Elizabeth Hayley | How Two Became One

Once upon a time, in a high school hallway likely far, far away from where you
are now, two young, vibrant, gorgeous, wonderful, amazing, clearly narcissistic
(we’re kidding, by the way), women decided they could write a romance novel. One
had the idea, another had the plot. We mapped it all out and were excited to get
started.

However, there was an obvious concern we had when we went into this: what if our
writing didn’t mesh well together? What if it was clear we were two writers
because we couldn’t blend the narrative cohesively? What if we tried, and we failed?

The prospect of failure was terrifying, as it often is. This was something we
both secretly dreamed of doing but had never had enough of a push to make it
happen. Now we had the push: each other. But we still had to actually write the
damn thing. The stakes felt much larger than they really were. Like if we
weren’t able to finish this one project, all hope of ever finishing another
would be gone.

So we did the only thing we could do. We wrote. We tried. We succeeded. Kinda.

That first book was a blur. We wrote it in under two months using Google Drive so we would be able to see each other’s chapters and edit one another’s work without having to worry about emailing it back and forth or potentially losing something without the ability to retrieve it. We worked out a system we still use four years later: choosing which chapters we wanted (or which ones we really didn’t want) and then leaving comments, Elizabeth always in blue, Hayley always in red.

The final product was something that would become uniquely Elizabeth Hayley. Two
people who miraculously have the exact same voice and tone and style. It shocked
us how easy it was—not the writing a book thing, but the sounding like
one-person thing. It came naturally, as if we were always two halves of a whole
that had finally found one another.

It worked for us. And even though publishers weren’t interested in that first
book, we were bitten by the writing bug and decided to keep at it. It took two
more books and a novella before we finally wrote something worth getting us an
agent and pitching to an editor.

But it didn’t take any time at all for us to realize how important we were to
and for each other. None of this happens without the other. While we may live
our lives as separate entities, in the writing world, we will always be one. One
voice. One goal. One Elizabeth Hayley.