After my Michaela Mason series for tweens came out, Scholastic Australia asked me to pitch them a commercial, illustrated series for 7-11 year old girls, and I ran around the house squealing for a bit, before settling down and mulling over ideas.
One of those was a diary series with alternating points of view, between two 10-year-old girls.
Of course, there are plenty of diary series for kids on bookstore shelves, but the shifting point-of-view would afford me gags and dramatic irony. Were these characters best friends? Sisters?
A dozen cups of tea later, I landed on identical twins.
Not only are there dozens of diary series in
print, but there are also many twin series. However, I couldn’t find any that
used alternating diary extracts the way I intended to.
Now, I adore sitcoms and book series. When I
meet a fellow fan of The Big Bang Theory, Friends, The UK
Office, or Gavin and Stacey, I’ll pin them against the wall and ask
them earnest questions about their favourite episodes. In books, I love Louise
Rennison’s Georgia Nicholson series, Meg Cabot’s underrated Mediator
books, and David Eddings’ classic fantasy epic, The Belgariad.
I asked myself, why do I love those series so
much?
Easy: because of the characters. I wrote here in2021 about having crushes on fictional characters. Turns out I’m also Friends
with them. My main challenge in Twinning, I decided, would be to create that
sitcom vibe with a strong ensemble cast. I wanted my readers to feel as if they
were sitting on the playground beside my characters, sharing their seaweed
snacks, as well as their jokes, secrets and dramas.
Most of my work went into developing those characters (and they’ve been brilliantly brought to life by illustrator Sofya Karmazina). After creating the quartet and my antagonists, I faced the big test. Would Twinning have enough juice to fuel not just one book, or two, but a series?
The shifting point-of-view meant each book needed
two linked stories, one for each twin, which means a lot of story. When I found
myself generating dozens of stories for my characters, I felt confident that Twinning
would ‘go’.
But a
note — I find the creative process fickle. I’ve worked on series ideas I’ve
loved that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make ‘go’. In creating a
series, there seems to be a smidgen of alchemy you simply can’t force. Some character
combinations work better than others, and generate more story, and my job, as a
series author, is to search for that winning chemistry.
I
hope I’ve achieved it here. Because when authors get it right, they create series
that we love to revisit again and again.
Alexa Moses is an author and screenwriter, writing predominantly for children. In 2007, she won the Varuna HarperCollins fellowship for her first manuscript and now divides her time between writing books and writing for television.
Her book, Bat vs Poss (Hachette Australia) was a CBCA Notable Book for 2020. She has also authored two books for ‘tweens, Slave Girl and Talk Like an Ancient Egyptian (HarperCollins Australia), and contributed to CBCA Notable children’s poetry book A Boat of Stars (ABC Books 2018).When she’s not reading and writing, Alexa spends her time walking the dog, listening to music, going to the gym and arguing with anyone who’s game.