Once upon a time, I was happily procrastinating away on Twitter when I came across a thread that I couldn’t get out of my head. It was the first of February 2018, and I was six months into a one year creative writing MLitt, with absolutely no idea what I was going to submit as part of my final 20,000 word portfolio. But as I was soon to discover, procrastination had its uses after all, and things were about to change.

The Tweet was from Alastair McAlpine, a palliative paediatrician in South Africa. He decided to ask the children in his care, who were dying, “what they had enjoyed in life, and what gave it meaning.” This was such a powerful, raw and moving thread, and even though it was terribly sad, it was also full of love, fun, light and hope. As soon as I read it, after having a good auld bawl, I opened up the laptop and wrote the first chapter of what would become Boys Don’t Cry.

From the very beginning this book felt right, but I didn’t know what to do with it. It was very different to what I’d written before – funny little stories for my own children and the children at school. My desktop was a cluttered shrine to a multitude of middle-grade novels in various stages of abandonment. I had never finished any of them. So I did what I always did, created a Boys Don’t Cry folder, saved it to my desktop along with all the rest, plopped in the first chapter, and shut the laptop down.

Weeks passed by, but this story was a determined little feicer, and just wouldn’t leave me alone. The characters kept intruding on all my thoughts, interrupting all my daydreams, so I decided to take the bull by the horns, and I showed my tutor what I’d written. I’d never been so nervous of what she would say. I knew now that I wanted to tell this story, but I just didn’t trust myself enough to believe that I could do it justice. While yes, my tutor loved it, go me, amn’t I great, she also gave me a very stern talking to. When was I going to take my writing seriously? When was I going to stop treating it like a hobby? When was I going to start calling myself a writer? I couldn’t answer any of this.

I never really realised how dismissive I was of my writing until this point. It was, and still is, I’m working on it, promise, the only thing in my life that I talk negatively about. I hadn’t told anyone except my husband that I was writing, or that all I wanted to be was a writer, and I’m forever grateful to my tutor for starting to break down these barriers, for giving me a confidence that my voice was worth hearing. So with a new determination, I opened back up the laptop, and began to write this story.

I always hear a story first before I see it, a loose beginning middle and end, and it always starts with character. In my head I had it all worked out. This was going to be Finn and his Ma Annie’s story, but when I sat down to write it, Joe kept barging in, wanting to be heard. He would not leave me alone. And in the end, this is ultimately his story. I don’t know why this is, maybe it was a form of self-protection, myself having a son around the same age as Finn, writing from a mother’s prospective may have been too close to the bone for me. But Joe hung around, and so he and Finn were born.

I get asked all the time if Finn was difficult to write, and funnily enough, because his story was so clear from the very beginning, so inevitable, he was far easier to write than Joe. I was determined to capture in Finn the essence of that original Tweet, full of love, kindness, fun, acceptance and hope. Children also have a very unique and special way of looking at the world, and it was important to me that you could feel that through Finn too. Joe on the other hand was a nightmare to get right, he was always just so guarded and he wouldn’t let me in for a long time. I found myself mothering him in early drafts, explaining away his actions, when Joe himself would never do that. I could see myself all over his character, and I think one of the most important things you can do as a writer is to let your characters speak for themselves, so that’s what I tried to do.

This Tweet sparked a story in me, igniting something that was lurking away in my subconscious that I didn’t even know was there. There is so much of my Da in Joe, for example, far more than I ever realised. And it is only after his sudden death last year, that I can see just how much. My Da’s death was the first great grief of my life, but I honestly cannot think of a better tribute to him than having some of his essence woven throughout the fabric of my very first book.

When Alastair McAlpine wrote that Tweet, he didn’t do it to shock, or to upset, he did it to create positivity in the Twitter timeline. Those inspirational thoughts he compiled from the children in his care showed that life was for living, highlighting that what really matters in life, are often the very things we take for granted. That is one of the biggest silver linings I think we can take from this pandemic we’re all wading through at the moment, trying to find the joy and the light in the so called smaller things in life, family and human connection.

In the final Tweet of that thread, Alastair summarised all of what had been said before. This is what gave those children’s’ lives meaning, this is what they enjoyed the very most while living and what should live on in the people they leave behind, and I for one, will be doing my very best to live the rest of my life just like this; “Be kind. Read more books. Spend time with your family. Crack jokes. Go to the beach. Hug your dog. Tell that special person that you love them… and eat ice-cream.”

Boys Don’t Cry, Faber, €10.77 is out now.