Making Housewarming: Part 5, Working Together
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 five!), so make sure to check back in or join our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss anything!
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!
For a duo that has been working together—writing, designing, photographing, building, and all the other things we do with our business—for going on eight years now, you may reasonably expect we have a pretty smooth workflow going, and that we could translate that easily into writing, say, a book.
Not exactly.
The way Beau and I normally work together is by divide and conquer. We both work best alone, and prefer to only involve the other when it’s time to review whatever project before hitting publish or sending off to a client. Beau doesn’t like to be limited by editorial feedback on the front end, so if I’m involved and poke holes in his ideas before he fleshes them out himself, I cause issues. I’m more of a meticulous planner, often allotting much more time to sketching, thinking, outlining, and troubleshooting in the pre-game than Beau would ever be comfortable with, so I don’t love his involvement on the front end of my work either. Wonderful. Our solution is to just trade off taking lead on projects, the other contributing only when asked, and only how. And even though that might make us sound like total control freaks, it’s actually worked out pretty dang well for us, okay?!
Co-authoring a book, that strategy, the one we’d come to rely on for years, had to be thrown right out the window. We wanted every piece of this book to come from a uniform voice that felt like both of us at the same time, so naturally we needed to both be intricately involved in almost every aspect of it. But opening up a shared Google doc and literally writing together felt clunky and limiting, the same as if you were writing with someone looking over your shoulder, and nothing was getting done. Because we are stupid, we still tried writing that way for entirely too long, the thought being that it would be better for us to approve as we go, hopefully cutting down the later editing time, but it became clear that we needed to be moving at a faster pace or we’d never get the book done.
We realized we would still need some level of autonomy when it came to our work in the book, even if it would require heavy intrusion by and inclusion of the other’s ideas and words. We decided to tackle chapters separately, usually just having one of us basically outline the chapter before sending off to the other for the actual writing, then back to the first person to write some more and edit, and so on until we were happy with where the chapter stood. We did this for all of the chapters in the book, occasionally arguing to the death about whether to keep or cut a paragraph, sentence, or single word, until we finally had the entire manuscript compiled. It was about as nuts as it sounds, but it worked!
There were a few chapters where one of us would take lead. For instance, because of my experience working in swanky restaurants and a gratuitous budget for tasting and learning about wines over the past many years, I took lead on our wine chapter, a behemoth of a chapter that is meant to serve as an intro to picking the right wine for your occasion. Alongside the chapter’s adorable art work, I classified the wines by “vibe” to make it more approachable and less heady. Beau’s experience of wine is a “let me drink it” approach that relies more on the speed of glass-to-mouth than any knowledge of the wine itself, so he was happy to let me handle the nitty gritty. And Beau spearheaded a few of the DIY chapters, like our chapter on creating custom pots for your favorite houseplants, because while I love living in a home with a lot of thriving houseplants, I’m not the one walking in the door with arms full of my latest plant store shopping spree, or whispering words of encouragement to the new cauliflower head growing in the raised beds, so it felt appropriate that he take charge of those chapters.
Oh and did we fight? Yes ma’am. Not so much on the content of the book. I mean there was plenty of back and forth but ultimately we both wanted to create the best piece of work and can put our egos down long enough to realize the other may have a more effective way of meeting that goal. But things escalated passed the “I’m not sure I see the vision but I want to hear you out” stage of a disagreement and into the “you’re dead wrong and this isn’t ever going to work!!!!” stage when we were discussing when was the best stage for us to send our manuscript off to our editor.
Excited to be working with a Real Editor and a Real Publisher, I was itching to share early, early drafts for editorial feedback and guidance to help us swiftly to our first compiled draft. Beau felt differently and wanted to keep everything internal until it was more fully developed, so that our editor would not spend time reviewing partially-fleshed out rough drafts that we might end up scrapping anyway. “Discussing with our editor is internal,” was how I felt, and if I ever write a book solo I’ll probably want to share those early and incomplete pages for some initial thoughts. But I let Beau have this one, mostly because I wasn’t just going to, like, send our book off to our editor without telling him—we finessed the manuscript from version to version until it was in a place where we felt it was good enough for outside eyes. What we were able to send to our editor really did allow her commentary to be based off a fully fleshed out project.
So before we even submitted anything to our editor, there were a total six versions of the “completed’ manuscript printed out, chopped up, covered in highlighter and red pen, and reworked in the computer to make the next version, which got printed out and subjected to the same treatment until we had version 6.0, with few enough issues that we were ready to submit it.
From there, we had the guidance of a professional (and fantastic) editor who was able to really fine tune our ideas, and the suggested edits were (for the most part) much smaller, all made on digital PDFs, for an additional three or four total “passes.” Which I guess means there have been a total of ten full drafts of this book written, which sounds kind of nuts but felt completely necessary to make you the very best thing we could!
Luckily, the writing of the book was the part most plagued with compromises and competing ideas. After we had our manuscript done it was time to coordinate all of the photos and artwork, which was much smoother. Maybe it’s that we tend to have more similar taste in visuals than we do in words, but it was incredibly easy to be collaborative and in sync when plotting the book’s 150 photos and massive amount of illustrated art work. But we’ll have a post in this series all about the photoshoot and the artwork, so much more on that to come. 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! Below you’ll find all of the previous posts in this series, ready for your viewing :)
Xoxo
Beau & Matt
