When we met, we were both journalists. Before delivering an article, we would show it to each other. We passed books between us. From the beginning, this sharing was at the heart of our relationship and we started to talk about writing something together. Could we do it? Create one voice out of two very different writers? 

One day we read an article about the ‘recovered memory’ controversy. Patients in therapy were recovering apparently lost memories of horrendous abuse and as a result people were convicted and imprisoned on no other evidence. But were the memories authentic? It seemed like an idea for a new kind of psychological thriller. We had to write it and we had to write it quickly, before anyone else did. 

But how would we actually do it? We stumbled into the only method that would possibly work for us and we’ve done the same ever since. Everything apart from the actual writing, we do together. There’s no helpful division of labour. If there’s research needed, we both do it. If we need to visit the setting (we almost always do), we both go. And the ideas come out of our conversations – and they’re not always about crime. A few years after our first book, we were having a conversation about the odd way we got together. Nicci was newly separated with two tiny children. We met and within days we’d moved in together and within a year we were married with another child. In retrospect, it sounds insane. We barely knew each other. We knew nothing about each other’s past. And then we suddenly thought: what a good idea for a thriller. We were already a third of the way through another book but we were so excited with this new idea that we junked it and wrote Killing Me Softly. 

But when it comes to writing, the collaboration stops. When we are sure we have the same book in our heads, one of us (we never decide in advance) starts writing. After a few pages or so they’ll send it to the other who is free to rewrite, edit, cut, add, whatever. Then they continue, send it back and after about seven or eight months we have a first draft. 

When we started writing our first book, The Memory Game, we had no idea if this could work. But, gradually, we felt a real book was emerging and, more unexpectedly, a new writer, different from either of us. 

A few rules slowly emerged: if, when you get the book back, a beautiful phrase of yours has been changed or eliminated, you’re not allowed to change it back. If when you receive the book, the chapter doesn’t seem right to you, don’t tell the other person it isn’t good enough: just make it better. And we’ve never told anyone, not even our own family, who has written what. Anyway, it’s the wrong question. It’s all by Nicci French.