On “Significant Authorship:” Writing as a Team
“We should write a book.” My husband, Jon, said it casually, five or six years ago. I adjusted our baby son on my lap and laughed a little.
“Write a book.” My voice was deadpan as I repeated it, as if I thought he were joking. Hell, half of me hoped he was joking. Write a book? I was a new mother. Sleep-deprived. Frazzled. Probably hadn’t washed my hair in a few days. But the other half of me felt something else. A strange brew of hope and trepidation.
The suggestion had opened a door inside me…one that had been closed a long time. One I’d probably closed myself, for reasons I’ll never quite know. Well, I guess that’s a lie: it was mostly fear that had closed the door. I did that slow, backward walk away from writing that people often do from the things (and sometimes the people) they care about when they’re afraid to mess up. I’d written constantly as a child.
My nine-year-old self had churned out fun, whimsical stories about kids who could change the past through lucid dreaming, and melancholy ones about the sinking of the Lusitania. I’d written poems, songs, retellings of fables and myths. I’d fill Lisa Frank notebooks with my preteen musings, commandeer the family Compaq for hours to clack out my manuscripts on Microsoft Word, much to my sister’s dismay. I’d write on napkins. In the margins of my school papers. But somewhere between college and adulthood, that part of me had faded.
Yes, it had been years since my writing life had flatlined, but Jon’s suggestion had begun to breathe life back into it. We had an enthusiastic conversation around our kitchen island that day. We’d call our book “Time Teams,” we said. We argued about whether it would be for middle grade or young adult, and bantered about the main characters. Still, it would be another couple years still until we’d sit down and actually write that book.
It happened during the summer of 2018, when I was teaching summer school and our second child was learning to scoot around our living room. We’d moved to a new house, I’d started teaching in a new district, and we were more sleep-deprived than ever. Most nights, we’d fall asleep while binge-watching old seasons of Survivor.
“Let’s start that book.” Jon sat down in our living room and started the first scene in the “Notes” app of his cell phone. I watched him, eyebrows raised, as his thumbs moved across his cell phone keyboard. When he got stuck writing a dialogue scene, I jumped in, and we spent the rest of that June passing the document back and forth, using an Expo pen on our dining room window as a storyboard, until the first draft of our first book, a young adult sci-fi novel about a grieving teenager who finds himself sucked into a competitive time traveling club, was done. Thus, we became what Jon termed “Significant Authors.”
After a year of unsuccessful querying, we were offered a revise and resend by Tiny Fox Press, who published our book in September 2020. The Fifth Timekeeper, the book’s first sequel, is slated for publication this summer.
The most frequently asked question Jon and I get about our book is how we wrote it…together. How does one actually share the authoring of a book? Here are our tips for writing with a “significant author:”
- Trust is essential. Writing is usually an intensely personal endeavor. It’s hard enough to offer your work up for critique, but to share it with someone else? Choose someone whose writing you respect and admire, who you can be honest with without it turning into an outright brawl.
- Have the right differences. Jon and I work as significant authors for the same reason we work well together in life: we’re different in the right ways. I tend to bring the seriousness, but he’s right there to usher in the fun to balance it all out. I tend to lean into the character development side of our books, while his mind goes straight to world-building. Jon is a panster while I am a plotter. Your complementary differences are what will make your book.
- Know when to get out of the way. Your significant author has strengths, and so do you, and chances are they aren’t the same ones. Be humble enough to know when to stay in your lane and let them do their thing, and trust that they’ll do the same for you.
- Trust the process. There will be days, weeks, where both of you are on fire with writing, the story has hijacked both your minds and the words flow like water. But there will be creative droughts, long streaks of time when neither person has time or inspiration to give to the project. There will be days when the whole book looks like garbage to both of you and you want to light it on fire and walk away. This is part of the process. Trust it.
- Be each other’s biggest champion. Read each other’s work, even when it isn’t part of your joint project. Protect their time. Give them space. Let them wake you up in the middle of the night with a cool idea that they just have to share. Let them talk in circles.
Writing as a team isn’t for everyone, but if you choose to, I hope you find that “significant author” who opens up that closed door inside of you.
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Dayna McConnell teaches fourth grade. When she isn’t writing, she’s reading historical fiction, gardening, or stewarding their family’s Little Free Library. Born and raised in Los Osos, California, Dayna graduated from San Francisco State University. Her favorite part of writing is developing character arcs and relationships. When writing, Dayna is the “plotter” of the pair – she likes detailed outlines and playing with permeating themes and symbols.
Find out more about Dayna and Jon on their website https://mcconnellwriting.com/
THE TIME TRAILS
“Four players. It’s in the rules.”
“Is this like, some sort of academic decathlon or something?”
“Something like that.”
Walkman-toting, guitar-playing Finn Mallory blames himself for his parents’ deaths and would do anything to turn back time and set things right. So, when he’s recruited into a secret club at his new school that specializes in competitive time travel games, Finn sees a world of opportunity open before him.
The games, however, are far from benign.
Competition is cutthroat.
Scenarios are rigged.
And the mysterious timekeepers who organize it all have no qualms about using-or disposing of-players to suit their own sinister plans.
Now Finn must decide who he can trust while making peace with his past if he’s to have any hope of leading his team to victory and surviving his junior year.
As the games commence, it’s time to press rewind.
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Category: Contemporary Women Writers
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