Category: Bumps & Bruises

Things don’t always go as planned.

Brave New World

The time has finally come for us to start the actual writing process. We’re finding it slow going, even with all the preliminary work we did. The first three novels we wrote were a trilogy. By the time we got to the third one, we knew the characters better than we knew ourselves. It was dead easy to find their voices and dive in.

After the trilogy, though, we wrote a standalone novel, and had this same problem at the beginning. We just don’t know the characters well enough yet to feel totally at ease writing in their voices.

This is one place where writing with a partner can make things more difficult. If either of us were doing this solo, we could just wing it and see what happens. With two of us involved, and wanting everything to feel seamless, we both feel a little inhibited.

Because Jen is cruel, she makes Kent take on the first scene. It’s up to him to introduce the narrative voice, and the main character’s voice, too. Jen sits there and watches him type, because until she sees what he’s done she can’t write anything. The fear is that we will both write something great, but that the pieces won’t mesh. Instead of chocolate and peanut butter coming together to make a delicious peanut butter cup, we dread ending up with salmon bonbons. Either the fish or the ganache would be delectable on their own, but together they’re something the loser made on Iron Chef.

And so we tiptoe around each other, each of us hesitantly writing scenes and vignettes. When we share them, it is always with a healthy dose of Remember This Is A First Draft and I Don’t Know If This Works.

Fortunately, this weirdness is confined to the character voice. We know for sure that the actions and details contained in a scene will be right, and next week we’ll tell you how.

Constraints and Limits Spark Creativity

When two people write together, there are twice as many heads coming up with ideas. Perhaps more importantly though, there are also twice as many critics of every impulsive, creative act. This is a good thing. Ideas are sold by weight, not volume. You don’t improve your fiction via more ideas; you do so with better ideas.

A good partner makes sure your work meets the required standard. Sometimes there can be some friction if the two of you don’t immediately swoon for the same imagery and concepts. It’s natural to want unrestrained license to explore any wild notion that springs to your cortex, but that doesn’t mean it’s the path toward achieving your best work. When everything goes on the page, unfiltered, your truly great ideas are tangled up with, well, the other ones. A partner’s critique helps you filter things. Later, you can return the favor when your partner wants to wear plaid with stripes.

It feels like a paradox, but working within constraints actually increases your creativity. Cutting back on the effects budget drives you to focus on character and story. Avoiding tangents keeps your prose tight. Working by yourself, it’s often difficult to gauge when you’re going astray. In a collaboration, someone has your back.

Negotiations

As we talked about in our previous writing collaboration post, we’re trying to decide what our next novel-length project will be. Kent has an idea that he is very fond of. Unfortunately it doesn’t hold much appeal for Jen. This leads us to the land of negotiations.

It’s an unusual place for us to find ourselves. Not to be too smug, but we generally share a brain really well. There is very little dissension in either our marriage or our writing partnership. When we do disagree, we usually work through it pretty quickly. We’re damn near perfect!

Except now we have reached an impasse. We are stalled. Kent loves his Big Idea and, so, is having trouble brainstorming anything else. Jen thinks the idea sounds like something interesting to read, maybe, but doesn’t feel drawn to devote a year or more of her life to it. Without feeling a connection, it’s really impossible to be invested. Kent understands that. He really does.

Jen does not currently have a Big Idea to counter with, which is both good and bad. If she had a proposal it might entice Kent enough to put his baby aside, or it might cause friction, with both of us digging in our heels and fighting to the death for our own cause. It might even lead to working solo (gasp! horror!).

As it stands, Jen wants to be persuaded. Or at least she wants the reassurance of knowing what’s coming up. As we’ve said, Jen’s all about the backstory, so the more time she has to cogitate about that kind of thing the happier she is. And so Kent keeps approaching the story from different angles, desperately trying to trick Jen into writing it with him.

Have no fear, dear reader. We aren’t just spinning our wheels. After a well-earned and highly enjoyable trip to Bermuda to celebrate our anniversary, we have our noses back to the grindstone. We’re hip-deep in a read-through of our trilogy, which will lead to one more round of edits before we turn it over to our critique group again. And after that we have a stand-alone novel that’s been patiently waiting for its own round of edits. Plus there’s always marketing. And short stories.

Meanwhile, Jen has a character name she really likes, and part of another. She’s starting to form a picture of what this character (and a half) are like, which might lead to a Big Idea.

That’s when the negotiations will start in earnest.

It Cuts Both Ways

Sometimes your inspiration starts with the Big Idea, or maybe the starting point is a particular character, or a name for a character, or a plot twist. No matter how your inspiration usually arrives, the project will ultimately rely on having all the pieces fit together.

All of that is basic, intro-to-creative-writing type stuff, and none of it is specific to collaborative writing. However, the experience of getting from the initial flash to the actual writing is a lot different for partners. It’s kind of a double-edged sword.

