Dr Rachel Knightley speaks to her Great British Horror 5 co-contributor, award-winning author of ovels, short stories and articles (“Usually strange ones”) Aliya Whiteley. is the author of seven books of speculative fiction, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlisted Skyward Inn and The Loosening Skin, and also The Beauty, which was shortlisted for both a Shirley Jackson award and the Otherwise Award. A tenth anniversary edition of The Beauty was published in 2024. She has written over one hundred published short stories that have appeared in magazines such as F&SF, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, The Dark, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Guardian, as well as in anthologies such as Unsung Stories’ 2084 and Lonely Planet’s Better than Fiction. Her non-fiction includes The Secret Life of Fungi, a look at how fungi are a permanent presence in her life. She also writes a regular non-fiction column on sci fi and fantasy matters for Interzone magazine.
For a writing workout based on Aliya’s interview with Rachel, scroll down or visit WritersGym.com to download every Writing Workout in the series.
Find out more about Aliya at https://aliyawhiteley.uk/about/
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Writing Workout based on Aliya’s interview
Warm-up: The Enormous Importance of Weird
Write down a list of your five weirdest interests or experiences.
Pick the one you’re least likely to write about.
Write about it for five minutes. Just for you.
Exercise 1: Fiction, Memoir and Truth
“I’m not an expert on fungi at all, but I wanted to write something about my fascination with them. and I tried, I did like a huge amount of research and was trying to put across things in a very dry academic kind of way… so instead I wrote this very short, personal book about how I just found fun everywhere throughout my life.”
- Think about an experience doing something you love. Describe the sensations in your body, physical and emotional. Show us what you feel and discover.
- Write another version, in third person. Change the character’s gender, or location, or even their activity. Keep the emotional truth but change the literal truth.
Exercise 2: Remembering to Play
- “I’m a big believer in all sorts of exercises and routines that you put around writing, it’s a bit like scaffolding. It kind of takes the pressure off what it is you’re trying to build. Something like working on 381, where every section of that book is 381 words long. That moves a lot of pressure of what’s happening in the novel because you’ve applied sort of weird constraints to it.”
- “Or exercises like, okay, so I have to put these five particular objects that I’ve just made up on the spot. They have to appear in this next short story somewhere. And then the narrative or the characters or all the other things that you would choose to worry about aren’t there any longer because you’re thinking about these five objects.”
Cool-down: Voices on the Bus
Choose one of Aliya’s favourites:
“All the voices that are in your head and you’re all on the bus together. And the writer self is the one driving the bus. One of your passengers is shouting, but passengers are allowed to shout every now and again on my buses. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean catastrophe ahead. t’s a whole range of emotions and thoughts and processes and some, there are the ones that, you know, they’re trying to warn you all the time, but you know, they’re not driving the bus.” Aliya Whiteley
Who are the passengers on your bus?
What is each of them interested in?
Who’s really enthusiastic?
Who panics easily?
What does each one love?
What does each one want?