When 15-year-old Yasmin, an overweight, social outcast, sees a sinister man watching Alice Taylor – the girl Yasmin herself obsesses about – she’s convinced he’s planning to take her. Believing she can save Alice and so win her friendship, Yasmin sets about finding out as much as she can about him. When she meets him, however, he’s nice to her and as their relationship develops, it seems that finally she has found a friend. And then Alice disappears...
It’s a surreal feeling when a story that has only existed inside your head goes out into the real world where people you’ve never met encounter it, then contact you or write reviews. It’s wonderful to know that, without you, the world you’ve created – small as it may be – wouldn’t exist at all.
I’ve always loved making things for that reason. When I was young I’d spend hours on end drawing or painting or Sellotaping cardboard and silver foil together. There seemed to be something magical about it because before I began I never had any idea what I’d conjure from the pile of scrap materials. When I began writing stories at the age of seven or eight, I found the process even more incredible because to write, I realised, was to create something from thin air – whole new characters, whole new worlds!
I knew then that I wanted to be an author and continued, as I grew up, to write poems, stories and plays. After an arts degree course at Trent Poly I took the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where I was lucky enough to be tutored by Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. But then I found myself, almost by chance, not writing but with a job in film editing. I went on to work on features for more than a decade with credits including Twelve Monkeys, Seven Years in Tibet and The Talented Mr Ripley.
It wasn’t until I left film to bring up my daughter and I rediscovered Dr Seuss that I was inspired once again to write. I began creating picture books for young children (under my maiden name, Tasha Pym) and was soon editing other people’s picture books for a literary consultancy. Then in February 2013 I finally sat down with the intention of seeing whether I had a novel in me.
I didn’t know what my novel was going to be about, just that I was ready to give writing one a go. The idea for Things We Have in Common came to me as I was playing around with the idea of writing to a fictional “you”. I wrote a sentence that began “The first time I saw you…” and immediately could visualise the scene – Yasmin standing on a playing field looking at this sinister man (“you”) who, in turn, is watching Alice Taylor, the most popular girl at school.
That sentence never changed and opens the book. Although I didn’t know where the story would go, I could feel Yasmin’s connection to this man – her perception of a shared sense of loneliness together with a desire for the unattainable Alice, and I could sense the story that was there in the shadows, waiting to be revealed. The title of the book was there in that same moment, too.
I found writing the novel to be an extraordinary process of self-discovery – the creation a mix of my imagination, memory and subconscious – yet I still don’t really know where the idea for the story or my protagonist came from. As a reader I’m drawn to dark psychological stories – I love Daphne du Maurier, John Fowles and Patricia Highsmith – so I suppose it was logical that I would also write those kinds of stories. I’m fascinated by people’s internal selves beyond what they present to the world, by the idea that no one really knows anyone else, or even themselves – of what, if forced to fight for something we needed, we might be capable of.
Perhaps there is no greater need as a human than to belong – and no time when this need is more acutely felt than as a teenager – and this is the central theme in Things We Have in Common. Yasmin has struggled to feel a connection to the world since the death of her father. Eating has been her one comfort, the effects of which have served only to isolate her further. Shunned by her peers and feeling like an unwanted accessory in her mother’s new marriage, she retreats into a fantasy world where her obsessions and imagined relationships thrive – most notably, the fantasy in which she is close to the beautiful Alice Taylor. It is a dangerous world to be in, especially when she meets the man watching Alice and her obsession with her classmate slowly begins to shift.
At the outset I had no plot outline, so writing the novel was a leap of faith – a belief that Yasmin’s need to find acceptance in the world was enough to drive the story to a powerful conclusion. Having said that, I did have a sense of the ending pretty early on. I knew, more or less, how the idea would play out, where Yasmin, psychologically, would end up. That was pretty much all I knew, but it was enough to keep me going.
There’s no question that my experience of working on films and picture books has influenced my storytelling – and probably in many more ways than I’m aware of. What I have found I love so much about novel writing, though, is how everything belongs to me – how I get to be the illustrator/cameraman, the soundtrack, the actors, and everything else besides. It feels overwhelming at times, but it’s also compelling and thrilling – and I love the practical simplicity of it – the fact that you don’t need any money or other people – that all you need to create a new world is a pen, a notebook, and your mind.
Tasha Kavanagh is currently working on a second novel, another dark psychological thriller. You can follow her on Twitter @KavanaghTashaThings We Have in Common was published by Canongate Books last month, priced £12.99
