The Split: Four Years On

TLDR: things are different now but in important ways, the same!

On 18th March 2021, my debut novel was released in hardback. All bookshops were closed. I celebrated in my living room, drinking champagne and being interviewed on Zoom. People kept asking me what it was like to release a book in lockdown but I didn’t have anything to compare it to so I said: ‘good! It feels good, it feels like a dream come true.’

The Split (originally titled, Malcolm, which I secretly always preferred) written completely naively with no sense of genre in mind, with no idea of audiences, marketing, my personal ‘brand’, is a book about love and loss and friendship. It is about heartbreak and identity and trying to find meaning in the word ‘home.’ I wrote it about Sheffield, a place which was once home and now is not.

It is also a novel about running and the act of attempting to move forward when you feel completely stuck. I had not run the Sheffield half marathon when I wrote it, and I still have not. I probably never will, it being a city I have very much left behind. I don’t feel too sad about that on account of all the hills. I think, for me, imagining it is enough.

I have changed a great deal since writing The Split well over five years ago. My life is very different and I would not write that book now, although I remain very fond of it and of those characters. I am no longer able to write naively because I am no longer naive. I am all too aware of what is at stake.

I have published three more books since The Split, all, fortunately, when bookshops were very much open for business. I have since learned the total joy of celebrating the accomplishment of writing a novel surrounded by friends, family and copious amounts of wine. I have learned that booksellers are an author’s best friend and that they are the people who make the whole industry feel alive and exciting, who lovingly stock and sell and champion work in a flooded market against genuinely evil market forces trying to put them out of business. These are the things that are a dream come true, it turns out.

When I was reflecting on the process of writing The Split, I thought about my most recent writing project and the way I work - differently now, slower since I’m no longer working full time in another job. I write deliberately and meticulously, reading sentences over and over trying to get them right the first time. I occasionally even plan which used to be unheard of, but now my brain, more used to the concept of structure, of the way a story unfolds on the page, demands it.

The important stuff, the stuff which makes me so grateful that this is my job remains the same. I write the scenes that I’m most excited about, that I simply cannot wait to develop first, wherever they might come in the chronology of the book. I write bold, bright characters who feel alive in my head. I play out situations I can hardly stand to think about in my real life, teasing out emotions that are as close to reality as I can possibly go, treading that impossibly thin line. I convey empathy through dark jokes buried in dialogue. The audience I write for is my friends and family, and I think if I reach them - if I make them laugh or cry or both - then I’ve done a good job. I woke up on a beach last year and my girlfriend was crying after finishing my latest novel and I thought, yes, this is the life.

I would not write The Split now but I am so happy that I did. I am so happy that I wrote with nothing on my mind other than a story and a desire to tell it. That book changed my life.