Boris Johnson was my inspiration.

Said nobody else, ever. But here we are.

When I say bumbling Boris was my inspiration, I’m talking specifically about his Covid-19 lockdown speech.

I knew from the start that The Silent Directive had to be dystopian. It’s one of my favourite genres to teach, and I’ve had a full-blown dystopian novel mapped out in my head for years, just waiting for the right time to write it. So I needed something dystopian in my writing box collection

The question was: how could the government control its citizens in a way that felt terrifyingly plausible? My mind went straight to lockdown.

Not the wholesome, banana-bread-baking, 1,000-piece-jigsaw-solving kind of lockdown we all remember from the first few weeks of 2020. This needed to be darker. Harsher. Absolute.

So I picked silence.

In this world, the government claims the “enemy” can detect us by sound. Conversations are dangerous. Words can betray you. And while the rich can afford thick walls and soundproofing, the poor must live in bare rooms and crowded flats, where a single cough or whisper could cost them everything.

Snapshots From the Stillness

The Silent Directive is as much a visual experience as it is a written one. This box is steeped in propaganda: vintage-style posters plastered with authoritarian slogans, identification documents bearing stark headshots and cold bureaucratic stamps, and unsettling hand-drawn pictures that look as though they’ve come from a child too young to understand the weight of the world they are living in. These aren’t decorative extras, they’re world-building tools. Every photograph, ID card, and childish sketch adds another layer to the chilling sense of a state that watches, records, and manipulates. Even the handwriting samples, from the stiff formality of the official to the messy scrawl of a teenager, carry their own narrative weight, hinting at loyalty, fear, and the blurred lines between the two.

How The Silent Directive Stands Apart

While The Kindling Collection weaves eerie folklore into rural village life, and Victoriana Collection immerses you in the mysteries of the 19th century, The Silent Directive feels colder, sharper, and far more authoritarian. Where the others invite you to piece together secrets from the shadows, this one issues orders in plain sight. It’s also the only one of my writing boxes not called a “collection” because you don’t collect a directive. You obey it.

Why Silence?

Silence is such an ordinary thing that we take it for granted. But in The Silent Directive, silence becomes currency — your safety, your loyalty, your proof that you belong. That’s what makes it so chilling: it’s not far-fetched futuristic tech or alien invasion, it’s something we could imagine happening here, if the wrong person decided it was the “solution.”

And that’s the heart of dystopian writing: it’s never about dragons or magic. It’s about control. Who has it, who loses it, and what happens in between.

A Box Full of Possibilities

The Silent Directive isn’t a single story with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, it’s a dossier — fragments of an entire world collapsing into silence. Inside you’ll find:

◆ Broadcast transcripts announcing new lockdowns.
◆ Internal memos tightening the rules, one order at a time.
◆ Detention registers and propaganda speeches
◆ Leaflets pushed through letterboxes, demanding the surrender of sound-making devices.
◆ Hidden messages smuggled into “official” letters, spelling out desperate truths.

There isn’t just one thread to follow — which means every reader will come away with their own story. Some will chase the name Victor Hartmann through the documents. Others will imagine life in crowded flats where silence is impossible. Some will ask whether the enemy was ever real at all. That open-endedness is deliberate.

For Teachers and Writers

Like all my writing boxes, The Silent Directive is designed as both a teaching tool and a creative spark. In the classroom, it can fuel dystopian writing projects, debates about freedom and security, or crossovers with texts like 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale. For writers, it’s an instant world-builder: a stack of documents you can raid for inspiration, details, and story seeds.

The Silent Directive Is Live

The Silent Directive is now available here, alongside the Victoriana and Kindling boxes. Three very different worlds, each one waiting for you to explore, interpret, and rewrite in your own way.

What truths will you unravel? What story will you write?