How to Write with Your Mother
I thought it might be prudent to address the oddity of my first major completed written work, in that I authored it with my mom. I’m not sure how other authors work together, if they divide the total number of chapters up and each person does half, but that’s certainly not how we wrote our book. Perhaps it is unfair, as unlike most authors who work together we as coauthors have the distinct advantage of having known each other for over twenty years. My entire life believe it or not. Because of this, or maybe because of how the two of us think, we took what I might consider in hindsight to be an odd method of coauthoring, and I wanted to talk about it.
Each chapter in Thunder and Pomp was actually written three times, depending on how you look at it. First, mom and I will write it how we think it should be written. Usually I write a little more action focused, and mom writes a little more dialogue heavy. We go in without any knowledge of what the other person is going to write besides usually one, sometimes two, essential goals for the chapter. So for example, we might go in agreeing “In this chapter Miles and Mathew must get chased by Gogmagog” but we won’t say how or where they end up or any of that. Then once we’ve both finished our own version, we read each others versions and proofread spelling and grammatical mistakes. And she’ll make all my gray’s into grey’s and I’ll do the reverse for her. Then we sit down together, and rip both our chapters into tiny little pieces and stitch them back together like a Frankenstein’s monster chapter. It is both glorious and satisfying.
Then the new chapter is reread by both of us again for spelling and grammatical errors, and also to tie up any loose dialog or story threads that might have made sense in one of the original chapters but don’t anymore now that they’ve been combined. This is of course not to mention further edits we do from time to time as the book progresses, either trimming plot points we decided to let drop, or adding in hints or nods to plot points we ended up developing later. And yes, we do write all of our chapters in order, unless we later decide we need to insert a chapter for the sake of bulking up a particular part of the story. In the case of Thunder and Pomp we ended up bulking up the chapter in the cafe with the Sinnerman so much we had to split it in half. I know a lot of other authors have told me to write non-linearly, just whatever chapter I am feeling most inspired to write, but I feel like I can’t write the later chapters without the context of the earlier ones. But maybe I’m just weird.
Speaking of segues, the last thing I wanted to speak on was how we ended up going with this method of jigsaw stitching together the corpses of our individual chapters. In short; The first chapter of the book is almost perfectly first half hers, second half mine, with a middle ground where we went nearly perfectly back and forth from paragraph to paragraph. It worked so well we tried it again the second chapter and liked it and then, that’s just how we did it. I’m not sure this will be interesting or helpful to anyone, as I don’t know how many people are really out there wanting to write with their moms, or who find this kind of explanation interesting. But I love writing with my mom, so I wanted to talk about it.
That’s all from me.
-Devan
