Lorraine Wilson writes speculative fiction, which she says is “writing in between folklore and the wilderness.”
Show notes:
- Lorraine Wilson
- We Are All Ghosts In The Forest
- The Salt Oracle
- Christopher Caldwell: Call and Response
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Lorraine Wilson writes speculative fiction, which she says is "writing in between folklore and the wilderness."
Lorraine Wilson has written several novels, and her latest is The Salt Oracle. Her previous novel, We Are All Ghosts in the Forest, is set in the same speculative future.
Lorraine says that We Are All Ghosts in the Forests is dark academia, yet it is also speculative fiction and fantasy. "I am terrible for blending genres. I don’t like staying in one box when I’m writing. In The Salt Oracle, the dark academia is about the core theme of a character having to confront the corruption at the heart of the institution that they have aspired to belong to."
Dark academia is a fairly recent genre, somewhat limited in its setting. Lorraine said, "Dark academia is often associated with Oxbridge colleges and Gothic architecture. I wanted to try and extract the core theme from that without any of the vibes that are generally associated with it. So set it into this salty, futuristic, slightly dystopian science fiction, but with that theme about the institutions and institutional corruption and privilege."
I asked Lorraine whether there was a risk of being pigeonholed in a genre like this. "I did worry, labeling it dark academia, that some people would come to it expecting to be like Oxbridge, and libraries, and cardigans, and rich people, and be disappointed that they’re not getting that. There is a library, but it’s not quite an Oxbridge library. I think I have to trust my readers that they will come with an open mind."
Lorraine has had an interesting career. She has a PhD in animal behavior and spent many years working in behavioral conservation in many parts of the world. Descriptions of the natural surroundings give Lorraine’s writing a level of texture that most authors don’t have. "A big part of the world-building research I do before I get started is looking at which species will be there and what the seasonality of that place looks like. And it’s usually places that I’ve been. So I know what it feels like sensorially to inhabit that ecosystem. [The natural world is] such a rich resource to draw from as a writer. And you can use it not just to enrich your setting with the specificity of what birds are singing or whatever, but also to layer emotion and subtext into your writing by how you choose to describe the natural."
The world in which these two novels are set is one where "the internet has broken and any data in the cloud, whether that’s news reports, videos, data files, audiobooks, or whatever, has all been released from the internet and is roaming the world as fragmentary digital ghosts."
And these digital ghosts are dangerous. "If these ghosts find a match for their own data in your mind, if you have read the book that this is an audiobook ghost of, they can upload themselves into you, and then you die a very painful death. You get degraded into digital code and die agonizingly."
Lorraine developed this idea when she was thinking about "the parts of ourselves that we put onto the Internet and that exist in the cloud, and particularly the echoes of ourselves we leave after we have died, and what that means that we are leaving these digital echoes of ourselves. And is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
I asked Lorraine when she started using Scrivener. She wrote her very first "beginner" book in Word, "and it was horrendous. I never wanted to do that again. I was looking around for something and found Scrivener, which must have been about 2015, and just loved it instantly, and have not looked back. I use it for both short stories and novels. And I very, very begrudgingly leave it behind when I get to the copy-edit stage with my books, whilst grumbling intensely."
Scrivener is ideal for the complex world-building required for Lorraine’s novels. "I do a lot of doodling in a notebook, but I use the Scrivener Research folder for a lot of the imagery. I put photographs that I find inspirational in there. I have lots of maps, particularly for The Salt Oracle. I had bathymetry maps, harbor maps, and all sorts of stuff in those files. And I have moodboards and character notes."
Scrivener’s Research folder also allows Lorraine to ensure consistence in character voices. "I usually have a little file for each character where I might add visual images, or I often put little basic conversations for each character in a file, to encapsulate that character’s voice. If I’m struggling to get a sense of the character’s voice and keep my characters’ voices distinct, particularly in my early chapters, I go into those files and read those conversations through and get that voice back in my head again. It’s really handy to have that immediacy of having those research files right there for me."
Lorraine also has multiple point-of-view characters in The Salt Oracle, and Scrivener helped her manage them. "It was very easy for me to keep track of the different points of view. At various points, I compiled and extracted the individual points of view as separate documents so that I could read them through on their own and make sure that the voice was constant and that the character arc within each point of view was doing what I wanted it to do."
I mentioned that the universe that Lorraine has created would work well on screen. She said, "My ridiculous pie in the sky dream is that Studio Ghibli will make We’re All Ghosts in the Forest."
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener. He also offers one-to-one Scrivener coaching.