Kevin Sylvester (SMC9T0) and current St. Mike’s student Basil Sylvester are a parent-child writing duo. Their book The Fabulous Zed Watson! was released in early 2021 from Harper Collins. It tells the story of Zed Watson, a non-binary tween with a love for riddles, monsters and libraries. They and their friend Gabe set out on an epic journey to find a lost book. Along the way they meet an interesting cast of oddball and fun characters. But do they find the book?
The Family That Writes Together…
Kevin: Basil and I had been working on book ideas together for a while, and the idea came from their imagination. Zed was already forming in Basil’s head, I think, when Suzanne asked us if we’d be interested in writing a story about a nonbinary kid.
Do I have that right?
Basil: Yeah, pretty much. It was a super weird coincidence, or maybe just serendipitous. I’d read Mason Deaver’s I Wish You All the Best earlier that year and realized it was actually possible to write books with nonbinary characters! I was working on a similar sort of story but I was planning it to be YA, and wasn’t really getting anywhere with it.
Then Suzanne Sutherland from Harper Collins got in touch about writing a book together. It seemed so perfect since, as you (Kevin) said, we’d been working on other ideas together already—for years!
I shared with you what I’d been thinking and then you were like, “What if it’s a road trip book?” The road trip thing was so genius. I just remember gasping and being, like, YES, I want to write that! And I just remember in the span of one conversation we planned about 80% of the book!
K: Once we had an idea about a road trip, we really just took off with it. Basil and I both love the idea of quests, lost stories, mysteries…and road trips (we took MANY cross-country trips as a family). Writing wasn’t “easy,” but it was fun. We sat down and started working on an outline and, TBH, had a workable idea in just a few days.
Then we started writing, and kind of split the first draft into “chapters” based on things we each felt comfortable at writing. I did much of the early road trip scenes, and maybe some of the jokes.
Basil handled monsters and also the places where Zed’s being nonbinary came into play. There was more of a blend overall, of course, but that was the basic methodology.
B: Yeah, the split was pretty even.
You did a lot of the plotting and mechanics, I would say, and I did a lot of the early Zed scenes.
But what I loved about it was that we had this workable outline, like in… a couple days, probably! Which allowed us to go off and do our own writing and then about once a week we would get together and go over what we’d written to make sure the tone was consistent, etc. That was my favourite part, reading it out loud across the dining room table.
We had also originally planned to maybe go on the trip, too, like after handing in a draft, to see if it was feasible. But then COVID hit, so that was out of the question. But one of our first orders of business back when we were first planning everything out was to get a huge map of the States, to make sure it was all doable.
K: That’s where the scene in the beginning comes from, with Zed and the map. We had ours pinned to the wall of our dining room. In some ways Zed is Basil and I’m Gabe. Not literally, but in temperament? That’s probably too simplistic, as they are fictional complex characters in their own right, but I think we had our own virtual “road trip” while we wrote about their road trip.
B: Yeah, I think the Zed/Gabe dynamic was maybe unconsciously influenced by us, but we definitely didn’t do that intentionally. I think you had a sketch early on of Gabe or something and we joked a bit like, wait, this is us, isn’t it? but not really. Anyway, it was super cool to write with you, because of how much we’d talked about doing it for years. Like, even when we disagreed, it was very productive, and definitely the collaborative process made the book stronger.
K: I found it an amazing experience. Basil is a great editor, as well as writer, and to have that kind of immediate feedback loop built into the writing process made it faster, more enjoyable and richer.
B: One of the last days of writing, Dad/Kevin brought me a chapter he’d written, and I just remember laughing and being so surprised and just excited to work with what he’d introduced! So I hope kids who read it just have a good time with it, while also considering things they haven’t before, or maybe learning something.
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