Writing in the Dark: Finding Light in Uncertain Times

Finding authentic creativity in tumultuous times

Before we dive into this month’s Writing Sanctuary, I wanted to let you know that bookings are now open for my Compassionate Storytelling course that’s running for the first time in November. It brings together everything I have been writing about here for for the past few year about using our words to create connection with everyone and everything we’re sharing this human experience with, which feels vital when our world is so divided and we are so disconnected from the earth.

Who This Course Is For?

✓ Fiction writers who want to create complex, fully human characters

✓ Memoir writers seeking to tell their truth while honouring the complexity of the real people in their stories

✓ Life writers documenting present-moment experiences and wanting to navigate current times with greater compassion

✓ Any writer who believes stories can heal rather than harm, connect rather than divide

✓ Writers ready to tackle difficult subjects — trauma, conflict, social issues — with both courage and care

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Welcome to The Writing Sanctuary, a space where mindful writing meets transformative storytelling. Drawing from my training in therapeutic journalling and positive psychology, my many years of experience as a fiction and life writer, creative writing teacher and publisher, and my journey with mindfulness, Taoism, Buddhism, Gnosticism and metaphysics, each month I share insights and inspiration to help you develop your craft, connect more deeply to who you are as a writer and a human, and find ways of using your writing as a force for good in the world. I’m so grateful to you for being here and I’d love to hear what comes up for you.

Writing in the Dark: Finding Light in Uncertain Creative Times

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to write in the collective darkness that surrounds us. The fear narrative pumped out by the mainstream media 24/7, political upheaval, environment anxiety, social division, and global uncertainty that can make sitting down to write feel almost absurd. What's the point of telling stories when the world feels like it's unraveling?

Yet this is precisely when our words matter most.

Before I stopped reading/watching/listening to the news, which happened gradually then came to a complete stop in 2018 at the height of the Brexit vitriol that tore my home country in two, I would sit at my desk some mornings, scrolling through news that felt increasingly surreal and I noticed a creative paralysis setting in. The overwhelm of information, the weight of problems too large for any individual to solve, the sense that whatever I might write would be inadequate against the magnitude of what's happening in the world.

But I've come to understand that this feeling — this sense of writing in the dark — isn't a creative obstacle. It's an opportunity to write more truthfully, more compassionately, and with deeper intention than ever before.

When the World Feels Too Heavy for Words

There's something that happens to many writers during turbulent times. We either feel compelled to address everything directly — to become commentators and activists through our work (which I did when I started writing my novel, Remember Tomorrow, more on that below) — or we retreat entirely into stories that seem divorced from the reality we’re living in. Both responses are understandable, but I've found that neither truly serves our craft, our wellbeing or our readers.

The urge to become preachy comes from a good place. We want our writing to matter, to make a difference. But when agenda overwhelms story, when characters become mouthpieces rather than fully realised humans, we lose the very thing that makes writing powerful: its ability to help us feel less alone in our complexity.

The retreat into escapism is equally understandable. Sometimes the world feels so heavy that we just want to disappear into other realms entirely. And there's value in stories that offer respite — fiction has always been a place where we can explore possibilities and find refuge. But when our writing becomes completely disconnected from the human experience we're all sharing, it can feel hollow, even to us.

What I've learned through my own practice, and through working with writers navigating these same tensions, is that there's a third way. It requires the same tools we've been exploring throughout this series so far: compassion for ourselves when the news cycle overwhelms our creative energy, mindfulness to stay present with what we're actually experiencing rather than what the media tells us to feel, and the understanding that our stories — whether fiction or non-fiction — have the power to create positive neural pathways and empathy.

The key is finding authentic creative response — not escaping our times, but engaging meaningfully with them through our chosen medium.

Finding Our True Response in Tumultuous Times

Fiction, in particular, has a unique power to illuminate truth through metaphor and story. A novel about characters navigating loss might speak more powerfully to someone living through collective grief than an essay about grief. A fantasy story about power and corruption might reveal insights about current politics more effectively than direct political commentary.

This is what I mean by authentic creative response — writing that emerges from our genuine engagement with the world around us, filtered through our unique creative lens and the themes that burn inside us.

Ursula K. Le Guin is a great example of this.

She wrote some of her most powerful work during the tumultuous 1960s and 70s and her science fiction novels weren't escaping reality — they were wrestling with questions about power, gender, war, and human nature that were urgently relevant to her times. By setting these explorations in imagined worlds, she could examine these themes with a freedom and depth that more direct approaches might not have allowed.

