Iain Mac Lachlainn's Blog: Iain Mac's Writing Journal

Sunset Song

Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Sunset Song is a novel is about the transition of a farming community in the Northeast of Scotland as the world presses in on it in the early twentieth century, bringing with it mechanisation and war. It is also about the changing role of women in society as the protagonist, Chris Guthrie, stands up to the authoritarian father that has brought so much misery to the lives of her and her family.

John Guthrie is a mean-spirited and brutal man, bringing with him a constant...

Winner – Scots Book o the Year

‘This Is What You Get’ was named Scots Book o the Year 2025, at a ceremony in Dundee on the 6th of September

It has been said that Scots looks ‘strange on the page’, being a predominantly spoken language.

“To be able to unashamedly produce serious work in ma ain tongue gies me an immense amount o pride.”

Despite being short-listed for the Penguin/RH WriteNow programme and praised by a London editor for its refreshing dialect, my agent couldn’t place this novel through traditional ...

Sausages and Syzygy

Discussing Caledonian Antisyzygy

Syzygy, a wonderful sounding word with its origins in Greek, means the alignment of two things. Antisyzygy, therefore, is opposed to the alignment of two things.

Caledonian Antisyzygy, as with all things Scottish, is a little more complex.

The O.E.D. defines it as:

‘The coexistence of contrasting or contrary characteristics, ideas or principles, considered or represented as a distinguishing feature of Scottish people and represented esp. in literatur...

Scots Book of the Year 2025

This Is What You Get – Shortlisted

I am excited to share the news that my novel, This Is What You Get
has been shortlisted for
Scots Book of the Year
at the 2025 Scots Language Awards.

VOTE HERE

The winner will be selected by public vote. Please use the link above to vote for my Northeast Scots novel from the shortlisted books.
(Category 10)

A massive thanks to all that voted to get my book this far . . . please vote one more time for the final push.

VOTE HERE

A Jambalaya of Many Ingredients

Influences – Style

I often think that a writer’s style, or that of any other type of creative, comes from the things that they like to read, listen to, look at. The things that evoke passion and stimulate thought within them. Style for most is a jambalaya of many ingredients, tastes and flavours. It’s what they love and what speaks to them. Songs and paintings can influence writers and people and places can influence writers.

By my early twenties, having seen active service in the firs...

Authentic Voices

Influences – Dialect and Dialogue

In 1996, Trainspotting hit the cinemas. In Scotland, everyone was talking about it, and one of the reasons that everyone was talking about it was because the dialogue was in Scots. Real Scots. It was a novelty indeed for Scottish audiences to hear an authentic portrayal of their own dialect on the big screen.

“[…] sparse prose combined with symbolism and imagery of land in authentic voices that reveal emotions and character and control the rhythm and ...

Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

This is a speculative fiction novel, following the course of the establishment of a totalitarian government in 21st century Ireland. The feeling of ominousness is very similar to 1984, although in this novel we descend into the oppression, rather than already being fully immersed in the authoritarian world that Orwell created. Lynch does well to carry this device of steady descent throughout the book as an ordinary family lose more and more of their liberty and dignity, until, l...

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

by Shirley Jackson

Through the eyes of the misanthropic narrator, Merricat, the reader is immediately drawn into a world where nothing seems quite right. Merricat makes her way past cruel and taunting neighbours, all the while dropping a trail of crumbs which inform us little by little of a family tragedy which lies several years in the past and alludes to the possible circumstances which brought about the tragedy. The narrator also gives us snippets of her remaining family members, of her lo...

If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

Sometimes, when you hear a new song on the radio, you instantly recognise the guitar. Even if you’ve never heard the song before, you know the guitarist from the unique sound of their telecaster or from the way that they are picking the strings. For me, this is how it felt when I began reading this collection of novellas.

In these stories, King explores some of his trademark themes. There is the suspenseful locked attics and creaking doors, early hints of the supernatur...

Inspiration to write comes from reading

I can’t think of a more obvious way to be inspired to write than to love reading. Even if you have a story to tell, you must still need inspiration of how to tell that story?

My mother encouraged me to read, and read I did. I love to read, I read every day and I cannot sleep if I do not read myself to sleep.

As a child, I read classics and children’s books from the school library. My mother had her head in a book a lot of the time when I was growing up and she mainly read crime fiction, c...