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?