April 26,2020
It was the summer of 2014 when Kaylee and I decided to write a book together. We spent a good ten minutes of our time floating ideas of spaceships and robots back and forth to each other. Ten minutes. Ten minutes is all it took for a life changing goal to evolve. A goal we have spent the past 6 years developing into a reality. If someone told me a series of text exchanges about a dream would lead us to where we are today, I’m not sure I’d believe it.
So, how did our journey begin?
That summer, we worked up a timeline of events and developed names for our characters. We did little to no brainstorming before we began to write and spent too much time learning about how spaceships work and how one would be built. Needless to say, we made a lot of mistakes. After months of getting nowhere, the whole let’s write a book together idea sort of fell through.
Let’s fast forward to November 2015. I was now a 4th grade writing teacher and had been struggling with student motivation. That was, until an idea popped into my mind. What’s a better way to get to students motivated to write than to show them your own work? I rummaged through old emails and Google Drive files to find our abandoned novel and shared a snippet of what Kaylee and I had written with my students. Fortunately, my plan worked in two meaningful ways! My students got excited to write, and they convinced Kaylee and I that writing our novel was worth pursuing again. With hesitation but definite excitement, we decided to pick back up where we left off. I guess, in a way, I have my students to thank for helping us see the potential we truly had.
Of course, writing together had its challenges, with the number one challenge being that Kaylee and I were living in different states at the time. All of our book discussions had to be over phone calls and through Google Docs. We didn’t want to get hit with writer’s block again, so to prevent it, we wiped the slate clean and created an outline. The outline was a tremendous help and we relied on it heavily, but we still struggled with dedicating time to the book. Therefore, the process was slow and still getting us nowhere, leading us back to that ever so dreaded writer’s block. Why did this keep happening? Well, we weren’t doing enough research! That’s where Pinterest came into the picture. We’d spend nights reading and pinning helpful blogs, and it eventually became a godsend!
Let’s fast forward to 2017. Kaylee was now living back in the same city as me; good ‘ole Austin, TX. Now that we were able to meet in person and knew how important this book had become to us, we set up a weekly schedule to dedicate to it. We also assigned certain chapters to one another and gave ourselves deadlines. Eventually, we ran into our first problem: a major plot hole. After several discussions and revisions of sections, nothing seemed to be working in our favor. So we assigned ourselves a job. We each had to brainstorm new directions for the story that would close the plot hole and allow us to move forward.
By that point, we learned a valuable lesson. The new idea we chose to go with meant changing the genre of the book in its entirety. We had to say goodbye to the fantasy sci-fi genre and switch to a more realistic view. Initially, we unknowingly set ourselves up to fail by not realizing our lack of knowledge in the sci-fi fantasy world. Truth was, we didn’t read enough books in that genre. Therefore, we had set ourselves up for a rather ambitious project; one we weren’t capable of taking on. At least, not at that moment. Being open to this new change was difficult for us both. There were so many scenes and ideas we were tied to. Here’s the good thing about changes and deleted scenes. They don’t have to be gone forever! We saved the deleted scenes into a separate Google Doc. Who knows? Maybe they can be used for other works in progress.
After switching genres, there we were again, back to square one. We made a new outline and this time I used a plot diagram to ensure we utilized all the elements that make up a story. It’s something I’ve found super helpful and have continued using for my other works in progress. We spent the next few months making the new changes and staying committed to our meeting schedule, until we finished in March 2019. After completing the story, we went back to the beginning to make grammar edits and add or delete small details. At this point, we felt confident to share our manuscript with a few close friends, but boy, were we wrong!
You can check out Kaylee’s blog about our feedback and round two of writing a new and improved version of Vitality. View it on page two below!
It's Kaylee and Kayla 