What If It's Us

Both Albertalli and Silvera have experience writing young adult fiction about LGBTQ+ characters. Albertalli is most known for Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, a novel about a young gay man, which won the William C. Morris Award for Best Young Adult Debut Novel of the Year and was on the National Book Award Longlist. Likewise, Silvera’s novels More Happy Than Not and They Both Die at the End are both about gay men, and both were New York Times bestsellers. Both authors’ first novels came out at the same time. They collaborated via email to develop the plot of What If It’s Us.

According to an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Albertalli wrote Arthur’s chapters and Silvera wrote Ben’s. They frequently emailed drafts back and forth, forcing them to be humble in sharing their typically unseen “roughest” drafts. It was a very different process from what usually is a private endeavor where a writer compiles a chapter and sends it over to an editor once they polish it. Sometimes an author will write whole novels before anyone else sees the text. As Albertalli noted, “It requires a lot of trust.” Ultimately, this worked well for What If It’s Us because it is told from Arthur’s and Ben’s perspectives. Additionally, it also required the editors to work together, with several different people having a hand in the final product.