Despite having published five novels, I never (and I mean never, ever) sit down to my writing desk with my back straight, brimming with ideas, safe in the knowledge that I’ve done this before and confident I can do it again. Rather, writing always feels like crawling to me, or dragging myself through tar because the truth is that I only know how to write the books I’ve written, not the ones I’ve yet to write, and certainly not my work in progress which invariably feels like pure drudgery.
Each book is different. Each book sets its own challenges, its own limitations on what is and is not possible in terms of a particular narrative. The writing of one book never makes the next book easier. But if I had to be completely honest, I would admit that my latest novel, One, has been my most challenging project so far. It is a book I wrestled with for almost two years – both the writing of it and the researching. It is a book that had me weeping on the bathroom floor for fear I wouldn’t finish it, for fear I would make a mess of it, for fear I would write something that wouldn’t be good enough, and that ultimately wouldn’t do justice to what I had learned about the subject.
Tippi and Grace, the main characters of my novel, happen to be conjoined twins, yet they are also simply teenagers struggling with many of the issues that ordinary young people face – difficulties in friendships, bullying, and love. But they also face an extra set of challenges, both physical and mental, due to their unusual anatomies, the fact that they are quite literally joined at the waist. One is a book that matters to me, and I wanted to get it right. The pressure of that, which came only from myself, was immense.
From the moment I began researching this book, I was completed absorbed. I was obsessed actually. At the time I was working on Apple and Rain, another children’s novel, and despite my looming deadline for this, I spent my days at the British Library poring over periodicals, encyclopedias and medical journals, photocopying anything I could find about the lives and deaths of conjoined twins over the centuries. At night I would do my reading, sitting in the kitchen of the flat I was temporary living in, a dim desk lamp illuminating the pages, my infant daughter gurgling in the background. And very often, I cried, because so many of the stories I read were tragic. But more often than not, I smiled, because so many other stories are filled with hope and humour.
Before I began the research I had pretty clear ideas about how the story would start and end. I thought I was embarking on a novel about a girl living miserably, living without freedom and dreaming only of escaping the bonds of her disability. But how wrong I was! Nothing I read in the literature or watched in documentaries suggested that any conjoined twins feel trapped by their siblings. Nothing suggested that conjoined twins feel self-pity. And nothing suggested that conjoined twins cannot, if physically healthy in all other ways and living in a country of reasonable prosperity, have full and happy lives. In fact, the only case I could find of conjoined twins asking for a separation in adulthood were Ladan and Laleh Bijani, Iranian women joined at the head, who wanted to pursue different careers but who both sadly died on the operating table in 2003.
And the more I researched, the more it forced me look at myself – my own relationships with others, and particularly my relationship with my daughter. We think nothing of tying an infant to us (oftentimes clamping them to our breasts for hours and hours every day) and remaining inseparable for months, sometimes years. Nor do we condemn those in love for wanting to be consumed by another person. However, for some peculiar reason, when conjoined twins say they never wish to be parted, people recoil a little – I know I did initially. The idea of never having privacy is abhorrent to many. But why? What is it we are defending? Can’t we conceive of loving someone so intimately that no action or thought need be hidden? These are the questions I began asking myself. And so I embarked on One, a novel very different to the book I had imagined, about sisters with an unbreakable bond and an unrivalled love.
And when I began to write, I thought my challenges were over. Although I had struggled somewhat clumsily with the philosophical issues of the book, I believed I had overcome them and that the writing itself would be a doddle. I mean, I had all the research to hand including interviews with prominent doctors and surgeons, I had a compelling idea, I had characters I believed in, and I had a plot outline. So I wrote. I did the whole 1,000-words-per-day thing, and made progress. Or so I thought. Really, I’d done nothing but fiddle and waste time because very soon I realised the novel wasn’t working. The words were flat on the page. The voice had no sincerity to it. I stopped. I didn’t write for several weeks as I tried to determine what was going wrong. And I couldn’t figure it out. So, in desperation, I called my agent and rather hysterically told her I wasn’t going to make my deadline and that this great idea I had was never going to become a book. She said the words no writer ever wants to hear: “Start again.” I laughed. “I’ve written 30,000 words,” I told her. She cleared her throat. “Ok. So start again.” I have to admit I was frustrated by her advice. I knew it was a good thing that she believed in me enough to think I could scrap a book and rewrite it and create something worthwhile, but delete 30,000 words? Really?
Needless to say, I didn’t listen to her. At least not straight away. I wrote some more terrible words, I struggled, and then, with no options left, I dumped the work in progress and simply began again. And when I did I was slightly shocked and slightly terrified because the words that came out were not in prose but in verse. The book was telling me it wanted to be a collection of poems! My debut novel, The Weight of Water, is a verse novel, and although it went down well critically, verse novels generally aren’t all that commercial. Also, I knew from experience that this would be a long, arduous process. I wouldn’t be able to focus on character and plot as I usually do when I write in prose, but would have to focus hard on language, on making sure I found exactly the right place for exactly the right word. And I hope I did. But it took time. And it took patience. And above all it took a teeny, tiny leap of faith to even attempt such a project.
Hordes of people have kindly tweeted me or sent emails explaining how hard the novel made them cry, and I’ll admit that in lots of ways it is a sad book, it has to be because of the illness my characters suffer from and the fact that most conjoined twins do not make it to adulthood. But I believe the book is more than a tear-jerker. At least I hope it is more than that because I didn’t write a book in the hope of making people hurt. I just wanted to write authentically on the subject, and I wanted to make readers think about identity and love. It has been a challenge, my biggest writing challenge yet, though sadly one thing I know for sure is that it’s taught me nothing about how to write the next book.
One is published by Bloomsbury Children’s, at £10.99. It is launched on September 10th at Easons, O’Connell Street, Dulbin, at 6pm.
