Alumna Josje Weusten: Successfully embracing creative writing

In 2021, Josje began writing her dystopian novel, Fake Fish. The first 10,000 words came quickly. To further develop her writing skills, Josje decided to enrol at the Faber Academy in London in 2022. This academy offers various writing courses and programmes, and admission to their advanced programme is competitive. They select a maximum of 15 participants based on submitted manuscripts. Josje was accepted as the only non-native speaker and spent an academic year completing the first draft of her novel.

Four months later, she found a publisher eager to publish her manuscript: Sparsile Books, a British literary publisher that was named Scotland’s best publisher this year. “I was very fortunate with Sparsile Books. They immediately understood the story I wanted to tell, and they focus on innovative, genre-blurring literature. That’s exactly the type of book I wanted to write. The novel explores fake news and AI and how they increasingly undermine our concepts of what’s real and what isn’t. I wondered what effect this would have on universities, where truth and factuality are central values. My work as a lecturer at UM’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences was a key source of inspiration. Readers will certainly recognise the settings described, but the book remains fiction. It’s not a roman à clef,” Josje explains. “It’s a novel set in the near future—dystopian, satirical, cinematic, but also literary. My publisher describes it as a blend of Margaret Atwood and Quentin Tarantino, and I think that captures it well.”

After several rounds of editing and revisions, the book has been available in bookshops across Britain and the rest of Europe since 14 November 2024. “The story centres around a video in which a professor makes misogynistic remarks. The video goes viral, but it’s unclear whether the clip is genuine or a deepfake. How do the people around him respond? How can they take responsibility when they’re no longer certain what to believe? As the novel progresses, these questions start to arise on a larger scale. While the main characters grapple with the ‘news’ about the professor, they fail to realise that their society is increasingly destabilised by fake news until, finally, the EU collapses.”

Although Josje’s dystopian novel is fiction, it addresses several issues that resonate with those we see in today’s society. For this reason, the book comes with a discussion guide, intended to encourage readers to think about real societal issues.

Josje explains why she chose to include a discussion guide: “I saw a discussion guide in another book and thought it was an interesting concept because it invites readers to take another look at the book, seeing it in a new light. It’s also a tribute to my students, without whom this book would never have existed. The constructive discussions with them about literature certainly influenced my writing process.”

The goal of the discussion guide for Fake Fish is to encourage readers to examine important issues from multiple perspectives. “One of the problems the book touches on is how people are increasingly trapped in their own information bubbles. With the discussion guide and the book, I hope to inspire readers to consider things from different angles. But aside from being a thought-provoking story, I mostly hope people find it an engaging book that they struggle to put down.”

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Would you like to start writing your own fiction book, or is it your dream to publish one? Josje shares a few tips to help you begin. The first is to read a lot: “Not just for enjoyment, but with a writer’s perspective. That means reading very consciously and asking yourself what you like about a story and why. How is it put together? How is dialogue constructed, for example, or how is a certain rhythm created in the story?” Gaining insight into these aspects can help you play with them more deliberately, improving your own writing skills.

She also encourages simply starting and writing regularly. “There’s a saying that you should write every day. I can’t manage that, even though I’d love to, but I have another job, a family, and a busy social life. I do try to write as regularly as possible, partly because I enjoy it so much, but also because it ultimately improves my work.”

Josje also suggests joining a group of aspiring writers nearby and sharing your work with others, especially since courses can often be expensive. If you want to publish in English, she recommends The Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook by Bloomsbury Press, an annual guide listing publishers and magazines with details on how to submit work and what they publish. It’s also useful to visit the website Authors Publish or follow them on Instagram. They regularly post lists of journals that pay for submissions and accept work at that moment, alongside helpful articles about the writing process.

Text: Janneke Haemers
Photography: Peter O’Rourk