Beyond the great debut

Writer and artist Tice Cin on the difficulty that comes with writing your second novel

There’s a girl I remember often. She didn’t always have a laptop so she wrote at her university or local library. She was doing an MA while juggling two jobs – commissioning damp reports or working for moon festivals putting together moon jazz playlists. An image came up in her mind and she’d write from North London to UCL on the train, sometimes sketching when words couldn’t come fast enough. Interviews for texture were conducted in cafes and kitchens. She finished her book on the balcony of her aunty’s home, overlooking her village and a barbecue.

See, I know that was me. I know that parts of that girl are still here. But there’s a complex pathway for writers like myself. We write with the hopes that a strong début might expel the aspects of our lives that we find hard, and that we might be propelled into a new life.

My life did change. I got to see some of my earliest dreams come true. A lineup of my many nieces and nephews literally queued to take turns to hold the very first copy of Keeping the House. I sat with an elder from my village who told me that I’d hit the nail on the head when writing about his generation. I was blurbed by writers I admired, watching words roll in that shifted the tides for me around whether or not my story would find their hearts. My publisher And Other Stories were there at every step. I had a lovely swim at Portobello Beach with Jav, my editor, when we were launching at Edinburgh International Book Festival. The author, Michael Donkorm called KtH ‘a cult classic in the making’ and I couldn’t believe there were newspapers covering my love letter to a fractured Tottenham, to the lives in and around the heroin trade. I was interviewed by some of the world’s greatest. A Turkish girl camped in a tent overnight in Cork to come to a talk of mine. My mum got to see window displays for Keeping the House from Foyles to Burley Fisher.