Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé and Adiba Jaigirdar When the two of us first thought about writing a book together, we were a little lost as to how exactly we should go about doing it. For all of the writing advice out there, there isn’t a lot that tells you how to sit down and plan and write a whole book with someone else. But surprisingly, once we got down to it, we realised that collaborating felt almost.
..natural.
Like we’d been doing it for a long time! And in a way we had been. You see, a lot of people think that writing is a very isolated job. You sit down at your computer day in, day out, typing out a story full of characters who have only lived in your head until you’re able to get them out onto the page.
A pretty lonely endeavour, right? You would think so. But once you get into the publishing community, writing takes on a little bit of a different shape. The story and characters that had resided in your brain become important to the people in your publishing team too.
Your editor or agent, for example, are often instrumental in shaping your book. They offer invaluable feedback and can provide insight that you might not have had before. There’s a very popular saying that goes, “writing is rewriting”, and in your process of rewriting or revising, there are often a lot of people helping you along the way.
In this way, the act of writing can be very collaborative, so when the two of us sat down to write together, we naturally tapped into those collaborative experiences we’d both had..
