Making Housewarming: Part 4, Writing The Manuscript
Hello! Welcome to “Making Housewarming,” our series on this here blog about how we created our debut book from start to finish—everything from how we decided what we wanted to create to organizing photoshoots to finding the right publisher and a whole lot more. We’ll be covering a different part of the process every week for ten weeks (this is week four!), so make sure to check back in or join our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss anything!
Be sure to scroll to the very bottom of this post where you’ll find ‘em all and catch yourself up to speed. Or don’t! I’m not your mom!
So we’d successfully found our dream publisher and—now over a year after we first first pondered writing this book—we were ready to, you know, write the book. It was the summer of 2020 and we were housebound because pandemic, so, it was kind of an ideal time to write a book!
But we’d never written a book and holy shit what did we just sign up for? Books are so long, and who decides where the words go and where the little images go and the big images and also those illustrations we want? Who decides where that goes? Well, as it turned out, we kind of had final say on pretty much all of that. It was clear from the start that we were going to need a system if we were gonna meet our deadline for the manuscript.
Oh and just in case you don’t know: a manuscript is like, a text file with all the words of the book—no pretty pictures or the fancy bits of artwork or designs or any regard to the page layout, just a good ol’ fashion Word doc with all the um… words.
What was so hard for us to grasp at first was writing while accounting for the 150 images and also a ton of illustrations that we would be including. Most of these images didn’t even exist yet, they were just ideas for photos and illustrations our photographer and illustrator would create later. With this blog, we typically are able to neatly package a nice tasty little hunk of words among a few big beautiful images that make sense with those words and boom, done, publish post, receive applause (or not).
But a design / home book is different. There would be entire spreads of just imagery with maybe a teeny tiny bit of commentary. Or maybe a lot of commentary just shoved into a small box on the side! But then there would be parts of the book that were text heavy, whether it was a story or a guide or a diatribe about wine. And the manuscript that we wrote would have to, like, make sense in the contexts of the entire book, referring to images we didn’t even have yet and artwork that wasn’t even in the initial sketching stages.
After a little trial and error, we eventually decided we’d just write in our typical long form way and then anywhere that needed to be edited way down to just an image description or bulleted list could be; this worked wonderfully for us and looking back should’ve been the obvious route. It was hard to go into this knowing that we were writing so much more than we’d ever be able to keep, but that’s how real life actual writers do it, so that’s how we were going to do it, too. We could write uninhibited, not really thinking about layout and design and just pour out our thoughts. So, our advice? Do that, just write your little heart out and worry about layout and editing and cutting later.
The way Matt and I wrote Housewarming was from a “we” perspective—something we decided very early on when we first wrote the proposal. We thought it would be somewhat easier for the reader of a co-authored book as they don’t have to guess who’ speaking based on context clues or look for a little “from Matt” or “from Beau” notation. And it’s also most representative on how the ideas and words on the page were created. I would write a portion—maybe just a sentence or a paragraph or even a whole chapter, and Matt would come behind me and add and subtract and edit for clarity or to remove weird things I’d said etc; and I did the same for him. The text within the book is truly collaborative, with each of us having had a bit of input into every single sentence, often going back and forth on individual words to ensure we were putting together the very best product. This method of writing is what we already do in most of our work online, so it came somewhat naturally to us, but doing it on such a large scale and for a book that we can’t log into and edit little mistakes later meant we needed to be precise. Our little system worked great for this book, and I think it made us each better writers overall, plus it was a fun and unique bonding experience for us.
And so it became a little dance between him and me, from summer of 2020 into winter we wrote and we talked and we edited and we wrote and we debated and we wrote some more. We had the first draft of our manuscript ready in February of 2021, and it was something like 50,000 words, and we were so nervous about sending it to our editor—mostly because we’d gone 10,000 entire words over what our book contract had outlined.
Well I was so nervous, Matt was just excited. I tend to be really afraid of sharing unpolished work, or anything that might make me look completely nuts, but Matt was an English major with years of experience as a writing tutor (maybe I should’ve mentioned this earlier sorry) and so he knew that some of the very best work only comes after letting another person see your first stabs at a completed piece. Still, I managed to convince him to let us comb through that first draft probably five or six times after it was “done” (just to make sure we didn’t say anything crazy or tell blatant lies) before we sent it to our editor.
A few weeks later we heard back from her in the form of the world’s most reassuring email that she was so excited over the quality of our first draft. It was… the best feeling ever. And there was so much work left to do on it but my shoulder relaxed a bit and I was ready! Good thing too, because for many months to come we’d be doing revisions to that first draft based on commentary from our editor, and then planning our photoshoot and the art work based on all that we’d written.
In the next few weeks of this series we’ll dive into the good bad and ugly of working together on making this book, what it was like to coordinate a photoshoot in the middle of a pandemic, and so much more. We hope you’ll join in and follow along as we count down the weeks to our book’s publication! You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss a thing, and preorder Housewarming if you haven’t already!
Love you loads
xoxox
Beau & Matt
