The Totally True Backstory

The winner of this week’s draw for a copy of Totally Me: The Teenage Girl’s Survival Guide is Megan. Send us your address Megan, and the book is yours.

Thanks for sending in your questions. We’ll try to answer all of them here eventually. But since we’re giving another copy of Totally Me this week, it makes sense to tackle this one first: “What made you write an advice book for teens and how did you write it as a team?”

As a refresher, here’s what the book’s back cover says:

Navigating today's complex world can be tough for anyone, but there's a survival guide to help you find your way with sass and style. Funny and insightful, Totally Me gives you all the information you need to master the girl world—and have a great time. With Totally Me at your side, you'll learn the real deal on boys, parents and friends.

Short on boring lectures and full of fun quizzes, stories and advice, Totally Me is the ultimate guide to finding the real you!

That description makes it sound like we knew what we were doing when we wrote it, doesn’t it? But nothing could be further from the truth.

It all started when Yvonne gave me a call at work, where I was writing a speech for an Unnamed Public Official. As usual, we vowed to keep it brief. And as usual, we promptly launched into a discussion of hair, food and celebrity gossip. I continued to tap on my keyboard in case anyone walked by the open door.

“So…” Yvonne said, taking an unexpected conversational right turn. “My niece keeps asking me for advice and I went out to buy a book for her.”

"Uh huh?" I started working on my speech again.

"There are no books out there with funny, sensible advice for teens."

"Uh huh?” I said, still waiting for the conversation to return to hair and food and the latest celeb gossip.

"We should write one," Yvonne said.

“Uh huh?” It sounded like one of the crazy ideas Yvonne tosses out now and then to see if I’m really listening. For example, she once suggested we become roadies for our favorite Toronto band (i.e., get paid to be groupies). Usually if you ignore these ideas, they go away.

“Are you listening? I said we should write a book for teens. And could you stop typing?”

I stopped typing. "But what do we know?”

"Enough," Yvonne said. Long pause. "Don't we?"

I wasn’t so sure. I’m not one of those people who’s got it all together. Mostly I think I shouldn’t be advising anyone on anything—except maybe the best brands of chocolate.

"And just so you know,” Yvonne continued, taking my silence as agreement, “I want to write it together. We'll sit in the same room to do it."

"Sure," I said. Whatever. It wasn’t going to happen anyway.

But I dashed off a query letter describing our idea and sent it to a few agents. All of them asked to see the proposal—the proposal that did not currently exist.

"Crap," said Yvonne, proving that it really was just a whim on her part.

But now we were sort of on the hook, so we quickly assembled a teen advisory group (Yvonne’s niece and her friends), fed them pizza, and asked what they’d want out of a book like this. The answer: the dirt on guys. How do I get him to notice me? What is he thinking? How soon is too soon? How do I dump him?

"That we can handle," Yvonne said, after they left.

"Yeah?" I asked. "How soon is too soon?"

"I'll write that chapter," Yvonne said, as I crammed a slice of cold pizza into my mouth. "You can write the one on body image."

We started writing and within weeks—nearly fast enough to fool an agent into thinking it had been ready all along—we had a proposal. A few weeks after that, we had an agent. And a month later, we had a publisher.

Of course, there was a hitch. We would have to write the book within three months. I was still cranking out speeches full-time and Yvonne was shooting a film in Calgary. Could we write a full book that quickly when we didn’t have a clue what we were doing? Highly unlikely.

We accepted the offer.

As Yvonne was on location, the issue of writing in the same room never came up—and hasn't since. What happens when we are in the same room is not writing—it is talking. And there are no pages to show at the end of it.

Three months passed in a blur, but we came out of it with a pretty good draft. You could barely tell we weren't experts on anything.

Except for the fact that the book was twice as long as it was supposed to be. (Note to aspiring authors: find the word count function.)

Yvonne wept silently as I slashed my way through the overgrown jungle of advice. But finally, Totally Me: The Teenage Girl's Survival Guide was done.

"That was fun, wasn't it?" I asked, when we met for dinner to celebrate. "What should we do next?"

"Rest?" she asked, looking haggard.

"Take a week," I said.

We compared notes about what we'd enjoyed most about the Totally Me experience and found it was writing fictional scenarios to illustrate our advice.

"Let's write a novel," Yvonne said, perking up. "Based on our experiences in politics and the film business."

"What do we know about writing a novel?" I asked, knowing it was just another one of her crazy ideas.

Check back next week to learn about where that crazy idea took us.

In the meantime, to win our last spare copy of Totally Me, leave us a comment or send us an e-mail to get your name in the draw.