Interview: Abigail Mann

Abigail Mann is an author, writing mentor, workshop host, Creative Coach for London Writers’ Salon and Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund. She is also a mother, who shares on Substack about the challenges of juggling writing with parenthood. Abigail writes female-led contemporary comedy novels that are big on feelings and even bigger on laughs. Her first three novels, The Lonely Fajita, The Sister Surprise and The Wedding Crasher, are available now. Her fourth novel, The Great Thirtieth Trip, is due for release in 2025.

Tell us about the challenges that impact your writing.

Challenges fall into two camps for me. One is the pragmatics of it: how it gets done and when, and the other is a challenge of self-belief: why am I doing it, and will it be worth it? If I linger for too long on the second, I can easily slip into an existential crisis. 

There is so much about writing that is repeatedly telling yourself that things will pay off, sometimes literally. I am not in the privileged position of being able to write for large chunks of my working time, and it not have the possibility of leading to financial reward, but let’s face it, there are easier ways to earn a regular pay cheque. The self-belief you need to keep going, to think that at some point you’ll be paid for your stories, is huge and often clashes with the thought that I am being selfish for choosing this as a career. Writing novels is particularly hard because you can commit years to one project only to see it sink beneath a wave that has crested too soon or too late to carry it towards the right audience. But there it is. The self-belief has to kick in otherwise, you waste time moping. 

Aside from that, it’s the juggling of childcare, how much I can afford to do, plus what happens in the weeks when illness wipes out my writing time (the answer: accept your fate and shift deadlines where possible. There’s no point feeling guilty about something outside of your control).

What support has been valuable to you on your writing journey?

Having a partner, friends, and family that believe in the choices I have made. Things would be so much harder if I had to convince other people as well as myself that writing was worthwhile. 

When I first decided I wanted to write seriously, I took advantage of a relocation and temporarily left teaching to see how much ground I could break with nine months off. My parents allowed me to live back home and didn’t charge me rent, and my partner agreed to a long-distance relationship whilst I took up freelance editing work and wrote my first manuscript. This was incredibly valuable because it gave me breathing room and a time limit to ‘give it a go’. 

I didn’t go back to teaching because that novel got picked up (The Lonely Fajita), and if it wasn’t for that time, which was akin to a sabbatical, I think it would have taken me far longer to complete a writing project to length. Now that I’m well into my career, competitions like the Comedy Women in Print prize launched me into the writing world with publicity that I could only have dreamed of. Since then, the Royal Literary Fund has also provided incredible opportunities to use my skills as a writer with students who really benefit from my knowledge and experience, all whilst allowing me time to make bold moves with my writing without it being a huge financial risk. That support means a huge amount. 

What more needs to be done to support parents to write around their children?

Childcare, childcare, childcare. Writers are under threat as it is, what with advances in AI and collapsing arts budgets. If primary caregivers are also writers, the maths becomes very simple. You do what you need to do to support your family, and I worry that low-earning writers who are also parents will be the ones to step out of the industry. That signifies the loss of a critical voice in the arts. This is compounded when we consider that mothers are most often the primary caregiver, and working-class writers are also at risk from being left out of the conversation. Talent is not enough. If we don’t offer parents fully funded hours that adequately cover nursery costs, then writing rooms, publishers, and bookshelves will be full of middle-class white dudes, and the stories that we desperately need won’t get written. It’s as simple as that.

Why does it matter that we hear stories from these writers?

There is so much missing from cultural and social commentary if we don’t allow space for voices that make up huge proportions of the population. I’m talking about the experience of motherhood and caregiving, not just from those who can afford extended maternity leave, but from parents who create alongside parenting, from those who are trying their best to communicate their truth amongst the noise. 

To write is to know ourselves, and doesn’t everyone deserve an opportunity to do that? There is a fantastic book called The Baby on the Fire Escape, which is all about creativity, motherhood, and the mind-baby problem. For an experience so common, the process of bringing new life into the world is about as sublime as you can get. Men climb mountains to be within touch of something that resembles that. In the book, Louise Erdich says of motherhood, “There is also the sense of a self merged and at least temporarily erased—it is deathlike. . . . Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies.” We need stories like that, not only to be written but to be raised to a level of esteem worthy of the experience.

What writers do you admire who are telling these stories?

I really enjoy Holly Bourne’s work, and her next adult novel, So Thrilled For You, is a thriller set at a baby shower that ends in arson. It is raw and gripping writing that manages to be riveting as well as profound. I recently read Costanza by Rachael Blackmore, which is historical fiction set in 17th Century Rome about the life, pain, and hope of Costanza, a mistress of Lorenzo Bernini, the famous sculptor. It is beautifully written, full of the life and the movements of women. Both authors are mothers, and I admire them greatly.

When do you write? Do you have a routine? 

I write when my toddler is at nursery or looked after by family. When she wasn’t in childcare, I would choose one of her naps to write in, usually with her strapped to my chest. I once tried to write whilst breastfeeding, but she was so temperamental that I had to assist her with both hands, so that wasn’t an option. I’m no good without much sleep, so mornings, after 7am but before lunch, is the best time for me.

What is the worst piece of advice given to writers who are juggling writing and childcare?

“If you wanted to do it badly enough, you would.” 

Sometimes we want to pay for heating badly. Sometimes we want to catch up on sleep badly. There are seasons to creativity, and sometimes life with a small baby looks like absorbing things, ready to breathe them into life later on the page.

Is generative AI going to be the saviour or the destroyer of creative writing? 

A big question that could be a whole essay on its own! It won’t ever destroy creative writing, but I really struggle to see how it is going to save it. Creativity is human experience captured, communicated. It has to come from a human. Maybe one day, when computers are sentient, AI can write about the robot experience of consciousness. One for a Sci-fi writer, to explore, perhaps.

You can find out more about Abigail’s books, workshops and mentoring at AbigailMann.com, or you can subscribe to her essays on writing, motherhood and the relationship between the two on Substack.

Posted in: Productivity

By: Allegra Chapman