Co-Authoring: How We Collaborate

Guest Blog by Susan Lynn Meyer and Jaya Mehta
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We have been friends for many years, since we met as grad students studying English literature. Some years ago, Jaya moved to Massachusetts where Susan also lives, and we started seeing more of one another.

The two of us began writing together like children engaging in what preschool teachers call “parallel play.” The pandemic hit, and to combat the isolation we started writing our separate novels “together” by Zoom at a set time every morning. Susan would take a long, day-dreamy walk, letting her ideas ​

germinate, while Jaya, whose hours are quite different, would greet her dogs and have her coffee. Then we got on Zoom together at a set time and said hello. We each wrote silently in our homes for an hour or two, turning the sound back on at the end to read our work to each other, offer commentary, and talk over stuck points. ​

​Working together like this kept us to task, eliminated procrastination, and eased the loneliness that writers suffer from--that everyone suffered from during Covid. It was joyous, and we each sprinted through a draft of our novels that spring, summer, and fall. Susan’s completed novel, A Sky Full of Song (Union Square Kids, 2023), has since won many honors, including the Sydney Taylor Honor Award and the Western Writers of America Spur Award. Jaya’s novel manuscript won a LitUp fellowship for diverse women writers from Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club.

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When the two of us talked over our novels-in-progress, we often talked about other things too, of course. One day Jaya told Susan a story about being a very small child in Brooklyn and choosing a Christmas tree for the apartment. She wanted a BIG tree and her stepfather wanted a SMALL tree—and in the end they happily settled on one each thought was just the right size.
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Susan was charmed and said immediately, “That should be a picture book!” 
 
Jaya, who was then working on a young adult novel, said, “I don’t write picture books.”

Susan was more experienced writing picture books, so she played around with the idea and wrote a draft of the story. Jaya read it and changed it, Susan tweaked it again, and so on, back and forth. We talked it over sentence by sentence and word by word, and that’s how our co-authorship started! The book became Nisha's Just-Right Christmas Tree (Beaming Books, 2024). 

​Susan suggested a preliminary authors’ note that she later thought wasn’t so good. Jaya wrote an alternate one, which Susan loved, explaining things about cultural mixing in her family of origin. (Jaya is the child of one Hindu parent and one Christian parent.) Susan loved it as it was, but Jaya knew that Susan also came from a culturally blended family, and she urged Susan to write about cultural mixing in her own family for the authors’ note. Now there’s a story in there about—wait for it!—the French word for “grapefruit” and how it embarrassed Susan once as a little girl! We encouraged readers to think about various forms of mixing that happen in their own families.

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How We Collaborate Now 
 
Since then, the two of us have written two more picture book manuscripts. Now we work a bit differently. For the most recent one (which is again about Nisha), we brainstormed together about story situations, chose one, and in conversation worked out some of the broad outlines of the plot. Then, separately, we each wrote a story draft. We emailed them to each other and talked them over on Zoom. We talked about what we liked most about each other’s drafts and, sentence by sentence, we worked out a combined version with the best parts of each. Over several sessions we revised and tightened the story. It was a lot of fun and intensely collaborative. Now it is with our agent. Fingers crossed that she likes it!
 
Challenging Aspects of Co-Authorship
 
Susan: We are both the kind of writers who care about every word. Sometimes we each think our own version of a passage in a draft is better. For the partnership to work, you have to decide what really matters to you and be willing to let go of the parts that don’t.
 
Jaya: Since we have known each other so long and so well, it is a temptation for our “check-ins” to become full-blown conversations, and the actual writing gets short shrift. We often have to reign ourselves in and get back to work!
 
Susan: BUT it was during one of those digressions that Jaya told me the story that became Nisha's Just-Right Christmas Tree! So maybe there’s no wasted time after all!
 
Benefits of Co-Authorship
 
Jaya: We have continued to work together ever since. We know each other’s work intimately. We have very similar writing styles and values, including emotional honesty, respect for historical and cultural accuracy, and regard for the nuances and cadences of language. Over the last five years, we have each learned an enormous amount from the other, and our vision and our writing is far better for it.
 
Susan: It isn’t you alone with the empty page!  Your ideas bounce off one another. You come up with things you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. Your literary world stretches and expands. You have someone else encouraging you, or even pushing you, to do something you wouldn’t have done on your own. 

Last Thoughts on Collaboration
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Jaya: If the first kind of partnership is like paddling two kayaks in sight of each other but on separate sides of the river, the second is like being in a double kayak, navigating the river together.
 
Susan (who loves kayaking): Ooh, nice metaphor! 

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Jaya Mehta has a Ph.D. in English literature from Yale University, and taught both English and Indian literature as a college professor. She won a LitUp Fellowship from Reese's Book Club for a YA novel manuscript in 2022. She is the co-author, with Susan Lynn Meyer of Nisha's Just-Right Christmas Tree. She lives in Chelmsford Massachusetts, among all the animals left behind by her college-aged twins. She loves observing wildlife, cuddling with her two dogs, attending storytelling events, travelling to foreign countries, and playing board games with her family during which her husband and son cheat madly. To learn more about Jaya visit her website. 

Susan Lynn Meyer is the author of three middle-grade novels: A Sky Full of Song, Black Radishes (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2010), and Skating With The Statue of Liberty (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2016). She is also the author of four picture books: New Shoes (Holiday House, 2015), Matzah Downstairs (Kar-Ben Publishing, 2019), Matthew and Tall Rabbit Go Camping (Down East Books, 2008). Her works have won the Sydney Taylor Honor Award twice, the Jane Addams Peace Association Children’s Book Award, the New York State Charlotte Award, and the Western Writers of America Spur Award, as well as other honors. They have been chosen as Junior Library Guild selections, included among Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books of the Year, and translated into German and Chinese. Susan is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley College and lives outside Boston. Visit her online at www.susanlynnmeyer.com.

To purchase Nisha's Just-Right Christmas Tree click here.