This is exactly what happened with my own novel, Remember Tomorrow. After fifteen years working as an environmental journalist, witnessing the gap between the promises of the "green" sector and the reality of what was actually happening, I found myself carrying a grief and anger that felt too large for essays or articles. The betrayal I'd witnessed — organisations more concerned with fundraising than genuine change, another profit-driven resource-hungry industry being created, the manipulation of well-meaning people's hopes — needed the deeper exploration that only fiction could provide.

By creating characters navigating a future world changed because of corporate greed, I could examine the complexity of environmental activism, the psychology of hope and despair, and the very human tendency to tell ourselves comforting stories even when facing uncomfortable truths. The novel became a way to process not just my professional disillusionment, but the broader questions about how we respond when the systems our society is built on fail us. I started writing this novel in 2015 and in early drafts, I was preachy and angry using the characters for my own agendas. But over the course of writing it, I developed a mindful writing practice and started letting the characters tell me their story instead of me imposing mine on them.

The same principle applies whether we're writing contemporary fiction, historical novels, memoir, or essays. The question isn't whether we're addressing current events directly, but whether we're writing with authentic awareness of the human experience we're all sharing, and all creating.

This awareness comes through mindfulness — that practice of staying present with what's actually happening rather than being swept away by the overwhelm of information or the pressure to have answers we don't have. The practice of getting out of the way and letting our characters speak their truths through us.

Mindful Witnessing in Chaotic Times

When the world feels chaotic, our writing practice becomes a form of meditation — a way of bearing witness to what we're experiencing without becoming consumed by it. This requires a particular kind of courage: the willingness to feel what's here without immediately rushing to fix or solve or explain it away.

I've found that some of my most honest writing emerges when I sit down with questions rather than ideas. What does it feel like to be human in this particular moment in history? How do we love each other when everything feels uncertain? What stories want to be told when the old narratives no longer seem to fit?

These questions don't need immediate answers. In fact, the willingness to sit with not knowing often leads to more authentic and resonant writing than forcing premature conclusions.

The practice of mindful witnessing means writing to understand rather than to solve. It means using our breath and grounding techniques when world events trigger creative paralysis and feelings of despair. It means bearing witness through words to what we're actually experiencing, not what we think we should be experiencing.

This kind of writing requires what the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön calls "staying with the discomfort" — not rushing to false hope or despair, but remaining present with the complexity of what's happening.

Stories That Build Bridges in Divided Times

Photo by Tyler Lastovich on Unsplash

One of the most powerful things we can do as writers during divisive times is to create characters and stories that reveal our shared humanity. This doesn't mean writing characters who are artificially perfect or conflicts that resolve too easily. It means bringing the same compassionate understanding we've been cultivating for ourselves to everyone who appears in our work.

I return often to that wisdom from the Tao Te Ching that I mentioned in our earlier post about writing with compassion: some people's windows have just a few smudges that need cleaning, while others are filthy with only small patches where light gets through. But the light is always there. We can always find our way back to it.

This perspective becomes especially important when we're writing in times that are so polarised. It's easy to create characters who represent "the other side" as caricatures rather than complex humans. But when we do this, we contribute to the very division we could be helping to heal.

Instead, we can use our understanding of the Three Cs of Character — Complexity, Contradictoriness, and Consistency — to create people on the page who feel real in all their flawed humanity. Characters who make choices we disagree with but whose motivations we can understand. People whose actions we might deplore but whose pain we can recognise.

This is where the neuroscience research we explored becomes especially relevant. When readers encounter characters who feel genuinely human — complex, contradictory, recognisable — it triggers that neural coupling response. Readers don't just understand these characters intellectually; they experience everything with them. And through that experience, if we use our words wisely, they may find their capacity for empathy expanded.

The responsibility of understanding our neurological impact becomes especially important when society is so fragmented. We have the power to create stories that bring people together or drive them further apart. The choice is ours with every sentence we write.

The Writer as Keeper of Light

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

– Martin Luther King Jr

I think about this quote and how Martin Luther King responded to the darkness of his times often when I'm struggling with how to respond creatively to our overwhelming times.

We don't have to solve everything through our writing. We don't have to have all the answers or address every crisis directly. But we can light small candles to drive out the dark — the stories that emerge from our authentic engagement with being part of the human family in these particular times. Because we are all connected and all want the same things despite what the media will have us believe.

Sometimes that means writing a character who finds their way back to love after loss. Sometimes it means exploring themes of resilience or forgiveness or the possibility of change. Sometimes it means simply bearing witness to difficulty without trying to fix it, trusting that the act of witnessing itself has value.

