“Psst… wanna write a book?”

A Fictional Witch’s Guide to Co-Writing

First, find someone you like who’s nothing like you. Second, be silly AF.

Intro: Pleased To Meet You, Fellow Real Person

My name is Sylvia Barry. I am the daughter of the four winds, the tides, and the caffeine-addled brains of two weirdos.

Maya Dworsky-Rocha and Anna Catalano are individual writers (check out Maya’s solo work here, and Anna’s here) who write together under the name Sylvia Barry. She, that is, I happen to be a seven foot tall auburn-haired witch who lives in a lighthouse and communes with shipwrecked ghosts, migratory birds, and the occasional lost salesperson who can’t remember how they arrived to my lofty tower of solitude but is now overcome with the need to purchase several jars of my homemade kelp jam.

And with you, of course.

Hush child, let Sylvia guide you

I’m here to tell you how Maya and Anna, or as they were dubbed by their publicist, “Mayanna,” write together. The ins and outs of not only writing as a team, but also getting published as one. The romance genre is full of successful co-author duos, and there’s a particular magic that happens when you get into a co-writing rhythm with someone. I’ve heard it compared to dancing, sparring, even lovemaking, but for Maya and Anna, the most apt comparison has always been play. The kind of play that turns backyards into pirate ships, rocks into walkie-talkies, and Barbie Dream Houses into Murder Hotels.

Come now, take my hand, let me guide you through every step of co-authoring; the grand victories and devastating pitfalls, the great dangers and greater rewards, and the existential euphoria of being seen by someone so completely that, one night, against the grain of the universe and your own considerable will, you blurt out: “we should write a book together.”

And if you happen to feel the growing hankering for kelp jam be sure to contact me. I’ll let the eels know.

1. A Real Life Odd Couple Meet-Cute

Once upon a time (2010, to be exact), Maya and Anna met at a local community college. Maya (who was just rounding out her vagabond era) didn’t immediately notice Anna (a deconstructing ex-Catholic theatre kid), as she tended to sit quietly at the back of every class and didn’t make much eye-contact.

It wasn’t until one of their lecturers casually said the first few lines of Hamlet’s To Be Or Not To Be speech, when suddenly. In a full projecting-to-the-back-of the-theater belt, someone completed it. Maya turned around in her chair and saw a quiet, green-eyed girl she’d never noticed before. She remembers thinking: Huh. So there is life on this planet.

Meanwhile, from Anna’s perspective, Maya was an academic force to be reckoned with: confident and active in class discussions, exceptionally knowledgeable about all things literature, anthropology, and philosophy. One of her final projects consisted of her writing and performing an original song based on Phoebe from As You Like It on a dulcimer she built herself, and Anna was both impressed and intimidated in equal measure, feeling unworthy of talking to someone so cool and talented. She contented herself to admire Maya from a distance.

Mayanna Pre-Sylvia

Maya waited for another thespian outburst from Anna, but it never came. They glimpsed each other in the periphery of English classes, until both transferred to university, and became the only face the other recognized in a room of over 200 people.

“Can I sit here?” Maya asked, and Anna silently moved her coat and cleared the seat next to her.

Familiarity grew, followed by a cautious friendship. And then one day Maya noticed Anna scribbling in a notebook and asked: “what are you writing?”

“I may or may not,” Anna hedged, “be writing Johnlock fanfiction.”

There, right there, that’s when it happened. Sparks flew, the music swelled. Maya was confused, but intrigued.

At the time, she did not know what either ‘Johnlock’ or ‘fanfiction’ referred to. And thus, history was made. That is, Maya and Anna slowly but thoroughly began to introduce themselves to each other as writers, as goobers, and as friends.

Until one day, everything changed.

2. How Two Lonely Writers Became One Super Tall Witch

It all began as an experiment.

While Maya and Anna had discovered that they worked well together academically (the study guides were absolutely epic, you don’t understand), and enjoyed each other’s writing individually (Anna’s fanfiction was delectable, and Maya’s fantasy worldbuilding could not be stopped), it wasn’t until Anna confessed that she’d been in a bit of a writing slump, that they considered writing something together.

“I had this idea about two roommates whose schedules are so different they never see each other…”

Meanwhile, Maya had been carrying around the characters of Armand Demetrio (misanthropic British cartoonist) and Robin Finch (bullied theater kid) for literal years, without any idea what story they might belong in. Armand was a shoe-in for one of the roommates (being both nocturnal and A Mess), and Robin was classic sidekick material. Anna grabbed Skyler Evans (asexual teenage adoptee) from an old novella, and then set her mind to creating a worthy opposite for Armand to butt heads (and… other bodyparts…) with. Thus, Lucas Barclay (sunny Californian photographer) was born.

Was there a plot? No, there was not. Maya and Anna had a premise, four characters, and Spring Break.

[embed]Lessons in Timing Lessons in Timing [Barry, Sylvia] on Amazon.com. FREE shipping on qualifying offers. Lessons in Timinga.co

As they wrote, Maya and Anna discovered they had very different writing habits. In setting out to write a novel about polar opposites, little did they know that:

• Anna is a plotter and Maya is a pantser
• Maya is an overwriter — she will describe everyone and everything in much too much and entirely unnecessary detail. Meanwhile, Anna is an underwriter — her characters exist as emotionally complex blobs in blank white rooms.
• Anna writes chronologically and Maya jumps around
• Maya drafts first and edits second, while Anna edits as she drafts

And while some of these differences were rough to navigate around, most turned out to be complimentary. Just like night-owl Armand and early-bird Lucas found themselves appreciating each other’s differences, so did Maya and Anna realize that writing together was not only a lot of fun — it was sustainable.