You have to find subject matter that both partners are interested in. No matter how well aligned your tastes and styles, it’s likely that you or your partner will occasionally feel inspired about something that the other simply doesn’t care for. The idea might be fantastic, but still not turn out to be something you can collaborate on.

On the other hand, there could be other reasons that you struggle to win over your partner to your idea. Maybe it’s not as shiny as you think it is, or maybe it’s just not quite ready yet. Working on your own, you would probably chase after your exciting Big Idea, wanting to pounce while you feel inspired. You’d only discover its problems after devoting a lot of time and effort to a draft.

In our case, an idea can fall down at the conceptual stage mainly due to not being quite the right kind of science fiction. There’s a certain type of world-building that we do well together. Our story worlds generally only diverge from consensus reality at a submerged level. They look superficially like the real world, but harbor deep and sinister differences. So, for example, a far-future setting represents a major stylistic and procedural shift for the writing — different kinds of research, different pacing for exposition, different priorities. Meaning there will be an uphill journey for a Big Idea that needs a far-future world in which to thrive, and if we come up with a different inspiration we’ll probably follow it instead.

Not that it’s impossible for us to imagine working together on different types of fiction, just that it’s not healthy for the partnership to try to force things.

Stop the Presses!

Time for another potential downside of having a writing partner: interruptions.

If you don’t have a fortress of solitude to write in, then you’re probably familiar with being interrupted. You’re thinking that it affects us all, with or without a collaborator. True, but with a writing partner there’s an added wrinkle.

 Soloist author's spouse: "Did you see that thing in the news?"
 Soloist author: "Sorry, Honey. I'm working right now."
 Soloist's spouse: "Oh, sorry. I'll tell you about it later."
Collaborative author's partner: "Did you see that thing in the news?"
 Fellow author: "Which thing?"
 Partner: "The missing dog. It got me thinking about that scene in chapter six..."

Notice a difference? It’s easier to give your spouse the old brush-off than it is to stay on task with a chatty partner. Sure, conversational overtures about irrelevant topics can distract you, but the special problem with your partner’s interruptions is precisely that they’re on-topic.

It’s no good to say, “Sure, sure chapter six. Whatever. Tell me when it’s finished.”

It’s also no good to heave a sigh and roll your eyes before saying, “Missing dog for chapter six? Do tell.”

Obviously, there’s no guarantee that your partner will always have something important or relevant to say. Sometimes people just talk a bit too much. But that’s an easy problem to fix: “I’m sorry, but this is work time. We can discuss [current popular tv show] later.” If that doesn’t do the trick, then you might just have a bad partner.

The deeper challenge is with partnership per se. You have to talk to each other, and once in a while that need conflicts with other noble aims. Which is to say, even if you have the ideal partner and you’ve found the optimal fiction project to collaborate on, you’ll run into this problem from time to time. (Voice of experience! Hey, partner!)

The final thing to say on this subject: embrace the interruptions, as long as they’re pertinent. If you try to curb your partner’s tendency to break your concentration, you’ll curb his or her enthusiasm for working with you. To be successful at writing in collaboration, you must adapt to a bit more interruption. It’s worth it.

Tales From the Dark Side

So far we’ve done nothing but extoll the virtues of writing collaborations. But surely it’s not all rainbow muffins and puppy baskets, right? If you’re used to thinking of writing as a solitary pursuit, shifting gears to work with a partner can be jarring. If you’ve chosen the right partner, the adjustment period should pass rather quickly. But for people who just aren’t compatible, working together will always seem hard.

The major obstacle to a successful writing partnership is the need for compromise. You and your partner have to agree. About everything. Perhaps that should more accurately be stated as you and your partner have to be able to come to an agreement about everything. It’s highly unlikely that you will be in complete concordance from the get-go on every issue, so the two of you need to be able to work together to make the finished product the best it can be.

There’s no one piece of advice that covers how to successfully compromise. You will each need to yield a bit sometimes, but that’s not always how to make the writing better. Sometimes you need to take a stand and persuade your partner to do things your way. The trick is finding the right balance of give and take, and doing them at the right times.

These moments of conflict can occur at any phase of a project, and on any level of detail. You need to agree on the big picture, and even something as fundamental as genre might create a snag. The story’s overall structure, point of view, and pacing need to come together seamlessly to create a unified voice. Right down to the nitty gritty of line editing and word picks, you and your partner will not always want the same things, but only if you can compromise is any of it going to work.

The need for skillful compromise is perhaps the most fundamental difference between working solo and with a partner, but there are other pitfalls to beware. There are logistical considerations, like schedules and file formats. How will you decide whose name comes first on the cover? (We suggest sharing a non de plume.) Many of the same things that are strengths in a healthy collaboration can become sources of trouble if you’re not careful. We can’t tell you how to resolve these conflicts, we can just warn you that you’re going to have to.

From time to time we’ll revisit the Dark Side of collaboration, and delve into these hazards in a bit more detail.