I’ve the great good fortune of writing much of what I write with my mother. My co-author is my mother, and in fact, we’ve written together now seventeen books and with several more in the pipeline. And it’s interesting. When we first started writing together, we weren’t sure how it would work. We weren’t sure if we would be compatible writing together. We’re both fairly opinionated, bossy women. Fairly strong women I should say, is a better word, and we thought we might clash a little bit. We weren’t sure.
The happy discovery has been that we seem to have very complementary strengths, and we are very good at knowing when to defer to one another. Mom tends to be very much more the kind of big ideas, big picture, visual person. I tend to be more about the structure and the details. And so those strengths are greatly complementary. The process is quite wonderful and it’s become much easier as the years have gone by. When we first started writing together, it was a little bit more labored.
We felt we always had to be in the same room together and we would do everything longhand on yellow legal pads with pencils and endless cups of tea and so forth. Now we’ve actually started incorporating technology quite a bit into our work, and since we live in separate states, we actually live on separate coasts most of the time, we do most of our work together via webcam.
The webcam has revolutionized how we work together because the fact that we can actually see each other as well as hear each other means that we are able to work with a kind of shorthand that somehow the phone didn’t provide. There’s a great deal of sign language. “It’s more like this than like that.” There’s a great deal of body language that comes into play. She’s in her home office in Los Angeles and I’m in mine in Sag Harbor, and we agree to log on at a certain time and we get to work.
It’s very funny because the first time we did it, the first time we started working on the webcam she said, mom said she put on perfume before logging on and then suddenly realized what a ridiculous thing it was that she had just done. “Oh, I must just put on some perfume before I get to work with Emma.” We haven’t come that far yet with our technology! But the process is essentially what we do is once we have a sense of the idea of what we’d like to try to write about.
For example, if we use The Great American Mousical as an example, we knew we wanted to tell a story about theater mice in which the theater would be in jeopardy and mice would save the day. Once we have our outline that we’re working from, then it literally becomes a process of finishing each other’s sentences. At that point, we go very organic, and one of us will just jump in and start free associating and the other one will say, “That’s so close, but it’s not quite the right word. It’s more of a blue word or a red word.”
It becomes this incredible sort of very fluid give and take process of writing and finishing each other’s sentences. Meanwhile, I’m typing furiously. Once we’ve transcribed whatever we’ve done for the day, then there’s a great deal that goes on in the editing process and it’s back and forth and changing this word and that word and typing sentences and realizing what’s missing and so forth. A huge amount of our work is done in the aftermath of the writing.
It’s become a very organic process, and both of us feel now that when we try to write alone, we miss each other. It’s funny because people, solitary writers, solo writers, often say, “How do you write with a writing partner? I can’t imagine writing with someone else.” We’re at the point now where it’s sort of like how do you write by yourself? How do you write without that person to bounce ideas off of, without that sounding board, without that give and take of ideas? We’ve become very attached to writing together, and hopefully we’ll continue to do it for a long time.
The other thing I should add is that one of the wonderful discoveries, a lot of times people will say to me, “I can’t imagine writing with my mother. What is that like?” Or, “With my daughter, what is that like?” The happy surprise for both of us is that it has actually strengthened our relationship, and I think it’s because before we were working together and writing together, time spent together or phone calls and so forth were often weighted with news of the day, discussions about family issues, politics, health concerns, problems whatever they may be, the normal things that one discusses and deals with and grapples with in families.
Now a huge portion of our time, in fact most of our time together because we don’t have a great deal of time together so we have to work very concentrated, is creative, and we’re in this wonderful world of children’s literature where it’s all interesting characters and fun ideas. It’s like being in a sandbox and playing when we get together now. It just feels like we get together and play and throw ideas around and have a great time instead of talking about arthritis or some of the other things that might come up in a conversation with one’s parent or one’s child — adult child.
