Kate Davies: ‘Write Like Nobody’s Watching’

As writers, telling a story about something we’re afraid of can be terrifying. You might be worried about oversharing, or perhaps the topic feels embarrassing, uncomfortable, and exposing.

What if your parents read your novel? Or your colleagues, students, or friends? And the worst part: what if you use your own traumatic experiences, then your book is published, and strangers on the internet point their fingers at you, yelling, ‘This is wrong, wrong, wrong’? The list of imaginary reasons why you should stop writing gets longer—and when this happens, it’s easy to think you can’t do it. That maybe you should leave this idea alone.

Take a breath and let that fear go.

In this article, our brand new writing coach, Kate Davies, reassures writers who feel afraid of the story they want to tell.

When you write what scares you, as Kate has done more than once, you create a story filled with powerful tension that will take you on a whole new journey as a writer. Because if you’ve experienced any deep-rooted emotion when reading a book, you can bet the author felt both fear and wonder as they were writing it.

Kate Davies is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and author, and we are so pleased to have her with us as a writing coach at The Novelry. Her debut novel, In at the Deep End, won the Polari Prize, was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and serialized for BBC Sounds, and has been optioned for TV. Her second novel, Nuclear Family, was highly acclaimed by The Times, Good Housekeeping, Prima, and the i paper. Kate also writes for children in the picture-book and middle-grade genres.

Here, Kate explains why it’s time to write like nobody’s watching.

For writers scared to write something graphic

When I was publicizing my first novel, In at the Deep End, I encountered a problem. Most of the story was so sexually explicit, I was embarrassed to read it aloud at bookstores and literary salons, and I was horrified when I had to discuss it during interviews.

I don’t talk about sex at all, really, and I’m not very sweary or direct—and yet my book contained so many graphic sex scenes it became known in publishing circles as ‘the fisting book.’

(I complained about this for ages—how reductive! There’s a fisting scene in Tipping the Velvet, too, and no one’s going around calling that a ‘fisting book’! But then I re-read In at the Deep End and realized the scene in question is only 1,600 words long and is essentially a fisting how-to guide.)

So, what happened?

In at the Deep End  started out as a romantic comedy about a young Londoner named Julia, who comes out and thinks, ‘Hooray! I’ve escaped the patriarchy! Now I’m going to have a truly equal relationship and lots of feminist sex!’ Instead, she finds herself trapped in a controlling relationship with a much more experienced lesbian.

While I was writing the first draft of the story in a frenzy, during NaNoWriMo way back in 2012, I read a novel called Wetlands  by Charlotte Roche. Here’s a description from the Irish Independent  for you:

Haemorrhoids, hairy armpits and halitosis, mixed together into an unlikely erotic pot-pourri.
—Irish Independent on the novel Wetlands by Charlotte Roche

The novel was so outrageous, so disgusting, so explicit that it made me laugh out loud. This is a cautionary tale, in a way—be careful what you read when you’re writing—because Wetlands  was so graphic and shocking that I was desensitized by it. I’d lost my embarrassment and shame filters.

I felt empowered by that reading experience.

If Charlotte Roche could write a story about sex and bodies in such a no-holds-barred way, then maybe I could, too. I had just come out as gay, and I hadn’t seen many honest representations of lesbian sex in fiction. As soon as I started writing, detailed sex scenes just sort of... came out of my fingers. I let myself write them. I’ll delete those later, I told myself.

But when I read my first draft, I noticed that those explicit sex scenes were the most compelling scenes in the book. The idea of anyone else reading those words and knowing I’d written them was toe-curlingly horrifying.

But you have to write like no one’s watching, don’t you?

I left those passages in. I realized some readers would probably feel ‘seen’ when they read them. I love the thrill of seeing thoughts or feelings that I thought were uniquely my own on a page in black and white—particularly those I’m embarrassed about, my darkest thoughts, things I would never dare to say aloud.

