How to write a bestselling book with a friend (even when it’s hard)

Liz and Mollie finish each other’s sentences—in work and in real life. 

They just co-wrote and illustrated their second best-selling book, Big Feelings, How to Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay. They’ve built a flourishing creative partnership that’s lasted through years of professional and personal changes and upheavals. And they’ve done it all while balancing the demands of having full-time jobs in different fields.

I wanted to understand: how do they do it? How do they produce great work—together—while working full time?

So we sat down to talk about the story of their books: the systems and processes they use to write them together. We talked about how they find time for creative output in the mornings and on the weekends, and how they tackle different pieces of the book simultaneously—and switch back and forth until each piece is finished.

As we talked, I realized that in order to understand their process for writing, I really needed to understand their partnership. For them, the great partnership is the process that makes the great books.

By the time a book is ready to be published, they say, they can’t point at a sentence in it and say, “That was mine.” It’s all theirs. And you can tell by the way they are in an interview: they obviously know each other, they know their similarities and their differences, and they fill in the gaps for each other in conversation seamlessly. 

Partnerships like this are exceedingly rare in the creative world. So I wanted to know:

How did they find each other? How did they decide to work together? And why does what they do work so well?

You might think their partnership is great because of how similar they are. But they’re actually quite different in how they approach writing, and what they care about. Instead, it works because they’ve learned to be radically committed to using their differences—the bumps, and conflicts along the way—to create the best possible work. 

What they’ve learned has enormous implications for anyone who wants to do their best work as part of a partnership, or a team. This is the story of how Liz and Mollie do it. Let’s dive in!

How They Met

Liz: I had just moved to New York from San Francisco for a job and felt alone and overwhelmed. I had never lived in New York before and I was afraid everyone was going to be abrasive. 

I emailed everyone I knew and asked to be set up on friend dates so that I would have a softer landing in the city. Mollie was one of those first friend dates, and we just hit it off.

We’re both introverts. We both have intensive sleep routines: sleep masks, white noise machines, ear plugs. The whole thing. We also both had similar experiences of getting seemingly great jobs that we thought we’d be at for a long time—and then completely burning out.

So we bonded over those things initially.

How They Started Working Together

Mollie:

I had been writing articles and I asked Liz to illustrate some of them. Liz is able to visualize things that can be difficult to verbalize—which happens a lot when you’re writing about emotions. She’s able to take something in words and turn it into something visual that speaks to exactly what we’re trying to get across.

One of the articles we wrote for Susan Cain’s Quiet Rev platform went viral: 6 Illustrations That Show What It’s Like in an Introvert’s Head. From that, we got an agent and sold our first book, No Hard Feelings: How To Be Okay When Things Are Not Okay, which came out in 2019 and was a WSJ bestseller. 

How They Wrote A Book, Together

Mollie:

People always ask: how do you both write books while having a full-time job? My answer is: “You give your creative hours to the book.” For me, that’s before work in the morning and on the weekends.

Liz:

I’d say my ideal work hours are nine to noon, and five to eight. Kind of the inverse of a traditional work day.

Mollie:

I read a lot and I’m obsessive about taking notes. So for me the process of writing starts with reading. I save a ton of quotes and go back to them later. I read on my Kindle, and all of the highlights end up in Readwise.

Liz:

Mollie is more methodical about keeping notes, tracking sources. And I’m much more chaotic—I’ll scribble something in one notebook one day and in another the next day. My process is much more in my head than in a tool.

Early on, all of Mollie’s organization felt unnecessary. But eventually I grew to appreciate it. 

Mollie:

We start our writing process by writing a list of all of the topics we want to cover. For Big Feelings, that was anger, burnout, regret, uncertainty, etc. Then I start reading broadly in all of those areas, highlighting stuff along the way. As we start writing a more detailed outline, I go back through Readwise and search for interesting quotes and ideas on each topic.