Influences that created The Land

I recall being 15 years old with my mum in Sainsbury’s. The year was 2006, and I had accompanied my mum on a shopping trip. Walking down the DVD aisle, I would often gaze at the many films and the worlds within them. On this occasion, one DVD cover stood out to me. Kirsten Dunst appeared to lie there on a floral backdrop, her face whitened by powder, with rouge lighting her cheeks a subtle red. Her soft blonde hair piled above her. It was, of course, the 2006 movie by Sofia Coppola, Marie Antoinette. I asked my mum at the time who Marie Antoinette was. Her reply started a lifelong fascination with her

“That poor unfortunate Queen.”

Many 15-year-olds experience a coming of age through building new relationships, drinking too much in a park, or even meeting who you think is the love of your life. Mine was spent watching the film which I had put into the DVD player, in which I witnessed a world far removed from my own. A world filled with pastel colours, cake, flowers, and stunning gowns, all set on a soundtrack of 1980s new wave music that I didn’t yet understand. This elaborate, well-crafted world, set somewhere in France, spoke to me like nothing else had.

What began was a yearning to know more. It was my sister (if she recalls) who brought me my first copy of the book on which the film was based, Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser. It was to be the very first book I would ever finish from front to back within a few days. Whilst the glittering, pink-filled film showed the decadence of Versailles, the book expanded on the life of a woman who was married at 14, expected to perform constantly, who attempted to curate her own world away from that performance, and who found that none of it actually mattered when it all came down around her.

To me, that was the theme of life. There is an expectation on everyone to perform daily, to smile, to put on a show, and be the person others expect you to be. A longing to escape it all by booking a one-way ticket to some distant destination and never looking back. And the realisation: how much in our lives actually matters? When the blade of the guillotine came crashing down on Marie Antoinette’s neck on a cold October day, I wonder what she valued the most in her 37 years on this earth at that moment.

Another film that came out in 2004 was Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, another influence on my thought process. In both worlds, Regina George and Marie Antoinette held court over their respective worlds. Both practiced their own self-worth in worlds which attempted to force them to conform to norms. Both celebrated individuality. Both faced consequences because of it. And that brought me to the question for the very first time, is individuality dangerous?

To draw parallels between the fictional high school popular girl and the long-dead Queen of France may seem a little mad, but in the late 2000s, to me anyway, it represented society.

Anyone who was born in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s had their lives mostly road mapped in front of them. They would attend nursery, then primary school, then secondary school. The goal was to get good grades, go to university, and one day marry and have children. A system curated by the generations that came after the war. It ensured stability and gave people a sense of security, as if it had been carefully designed for us. Those who came before had attempted to rebel against it, but the majority of them had since appeared to fall into line.

We became a uniformed generation, taught, on the most part, the same values and the same lessons, it was a muted system that was asking for trouble.

I recall at school going to a meeting with what was then called “Connections” It was a discussion between you and someone you didn’t know from Adam about your career goals. Before the meeting, you wrote three goals down, as if a 14-year-old could even comprehend the realities of being an adult. My first was to be a writer. My second, a publican. My third, the manager of a children’s home (likely influenced by Tracy Beaker there).

The person from Connections scoffed at the first option, as if you had to be Oscar Wilde to write a book. Then the second, a publican, they laughed. “Not a very realistic goal for you.” I recall thinking to myself, why would that not be a realistic goal? Running a pub seemed like a very realistic option to me.

The third was palatable for the Connections person, but still, for work experience they placed me in Tesco. For any 14-year-old, it’s a hard pill to swallow when your dreams are dismissed like that. But looking back, it was a classic example of that period of time. It was that person’s job to place you in a box and move on to the next young person.

I personally feel it was those driving forces of placing people in boxes that saw a resurgence in individuality. It was a time in which goths and emos started to appear, or reappear. The subtle appearance of wristbands and brightly coloured nail varnish that people wore to signal to others, even if they didn’t quite understand it, that they were rebelling against the status quo.

The early internet suddenly could create communities who held different beliefs to what we were taught in school. Bebo and Vampire Freaks come to mind. People were becoming more connected than ever, sharing ideas and expressing themselves.

Of course, you can disagree. Your experience of growing up may differ. But when I think about the world before the film and the book of Marie Antoinette, I see a grey world. It would be the story of Marie Antoinette that would drive me to see the world from a different perspective. To me, it was the perfect story for a 15-year-old to connect with.

In The Land, we meet Mia, a typical 20-year-old who has lived in a world devoid of culture. Individuality has been deemed dangerous because it gives people opinions. It allows freedom of discussion, disagreements, arguments, but in the end, it offers enlightenment. What does it take for our individuality to be taken away?

The Land is very much not a sweeping, grand piece of work. It’s a mad story, set against the backdrop of a world in which everything we know has been taken away. It’s a romp within the very genre it belongs to. But I often think, is such a world that far off?

As I have grown up, individuality has expanded, and that should be celebrated. But we also witness the negatives of it. Whilst opinions can be celebrated, society often eventually falls into a one-size-fits-all approach.