3. Sylvia’s Go-To Recipe (For Book, Not Jam)

These days, the joint writing process rarely begins with sitting down and saying ‘let’s write a book, what should it be about?’

Step 1: Premise

Someone makes a joke. Or a casual discussion quickly gets out of hand. One minute Maya and Anna are making an offhanded comment, volleying quips and insights to each other — the next it’s eight hours later and Anna is furiously scribbling notes (to be decoded later) and they’re realizing OOPS — this is a book. (They should know better than to joke around about anything ever).

And yet this keeps happening.

Step 2: Outline

Outlining before drafting is something that Anna swears by for all her individual projects (how can you embark on an adventure without a map?!), but Maya operates best by pantsing it (if you already know where you’ll end up, why go there at all?)

When they write together as Sylvia, though, an outline comes in handy so:

• They have a basic idea of what happens in the book (with the shared understanding — begrudgeing on Anna’s part — that an outline is less like rules and more like a set of guidelines, really), and
• They have an idea how to alternate POVs (switching off every other chapter). For Anna, this is the fun part — the what-ifs, the creation of facecasts and playlists, the writing sidequests of little vignettes to discover character voice; the sandbox to play around in as they settle into a shiny new project.

Circa 2015, Mayanna and Special Guest (third secret Sylvia) Iliana, Maya’s roommate and GASP future wife! How life immitates art…

Step 3: Drafting

Now it’s on to the drafting, which is where Maya thrives and Anna suffers. This step can take anywhere from two weeks (it happened only once and will never happen again), to a year (sometimes more, if the project needs more time to marinate or if Anna specifically can’t get words out.)

During this time, Maya works quickly, able to jump around non-linearly across the story’s timeline. Anna, on the other hand, is cursed to write chronologically no matter what.

Step 4: Walk. Away.

You may think that the next step is to edit the manuscript, but THINK AGAIN — it’s time to put that baby in a metaphorical (or literal) drawer and not look at it for a minimum of three business months (Maya struggles with this step).

In the meantime, Maya and Anna are either working on individual projects and/or refilling the creative well by playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (Anna) or rereading comfort Star Trek novels (Maya).

Step 5: Edit time! KILL THOSE DARLINGS!

Once the manuscript has marinated for some time, Maya and Anna will return to it with fresher eyes, going in with a proverbial red pen to chisel away everything that doesn’t look like a book.

The pendulum of polar opposites swings the other way now, as editing is the step where Anna thrives and Maya would rather die. And if you think you’re done editing, NO YOU’RE NOT. The editing will go on and on through multiple drafts and across a slew of beta readers until it’s squeaky clean and you’re sick to death of looking at it.

You’re never done editing.

Never.

4. Whose Baby Is This?

Sylvia… you ARE the father

At this point the question might arise — like juicy kelp to the surface of the ocean, ripe for harvest — how is the labor broken down equitably? It can’t be as simple as alternating chapters, especially if one writer is more suited to drafting and the other to editing?

You are correct. It is more complicated! Rest assured, Maya doesn’t do all the drafting and Anna doesn’t do all the editing. They don’t even keep to their respective characters. Maya has written scenes from Lucas and Skyler’s (Anna’s characters) perspective, and Anna has written scenes for Armand and Robin (Maya’s characters).

Moreover, there will be chapters that Maya and Anna later realize would best be told through a different character’s point of view, so — while keeping the content (such as dialogue and action) of the scene — it will be rewritten in an entirely different voice. Even when chapters are written fully by either Maya or Anna, the other will be instrumental in the editing process.

Because of this, the novels, novellas, and even short stories written by me — Sylvia, your gracious host — are truly distinct from Maya and Anna’s solo writing.

They give every part of them to every part of me. Like Frankenstein’s monster, but hot (so Frankenstein’s monster).

5. There’s No ‘I’ In Team, But There Is In Co-Writing (Two, Even!)

At the end of the day, Maya and Anna aren’t just co-authors, or even one super tall red-headed witch. They’re family.

They’ve known each other for fifteen years, Anna officiated Maya and Iliana’s (the third secret Sylvia who has been here the whole time, as seen above) wedding, and in 2023 Maya’s parents and larger family held a “Cousin-ing” ceremony, in which Anna was officially inducted into their ranks.

Anna lives a 2-minute drive away from Maya and Iliana, and they spend more than half of every week together.

This allows Maya and Anna to share the burdens of not only writing, but doing the harder, crunchier sides of co-authoring — the crust of the writing gig, so to speak. They film TikToks together, attend the bi-monthly Drafting Through Life writing workshop together (which includes this blog post, wa-hey), and share many other social media marketing duties, like promoting a short romance story (coming soon from Bothered Stories), talking up their published novel LESSONS IN TIMING (the previously mentioned Odd Couple roommates book), and announcing its sequel — LESSONS IN BALANCE — which releases December 22 with Riptide Publishing!

Present Day Mayanna FINAL FORM

Clearly, Maya and Anna’s particular co-authoring journey is not necessarily typical or easily replicated, but should you find yourself with a best friend with whom you share creative energies, I highly recommend giving co-writing a shot, even if just as an experiment, or a joke.

After all, that’s how I, Sylvia Barry, lighthouse-keeping romance-writing weather witch, was born.