I've discovered that our willingness to feel the world's pain — to stay present with difficulty rather than turning away — often leads to our most healing writing. Not because we're offering false comfort, but because we're offering the deeper comfort of recognition: you are not alone in this.

When we write from this place of authentic engagement, something interesting happens. The stories that acknowledge difficulty while maintaining some thread of hope — not naive optimism, but the kind of hope that comes from staying present with what's real — create the strongest healing responses in both writers and readers.

This is what I mean by being keepers of light. Not pretending the darkness doesn't exist, but refusing to let it have the final word. Despite my despair and anger that drove the writing of the first draft of Remember Tomorrow, by the time it was edited and published readers commented on the hope that was woven through it all too. And the villain of the story went from a two-dimensional baddie in early drafts to a complex, flawed and understandable boy-man trying to make sense of the world he found himself in.

Writing for the World We're Becoming

I want to close with something that's been guiding my own practice lately: the idea of writing as if future generations will read our words. Not in a grandiose way, but with the understanding that our stories become part of the ongoing human conversation about what it means to be alive at different times.

What do we want to contribute to that conversation? What kind of understanding do we want to pass along? How can our words serve not just our immediate readers, but the world we're all creating together?

These questions don't require us to become more political or preachy in our writing. They invite us to become more intentional, more compassionate, more willing to write from the depths of our humanity rather than the surface of our opinions.

The tools we've been exploring throughout this series — the compassion that starts with ourselves and extends to everyone who appears in our work, the mindfulness that keeps us present with what's real, the understanding of how stories work in our brains and bodies, the courage to write the stories that burn inside us — these become even more essential when we're writing in dark times.

Because the truth is, we've always been writing in the dark, haven't we? None of us really knows what we're doing here, how the story ends, what any of it means. The darkness of uncertainty is the human condition. Our job as writers isn't to eliminate that darkness, but to find ways of writing truthfully within it.

And sometimes, if we're very lucky, our words become small lights that help others find their way.

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Writing Prompts

Here are five prompts designed to help you engage authentically with our current times through your writing practice:

1. The Witness Practice Set a timer for 20 minutes and write continuously starting with: "Right now, in this moment in history, it feels like..." Don't try to solve or explain, just let whatever wants to emerge come through without editing.

2. The Bridge Builder Create two characters who would typically be on "opposite sides" of a current social or political divide. Write a scene where they discover something they share at the deepest human level — not their opinions, but their fears, hopes, or fundamental needs.

3. The Future Reader Imagine someone reading your work 50 years from now, trying to understand what it was like to be alive in 2025. Write a letter or story that captures something essential about this time — not the headlines, but the feeling of being human right now.

4. The Metaphor Maker Choose a current situation that feels overwhelming when addressed directly. Now write about it through metaphor — a fairy tale, a science fiction scenario, a myth, or any fictional frame that allows you to explore the deeper truths without getting caught in the surface details.

5. The Light Keeper Write about a character experiencing genuine difficulty (personal or collective). Focus not on solving their problem, but on showing one small moment where they choose connection, compassion, or hope despite the darkness.

Remember, there's no right or wrong way to respond to these prompts. Trust what wants to emerge and be compassionate with yourself as you navigate writing in uncertain times.

I'd love to hear what comes up for you with these exercises, and how you're finding your own way of writing authentically in these complex times. Share your responses or thoughts in the comments below.

With love,

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Write with me

None of my courses are about following formulas or writing to market trends. They're about discovering the stories that live in your heart and bones, and learning to pour words onto the page without fear. They’ve all been written with love. 💙 Paid members of my Substack get discounts and early booking on all of my courses, as well as lots of other great things to find ways to live and write more mindfully.

If you want to make meaning from your own lived experience... The Mindful Memoir Course guides you through the sacred act of transforming your memories into meaningful narrative, helping you find the universal truths within your personal journey and write your story with courage, compassion, and authentic voice.

If you're ready to write with deeper purpose...
Compassionate Storytelling shows you how to create fiction and memoir that promotes healing, understanding, and positive change in our world.

If you want to transform your entire writing practice...
A Year of Mindful Writing offers twelve months of guided exploration to help you develop a sustainable, joyful writing practice that nourishes both your craft and your soul.

If you want deep, committed and personalised guidance…
The Mindful Mentoring Program is six months of one-to-one work combining craft development with mindfulness practices to help you complete a draft of a novel or memoir and fill your writing practice with meaning and joy.