others feel. It’s a relief when the pleasant young man asks me instead, ‘Can you remember a time in the village when you were sad?”
― Dan Coxon, This Dreaming Isle

“Writing fiction, imagining characters we have not met and do not know, we use our empathy to try to describe their lives. However, the imagination must be fed by research, or else we produce caricatures.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny

“The ‘uncanny’, therefore, was not merely something unknown, but something that had been hidden or repressed. He famously called it ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny

“This effect can often derive from the negative spaces that inhabit a story: the absence of information, the dearth of explanation, the omission of clarification and exposition. It is human nature to seek to fill in the gaps, and when the writer withholds these nuggets that will help the reader make sense of a story, the reader’s own interpretation is often more unsettling because it will draw on their own fears, paranoias and phobias. Sometimes, the absence of something can be more unnerving than a sinister presence.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny

“In the novel Follow Me to Ground by Sue Rainsford, the slugs which inhabit the narrator’s garden at night are ‘shrivelling over the pebble and dirt like the skin on staling fruit’.11 Here the visual image this summons is unsettling: the slug being likened to a foodstuff implies that it may be devoured, with all the revulsion that would entail, but without stating this explicitly.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny

“Theology, the domain of male priests, referred to spirits or souls, rather than ghosts, a word smacking of lay superstition and pagan practices, associated with women. The dead, however, were no respecters of categories and roamed in both discourses.”
― Dan Coxon, Writing the Uncanny