Cecil Fenn: 'Pursuing truth and specificity for your character will always help you navigate sensitive topics'
BY Maya Fernandes
1st Oct 2026
In this interview Cecil Fenn, author of the debut gothic horror The Restorative Artist, shares his advice for writing sensitively about difficult subject matters.
'When you’re writing about sensitive topics like loss or the body, I believe that truth becomes more important. This is a story about one person’s experience only, and I hope it is sensitive to what it discusses, but it also isn’t an ideological statement that needs to be pure or safe.'
We caught up with scholarship winner Cecil to discuss his time studying with us, his literary influences and his writing routine.
The Restorative Artist follows Graham Creer, a talented embalmer and funeral home director, who begins to be haunted by the dead resting in his basement mortuary. What drew you to the funeral industry as the setting for your debut?
When I was younger, I worked in a funeral home myself and was training to be a restorative artist like my main character Graham. Even though I left the industry after only a few years, the experience has stuck with me. It’s a setting that is begging to be written about, honestly: there are heightened emotions, unusual stakes, and a rich visual palette. I always knew I would have to write about it – it just took me over a decade to process it all!
The seed of the story grew around the powerlessness I felt in the face of death while working in a funeral home. When I started training, I hoped caring for the dead would help me make peace with grief and with the challenges of being embodied; I thought a life of service would turn loss into meaning. That didn’t quite work out for me, so I went on to heighten and explore those challenges in my novel.
Graham's visions of the deceased grow increasingly gruesome as the book progresses. How did you approach the horror elements of the book, and do you have any advice for writers struggling to write sensitively about a difficult subject matter?
The horror elements of this book all draw on things I have seen while working at the funeral home, so I was very conscious of approaching the subject matter respectfully. Something that mattered to me was showing that, in the funeral profession, you might be exposed to gruesome things – I know I still have nightmares about some of it – but you also approach the dead with care and compassion. When you are in the right frame of mind for funeral service, the worst things don’t bother you but actually fill you with love for the human condition. While writing this book, I wanted to play with that contrast, and my focus was on using context, atmosphere, and character reaction to control what feels like horror and what does not.
I use the same technique on a sentence level by playing with language that distances my main character from the people he’s closest to but connects him to the dead. So, he might use anatomical language you’d find on mortuary studies course to describe his partner, but then use soft, colloquial language for a corpse. His growth and connection to the living, the dead, and his own body can be charted through that language.
When you’re writing about sensitive topics like loss or the body, I believe that truth becomes more important. There are some difficult things in this book – about grief, mental health, and the queer experience – that will not resonate with everyone. I did, though, spend a lot of time on research and reflection to achieve a specificity that I think, at least from where I stand, feels true, and avoids saying anything presented there is a universal judgement. This is a story about one person’s experience only, and I hope it is sensitive to what it discusses, but it also isn’t an ideological statement that needs to be pure or safe. I have an advantage in that I am writing from experience on many axes: my main character and I have the same gender identity; I’ve worked in the funeral profession; I have similar experiences with loss. But regardless of how close you are to the world you’re writing, I think that pursuing truth and specificity for your character will always help you navigate sensitive topics.
The novel has been likened to the work of Shirley Jackson, Donna Tartt and even Hannibal. Are there any literary or cinematic influences that you drew from during the writing process?
Honestly, I am never going to get over those comparisons! My career has peaked there, probably.
Shirley Jackson’s tension and atmosphere, and Donna Tartt’s rich descriptions and character work, are definitely touchstones for me. I was also inspired by the quiet, embodied grief writing in Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, the close emotional character portraiture of John Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van, the depictions of crisis and creativity in Jennifer Atkin’s The Cellist, and the quiet queerness and subtle speculative work in Genevieve Jagger’s Fragile Animals. I also read a lot of poetry and non-fiction about grief, loss, and the importance of ritual in healing in order to support the first-hand funeral industry experience I was drawing on.
