Screenwriter Moira Buffini on Songlight, and the comeback of dystopia
Screenwriter Moira Buffini on writing YA dystopian Songlight and the effect of dictatorship on young women.
Moira Buffini is an award-winning screenwriter and she is now here to make her mark with her YA dystopian novel, Songlight. People with certain abilities are classified as Unhumans, and there is a government ready to hunt them all down.
To celebrate the release of Songlight, Moira Buffini is here to chat why dystopian novels are making a comeback.
Why do you think dystopian novels are making a comeback?
Dystopian fiction taps into the very real fears that a lot of us are feeling about the future but allows us to explore these fears through epic adventures. A dystopia allows us to curate the cacophony. Whilst dystopias might act as warnings, I think that imagining a post-apocalyptic future may also enable us to feel more powerful and proactive in the present.
You are a talented screenwriter. What was the biggest challenge in writing a book compared to your usual writing?
I never thought that I would write a novel as I love writing for the screen but writing prose was liberating! It’s expansive, where drama is distilled. I had the luxury of delving into each character’s thoughts, dreams and emotional inner life and describing those things in their words. Writing drama has given me a great action-writing toolkit but I really loved inhabiting each different narrative voice. The biggest challenge for me has been the solitude of novel-writing. Theatre, TV and Film are such collaborative arts. I missed the team!
Given you wrote the book, does that make it easy to develop Songlight for TV now?
Most certainly. My first idea for this story was to write it as a screenplay but I fell down because creating the world just needed more detail and texture. Now I have all that and the book acts as a great reference for the rest of the creative team.
How do you come up with the names “songlight”, “Torch” and “Siren”?
I read that the part of the human brain that makes song is far older than the part that makes language. We were singing long before we were talking and I wondered if telepathy might come from this ancient part of our brains. We feel a lightness to our spirits and I think we have all imagined ourselves outside of our bodies – even if it’s only while we dream. In art, the human spirit is often represented by light so these two forces of song and light became the name for my fictional telepathy. Sirens are from Greek mythology. They’d lure sailors to their deaths with eerie, powerful song. This is what sirens are charged with: luring people with songlight to their doom.
Women in the Songlight universe are sorted as First Wives, Second Wives and Third Wives. Why did you decide to discuss expectations for women as wives in a YA book?
Our rights as women are incredibly fragile. The world seems to be romancing dictators again and in dictatorships, women’s rights most often disappear. I wanted to look at the effect of this on a group of young women. What is it like to have no meaningful education, no ownership over your body, no say in what happens to you? This was our reality in the past and is still the case in many parts of the world. Our comparative freedom in democracies is so precious. The autocratic and misogynistic society of Brightland is a reminder of that.
Finally, Songlight is book 1 of a trilogy. What’s the progress on the other books?
I have just finished writing Book Two, literally last week. It doesn’t even have a title yet. But I have loved expanding the world and following my characters on their journeys. I’ll start planning Book Three in the weeks to come.