The idea of anyone else reading [those scenes] and knowing I’d written them was toe-curlingly horrifying. But you have to write like no one’s watching, don’t you? I left those passages in. I realized some readers would probably feel ‘seen’ when they read them.
—Kate Davies

And now for something completely different.

For writers scared to write something tragic

There’s a scene in my new novel that I am absolutely terrified of writing. In it, a mother dies days after an emergency C-section, leaving her son without a mother.

I have a three-year-old son, and my greatest fear is that I’ll die and he’ll have to grow up without me. This thought haunts me almost every day; I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, when my son was one. I’m in remission now, but I’m constantly terrified the cancer will come back.

I’m writing this blog in the London Library (my favorite place to write), and I started to cry when I wrote the last sentence of that previous paragraph. Because I rarely let myself even think about it. I’ll be fine, I tell myself! I’m not going to die!  But that fear is always there anyway, bubbling below the surface.

I know I’ll cry when I write that horrible death scene: I will be diving headfirst into ‘the well’—the bottomless, dark pit of horror I fall into when I think about cancer too much or read basically anything about it on the internet.

I’m going to write it anyway. I hope it will be cathartic, but even if it isn’t, it’ll be worth the pain: I think it will end up being the most powerful scene in my book. Because I believe that when I’m vulnerable, I do my best work—and the more vulnerable I am in my writing, the more my work resonates with readers.

Use your greatest fears in your writing

Screenwriters Lorien McKenna and Meg LeFauve, hosts of the brilliant podcast The Screenwriting Life, often discuss how to use ‘lava’—your greatest fears, your deepest desires, the things you’re most ashamed of, the emotions that are always there, bubbling underneath everything—in your writing.

They say there should be a scene at the low point of your story that ‘scares the crap out of you.’ A scene that, whenever you pitch it to someone, you should feel in your guts. Because that way, the other person will also feel it in their guts.

That horrible scene in my new novel will come at the low point—at the end of act three (or act two, if you prefer the three-act structure). So, now I’m turning that idea over to you: what happens at the lowest point in your story?

I believe that when I’m vulnerable, I do my best work—and the more vulnerable I am in my writing, the more my work resonates with readers.
—Kate Davies

For writers who feel vulnerable

This morning, I read an interview with screenwriter Jack Thorne. He was talking about his new Netflix drama series, Adolescence, in which a teenage boy murders a girl in his class after being sucked into the online world of incel culture. Thorne wrote:

What I didn’t expect was to quickly grasp the attraction of the so-called ‘manosphere’. I knew almost immediately that if I was an isolated kid, I would find answers as to why I felt a bit lost. One of the central ideas—that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men—would have made adolescent me sit up and, frankly, nod.
—Jack Thorne in the Guardian

I thought it was so brave of him to admit that. He is empathizing with a misogynist—with a murderer.

We have to empathize with our most awful characters—that’s how we begin to make them human; by giving them a little part of ourselves. And all writing is an act of bravery. All writing makes you vulnerable. So you may as well go all the way and be as brutally honest as you can.

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You can be brave

I want to encourage you to write what scares you. Be as honest as you dare about your fears—and then be even more honest than that.

We have to empathize with our most awful characters—that’s how we make them human; by giving them a little part of ourselves.
—Kate Davies

Give your main character your greatest fear, the thing that scares you more than any other. Or give them your most desperate desire. Allow your protagonist to voice an idea or a thought so horrifying, you’d never say it out loud. See what happens. You’ll find that other people will rush up to you, saying, ‘I can’t believe someone else feels that way too. It’s such a relief. Thank you for writing that.’

And you’ll probably find that you feel less alone, too.

Write your novel with coaching from Kate Davies

Are you writing what scares you, tackling ‘embarrassing’ topics, and thinking you’d benefit from some kindly guidance? If you’re writing romance, contemporary fiction, literary fiction, or children’s fiction, you’ll find Kate a warm and insightful writing coach.

Join us on the world’s best creative writing courses to create, write, and complete your book. Sign up and start today.