Alexia Casale on why she wrote Sing If You Can’t Dance
Sing If You Can't Dance is an own-voice empowering story about a teenager coming to terms with her disability.
Sing If You Can’t Dance is a touching and empowering story following dancer Ven who had her life all planned out until she passes out right in the middle of a life-changing performance. Suddenly, she discovers she has an illness that means no more dancing. But she is not asking for pity because Ven is no victim — her future is going to be different but that doesn’t mean it’s over. Today we have the honour of inviting Alexia Casale to chat with us about how the book came to her.
Sing If You Can’t Dance is an accidental book. But not just in the sense that the idea appeared from nowhere, from one moment to the next – the truth is, I was dead-set against writing anything of the sort.
The main character has a complex, disabling condition, and at the time I was still navigating a big shift in how my own complex, disabling condition was manifesting. Unsurprisingly, everything about chronic pain and health challenges was raw. Whenever I thought about writing something that touched on these experiences, I tied myself up in knots worrying whether I’d be ‘cashing in’, or whether it was a way of making something good come out of something bad, or whether, in defending why I’d written such a book, I’d have to talk about private medical information. I was also worried about losing out on work and opportunities, either from prejudice or more likely because of organisers’ concerns about the logistics and possible additional costs. Even if all that was fine, what if I ended up pigeonholed as a person and as a writer? I hate having mobility issues so it’s really not the thing I want everyone thinking of first and foremost when they consider me and my work.
So there were many reasons I was determined never to write a book with disability as a major theme. Uhuh. Nope. Definitely not happening…
Until it did. And it happened like this.
Once upon a time, an author was sitting in her happy place (a covered porch behind her home), working on a new book that was making her very happy indeed because it was about loads of things she loved. The sun was shining, her cat was purring beside her, and she had a freshly-baked brownie waiting for the next chapter break.
Then a person who wasn’t really there appeared. And, despite not being there, this person managed to block the sun so that the author was distracted from her happy book.
‘Stop that,’ said the person who wasn’t there (but was very rude all the same). ‘You have to write my book now.’
‘Go away!’ said the author. ‘I’m busy and I don’t want to write your story anyway. It’s too close to stuff that’s happening to me. I’ll end up writing about myself.’
‘You most certainly will not,’ said the person who wasn’t there (but was still managing to cause a lot of trouble). ‘It’s my story. I’m just getting you to write it because you understand how it feels so you won’t muck it up as much as another author would. Now shut up and open a new document.’
‘Shan’t,’ said the author very maturely, and with great dignity.
But the person who wasn’t there just started talking, so loudly and insistently there was absolutely nothing the author could do but open a new document and start writing.
Although this was very frustrating, the author knew the person who wasn’t there was bound to disappear soon since books take years to plan and don’t just appear fully formed, blocking the sun, from one instant to the next.
Only the person who wasn’t there didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Half an hour passed, and then an hour, and suddenly there was an entire chapter and the start of the next. And all of it was far too good to be ignored.
‘You can work on the other book for a bit now,’ said the person who wasn’t there. ‘But I’ll be back again tomorrow, and we’ll just keep doing this till it’s done.’
And that was how I accidentally wrote the first draft of Sing If You Can’t Dance. After that, there was a lot of editing – So. Much. Editing. But that’s a different story.
This story is about a person who wasn’t there until she became a book. Her name’s Ven and if you read Sing If You Can’t Dance you’ll discover that I’m not even slightly exaggerating her bulldozer tendencies in my description of how we met. Still, she kept her promise – I didn’t end up writing about myself. She told me her story and I wrote it down, but it was possible for me to do that properly because I understood how she felt in a way that someone who hasn’t had a big change in circumstances probably wouldn’t or couldn’t. It’s the special ingredient that I hope makes the story true, even though it’s technically fiction.
