On Coauthoring

How did we decide to coauthor? What’s it like to write with another person? 

As we launch our web presence today, we thought we’d take a moment to answer the questions we get most often when we tell people what we’re doing.

Our story is one of an unusual friendship. We each wrote fiction and did theater throughout childhood and college, but went on to other careers. All of those childhood dreams came flooding back in early October 2021, when we met because Lilith volunteered with Erica’s school board campaign. We became close friends almost instantly, by January 2022 were talking about our unexpectedly sister-like bond, and by May 2022 had decided to try writing stories together. From the first days of writing, we knew we had a kind of magic together.

We write in google docs, augmented with a nearly constant exchange of ideas in gchat (and by constantly we mean “basically anytime we’re not sleeping”). Typically, we divide our work scene-by-scene, so either Lilith or Erica writes the first draft of each scene, but sometimes when the writing gets tough we switch off in the middle of scenes or even paragraphs. 

We intensively, exhaustively edit each other’s writing. We each know, love, and think in and through all the characters. By the time anyone else gets a chance to read what we’ve written, there is enough of both of us in every scene that even our spouses can rarely guess accurately who wrote what. We don’t argue much about our writing, but when we do, the arguments can go on for a long time. That’s Lilith’s Erica’s fault.

As we commented recently, we could write fiction separately, but that would feel kind of like intentionally chopping off one hand to type.