In the universe of The Land, some 200 years before, Alyssa’s great-grandfather believed that such individuality, which caused disagreements and perhaps coaxed the rise of a more right-leaning world, had ended society. What if the world could be rebuilt, curated, people living day-to-day lives without any significant opinion on anything?

As history has taught us, it doesn’t work. Marie Antoinette resided at Versailles, whilst 20 miles down the road, the people of Paris began to wake up and question the world they had always been presented with. Why does the King get to be King? Why can’t we choose our rulers?

With mostly good intentions, the French Revolution spilled across France, ending the monarchy, but not answering those fundamental questions. Instead, what was meant to be a new beginning for France simply introduced a system that was open to exploitation and raised more questions than answers.

This is a key factor and influence in my writing. Mia must search for her identity whilst asking of the world: who decides what’s right and wrong? And what right did anyone have to tell her that she couldn’t be her own person, with her own likes, dislikes, opinions, and self-worth?

In my early 20s, I stumbled across Suzanne Collins’ books, The Hunger Games, and they quickly became favorites. The story seemed to reflect the same ideas I was observing in the world, a society in a post-apocalyptic setting, based on a class system with the Capitol in the centre, ignorant to the plight of the people (Versailles).

Those in the districts were presented with a reality they were forced to accept, in a world overseen by President Snow. It isn’t particularly the story within the books that spoke to me, but the world it was staged in. How the horrors of The Hunger Games can be presented as entertainment and reality television.

The books are a reflection of the era in which they were written. I’m not sure how the author wanted them to come across, but to me, The Hunger Games was a letter, a call for change. It was inspirational to me, and, rounding back to the story of Marie Antoinette, I was clearly interested in worlds that lived on ignorance and underestimated the people they governed.

I have always been a manipulative daydreamer. As a child, I could lose myself for hours in a world of my own creation. As an adult, I have had to control that. But as I daydreamed a collection of characters in my head and the situations, they find themselves in, I find those characters to be influenced by people I have read about or seen on television.

In 2005, the EastEnders character Chrissie Watts cemented the realisation that I was gay, when, in the campest possible way, she was pushed into the grave of the husband she murdered by Peggy. This power play, these two strong women, heavily influenced the character of Alyssa in The Land.

Alyssa controls her world with a varnished hand. But she isn’t evil for the sake of being evil. There is a deeper story behind her which has driven her to act in the way she does. She genuinely believes that people need protecting from the truth and will do anything to defend that. And that is true to our world today. Many people are not open to opposing differences, and they will protect their own belief system however they see fit.

Over time, I have written many stories. Some have not seen the light of day and never will; some I will share here. I have attempted to write sweeping, fantasy, Game of Thrones-style stories, though my style always seems to find a way to make it comical and to mock the world I have created.

How I would love to write someone like Cersei Lannister (with preference to the show adaptation of her) a cool-headed, red-wine-drinking mother making her way in the world she has been presented with and playing the complicated game of life.

I sat down one evening in the summer of 2025. I had been watching the news about the UK’s intention to introduce laws preventing underage people from seeing certain content online, and then watched as TikTok commentators questioned whether this was simply wider censorship hidden under responsibility to children.

It was at that moment that, after years of attempting to create worlds and stories, The Land awoke in my head. I wondered: what if the internet was censored? What if we lost our individuality, our ability to share ideas? What if history itself was slowly eroded away?

What sort of world would we become? Would we become so uncreative that we would call the place we live in simply The Land? Could we be told that our world was founded with the assistance of an alien named XMAR? and that such an alien is humanity’s salvation?

Eventually, we might simply accept the reality that is given to us, just like in The Hunger Games, or like those French peasants in 1779.

I feel that world could happen. But what will always come back is individuality.

Mia lives in a world a thousand years from our own. But when she discovers an image of Gemma Collins, a person so far removed from her own reality, it wakes her up. It’s like us finding an old coin from the Roman era in our back garden. It’s an artefact that represents a different world and gives us a sense of our own place within it and confirmation that others came before us.

The Land poured out of my fingers over the course of several weeks. It evolved into places I didn’t expect. As a complete novice, I discovered I had a style when writing. I could not help but write a serious yet unserious story at the same time.

The Land almost mocks itself. The world is so bizarre that the characters simply find themselves living through it. I couldn’t help but place Easter eggs throughout the book which constantly remind the reader that The Land is the land we live on, that history will always find a way of revealing itself.

When presented with a blank slate, just like the mudlurkers on the Thames who attempt to rediscover London’s rich history, so shall the people of The Land.

I never expected to write a book. But I feel all the influences I have talked about here simply bubbled over into what is now a novel.

But it didn’t stop at The Land. When I completed it, I wrote another complete story, one which taught me more about myself and explored more themes.

I don’t know if The Land will do amazingly well, or if it will simply be read by a handful of people. But I hope that it’s a story mad enough to make you stop and think… and wonder about the land we live in right now…