The six teen superheroes in the Zeroes trilogy epitomize teamwork --- each of their powers relates to crowds, and can only be used when other people are around.
As it so happens, the whole process that took Zeroes from the seed of an idea to a fully published first book embodies this very theme. It was developed, written and edited by not one but three beloved authors (Scott Westerfeld, Deborah Biancotti and Margo Lanagan), and then polished, publicized and sent out into the world by an incredibly talented group at Simon & Schuster.
Read below to get all of the inside details on how working together can make a great novel (or a great blog post; but of course, Westerfeld, Biancotti and Lanagan wrote this one, together!).
The Zeroes trilogy --- the action-packed adventures of six super-powered Californian teens --- came about because two solo authors cooked up a cool idea and asked a third to join them.
Scott Westerfeld had been kicking around one or two of the superpowers in his head for a fair while. Then, back in mid-2013, he read Deborah Biancotti's BAD POWER, a collection of five stories that combined the police procedural format with some less-than-lycra-clad superpowers.
Meanwhile, Deb had just taken a taster course in TV writing. The TV Writers' Room looked super-attractive to her. She enjoyed sitting with a bunch of screenwriters brainstorming story ideas. She liked the way the group could pump energy and possibilities into the merest scrap of an idea. It was so much quicker than working alone, and it was so much more fun!
So when the two of them got to talking one day, it was only natural that they dreamed up a project that could pull all this together. They started laying down a few rules for this group of superpowered teens. For example, the Zeroes would all be the same age (born in the year 2000) and their powers would all relate to crowds, to being social, in some way. In other words, none of these characters is anything special when they're alone. But when other people are around, each can harness his or her power.
"In keeping with that idea, this has to be a team effort," Scott said. "Two people don't make a team, or a writers' room. Who else can we rope into this boondoggle?"
"How about Margo Lanagan?" Deb said. "She lives just down the road. She's won a few prizes for her books. And did I mention she lives just down the road?"
So emails were sent, and secret meetings organized, and before you could say Assemble!,Team Zeroes was gathering once a week to talk into being six characters called Scam, Bellwether, Crash, Anonymous, Mob and Flicker.
The first book came out in September, and we've just handed in the second. Looking back, we've been a lot more efficient putting Book 2 together than we were with Book 1. Book 1 involved a bunch of start-up conceptual work and character development; second time around we were building on what we'd already created. But our basic process was the same:
• Escape to the country and do the Writers' Room thing, nutting out a chunk of plot together over several days, pausing occasionally to eat, drink and exercise.
• Pin that plot down in an outline, split among the viewpoints of all six characters.
• Return to our separate writing dens and each create "our" two characters' chapters. (We each write two characters, whose identities, in the superheroic tradition, are a closely guarded secret. You must guess who writes whom.)
Keeping to the TV writing tradition, our Showrunner (Scott) has final say on what goes through to the editors. But we all comment on each other's drafts, protesting and defending points all the way to the line --- from big structural questions right down to the placement of certain commas and the use of individual words.
This means that the plot gets thoroughly tested as we each express our doubts about various wonky bits. And the final submitted text has been pretty much edited by everyone, some bits many times over, by the time it hits the publisher. Zeroes manuscripts are nothing if not clean.
But of course after submission, a whole other Team Zeroes kicks into gear, helping us add the last few bits of connective tissue, change the emphasis of different elements and clarify questions that might arise in readers' minds. At the same time, the machinery of packaging theZeroes and publicizing their arrival gets going. The power of three explodes to the power of many.
After all, collaboration is the only real human superpower. None of us can fly alone. But with thousands of people designing aircraft, building airports and doing air traffic control, flying becomes easy.
TheZeroes series, more than most novels, comes to you as the work of multiple minds, through the give-and-take of a collaboration. We hope the world enjoys reading it as much as we enjoyed making it real.
