I'll be honest with you, Steven or Noah should have been the one to write this section, not me. I wasn't really involved in writing most of the first book, the only part I played in the first book was working with Steven to write my responce letter. Steven and Noah were the ones who were really at the very center of the writing process.
The two of them
Back in 2013, Vanessa helped Steven with a project book he
was working on, specifically with a project to build an adventure for elementary
and middle school aged kids (her contributions to that mostly came out of the adventure we Guardians made for Jenna). So, when
she reached out to him in the summer of 2019 to ask if he would do a beta read
of her book, of course, he said yes.
What Steven got from Vanessa was a 124-page book of haikus, teenage
diary entries, disjointed vignettes, and a few stream-of-consciousness essays
that seemed to make absolutely no sense at all.
Knowing Vanessa and knowing that she has a master’s degree in English
caused him to read it over and over again, trying to make sense of it. Eventually, he did a sentence toss of
everything she sent him, and what started to emerge was troubling to him.
With the sentence toss in hand, he called Vanessa and
started to ask about it. It took a lot to get the basic story from Vanessa, literally
two years working off and on. But once they
had the basic story, they knew they had to complete it. It went from being a once-a-week project to
an almost everyday project.
In 2021, they concluded that they needed help. So, Steven reached out to a few places that
knew about the troubled teen industry.
One of those who answered his call for help was Noah, who was a very
recent TTI survivor and had experience writing fiction. Noah was eventually brought on as a
co-author, and those two became good friends, as did Noah and Vanessa.
By 2022, Vanessa’s book went to the publisher and we started
work on my book. That was a wild ride,
but the work that had already been done on Vanessa’s book made writing my book
1,000 times easier.
Writing these books was a real team effort. Vanessa and I brought our stories, but we
both tend to gloss over things and we don't express our emotions well. Steven got us to tell our stories and
interviewed us at length to get out the story and the details. He also did the work to hide the Church and a
lot of the nitty-gritty stuff, like researching things and keeping track of the
fake names. That produced a work that
read like a technical manual, not surprising since he is a technical writer.
After Steven would get a section out, Noah's job, as our
fiction expert, was to flush out the emotions and make sure the details were
properly presented as a story. This then
went back to Steven, who did more interviews with us based on what he and Noah
came up with. We would say yes or no and
add our comments. Very often, Vanessa
and I came up with little more than "yes, but it's not enough" or
"kind of, but I don't know". Steven would do a revision based on our comments and whatever research
he would do, then pass it back to Noah.
This cycle would repeat several times until we all liked what we came up
with, while at the same time remaining true as possible to our lived experiences.
This whole process was made more difficult because Noah came
on to the project only after we had made our deal with the Church. That meant we had to hide a lot from
him. For example, he isn't allowed to
know the real name of our program or even the identity of the Church. That meant that both Vanessa and I had to be extraordinarily
careful in what we said to him, and we mostly kept to text or filtered through
Steven to ensure we followed our deal with the church to the letter.
I also want to take a moment to recognize Noah for the work he did on the
more brutal sections of both books, as well as the sexual aspects of the two
books. V and I couldn’t really deal
with a lot of that on our own, and while he did his best and really tried to
hide his personal feelings (he was very professional about it), we all know
that Steven didn't want to work on those sections. That left Noah to edit those sections and
fill in the emotional context which was just too tough for Vanessa and I to do.
Some of the struggles we had in deciding what to include and
what to exclude came down to the same basic issue.
For example, I know that Steven didn't want to include things like the
punishment pictures in Chapter 2, and it took Noah and Vanessa a lot to
convince him that they were an important part of the story and should be part
of the book. Likewise for the torture of the gay girls, the part about the
hotbox, and so many other parts of the books.
With Vanessa’s book, so much work was done to make sure it
was all written in Vanessa’s voice, it’s kind of unreal how much work Steven
and Noah put into that, down to making sure the idiosyncrasies of how she talks
come through. That often involved hours
of having her read the segments out loud and then having her rephrase them.
With my book, that would not have worked because I don’t
have the patience for that. So I told
Steven and Noah to take more liberties with the writing than they did with Vanessa’s
book. They still ran every paragraph by
me, they took any input I had and included it, and he did a lot to make sure
it read as close to my voice as he could, but I am really thankful that he and
Noah could do it without making me read them out loud and do the rephrasing
thing they did with Vanessa.
But ultimately, while the process was unconventional, we ultimately
found that it worked really well for us.
We are all very proud of the work we accomplished.