I have fewer direct cinematic influences. Although I do love Hannibal – and it’s a direct comp for my next novel – I wasn’t consciously drawing on it while writing The Restorative Artist. I have a day job in lighting design for theatre, though, and I think you can see that in the way I think about image on the page. I’m often writing the picture in a way that leans towards the cinematic. I was most inspired by films that capture the dreaminess and melancholy of memory while writing, like Aftersun and After Yang, and movies about grief like A Ghost Story.
What is your writing routine?
I’ll preface this by saying: my writing routine is pure evil, and I do not recommend it to anyone.
As I mentioned before, I work in theatre, which is wonderful and inspiring, but the hours are ridiculous. The standard day when you’re making a show is 9:00 to 22:00, and that’s usually 6 days a week, so I had to get creative to find a writing schedule that worked for me around these long hours. I was too tired to work when I got home, so I started having a couple hours sleep, and then waking up around 1:30 to do maybe 2 hours of writing, then going back to sleep. I think this strategy is sort of like writers who work at 5am before work, but it makes the deadline for when you need to stop writing seem farther away, which made me more creative. Also: no one will bother you in the middle of the night. It’s definitely the most relaxed time to write. Biphasic sleep was a popular medieval practice, too, so maybe it’s not too strange!
If I have some downtime between shows, though, I do not follow this routine! I usually write immediately after my morning coffee for about four hours. I personally struggle to get more than about four hours of meaningful generative work done in a day. It’s diminishing returns after that, so I’ll switch to editing material later in the day.
In general, I take a top-down approach to my writing, and after I know the world well enough, I tend to meticulously plan a novel’s structure before writing. I always do structural edits before approaching anything at the sentence level.
You were awarded a scholarship to study on our flagship Writing Your Novel – Three Months course in London as part of our Breakthrough Writers’ Programme. How did your time with us shape your approach to writing?
The CBC course was an intensely inspiring space, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to learn with my cohort and our amazing tutor Christie Watson. Her teaching was so welcoming and open that it helped me approach my writing process with a joy and curiosity that I had forgotten should be central to the creative process.
What was most valuable for me was the workshop aspect of the course. I learned as much reading other people’s writing as I did hearing them critique mine. Doing intensive reading and analysis every week woke up my critical brain and taught me to approach my work fearlessly and to confront weaknesses of structure or language head on. The whole experience taught me to think of myself as a writer and to take my work seriously; I started to expect more of myself and my writing, and that made me a better editor.
The course also demystified a lot of the industry behind-the-scenes, which has been incredibly valuable. Knowing how to pitch my work and how to communicate within a professional publishing space helped me advocate for The Restorative Artist and has informed how I’m approaching my future projects.
Many of our students find lifelong writing friends on our courses. Are you still in touch with anyone you met on the course?
I am absolutely still in touch with my workshop group – we call ourselves The Eggs! They’re name-checked in the acknowledgements of The Restorative Artist, and so many of them came to the launch to celebrate with me.
We all recognised that it’s invaluable to have a group of people you can share your work with; it turns a three-month workshop into a kind of permanent rolling workshop where you can always go to test out early drafts and play with ideas. Being able to read what my peers are working on continues to motivate and inspire me outside of the course.
We also have seasonal socials, and honestly the warmth and support of my course-mates got me through the editing phase of this novel. The CBC course is just a great place to build a community that believes in your writing (even when you don’t!) and pushes you towards your voice when you’re doubting yourself on the page.
And finally, what’s next for your writing journey?
I’m just wrapping up edits on the novel I was working on while I was studying with CBC, which is a horror crime thriller called Low Noise. I’d describe it as C.J. Leede’s Headlights meets Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate, with a heavy dose of queer Hannibal aesthetics. I’ll be querying it soon!
Get your hands on a copy of The Restorative Artist, out now with Lucent Dreaming.
Cecil was awarded a scholarship to study on our flagship Writing Your Novel – Three Months course in London as part of our Breakthrough Writers’ Programme in 2025.
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