Katie Khan, who visited Putney High School last Thursday as part of the Putney Ideas Exchange (otherwise fondly known as a PIE talk) in celebration of World Book Day, is the author of two novels: ‘Hold Back The Stars’ and ‘The Light Between Us’, the first of which is currently being adapted into a TV series by the producers of celebrated Netflix show ‘Stranger Things’. She encouraged us to “imagine the future” in a brilliant talk filled with advice for aspiring novelists.

 

Many people, according to Katie Khan, confuse the closely related genres of speculative and science fiction. You may have categorised some of the greatest novels ever written into science fiction, such as The Handmaid’s Tale (Margret Atwood), neglecting to see how close they are to our reality. A fun “yet depressing” fact, exclaimed Khan, is that Margret Atwood did not include anything on her novel that had not yet occurred at some point in history, with the exception of the ‘compucheck’ - which is essentially a 1980s iPad. This is the exact definition of speculative fiction: a world in which one impossible thing is made possible. This genre is driven by authors asking “what if” about a situation or object, which acts as a leaping point into reimagining the future of humanity in a plethora of fantastical ways, whilst not causing the viewer to suspend their disbelief; unlike science fiction.

 

Khan is experienced in both genres, having admitted that she would classify her first novel ‘Hold Back the Stars’ as pushing the boundaries of science fiction as it introduced a multitude of impossibilities, rather than just one. Nevertheless, she respected the rules of speculative fiction with her second novel 'The Light Between Us', and described to us a few rungs in the ladder of inspiration which leads to a successful novel idea that has been translated into 22 languages, one of Khan’s many achievements.

 

Most authors will have a host of literary inspirations, and this is true of Khan. Her taste centres around books which convey one thing very effectively, explaining her love for The Handmaid’s Tale as a classic symbol of the oppressed woman which has been repurposed and referenced since its inception. However, Khan also praised The Power by Naomi Alderman, as it powerfully subverts gender dynamics, as well as Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel for its poignant portrayal of human connection during a pandemic. Ultimately, Khan moves through the world looking for the human heart in a story, and so when she is exploring the media, headlines such as “the moon is moving away from us year by year” call out to her as a basis for a heart-wrenching story. Do not be surprised if this is the premise for one of her future works!

 

Finally, she imparted some words of wisdom for any aspiring writer that she learned along the way, primarily addressing writer’s block. Routine is the key, according to Khan; “I treat it like a job, as uncreative as that sounds” she laughed as she emphasised that this encourages her to write little and often, even if it is only 15 minutes a day. A common cause of writer’s block, she finds, is that the story may have taken a wrong turn, in which case you must face the truth and re-evaluate your work, even if that does mean unpicking the story to see where it went wrong: “if you don’t want to write it, who will want to read it?”