We’ve mentioned our good friend Reggie Lutz several times on this blog, and I’m sure you’ve seen her comments. Reggie has published many solo works (poetry, short stories, and a novel) through both traditional and self-publishing, and has also dabbled in collaboration in the past. Her future writing plans include a deeper dive into the world of coauthorship, so we decided to talk to her about her process.

 

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You collaborated with Jen, on a somewhat… unusual project. How would you describe that experience?

That project was one of the most fun writing experiences I have ever had. Jen and I were sort of challenging each other with writing prompts and somehow ended up sharing characters. After a certain amount of time we realized we had enough rough material to fill a book, and started to shape a plot around those. The result is wild, weird, and hilarious. If there is any muscle tone left in my abs, I have to attribute that to all the laughing we did while working on the Saa of Hieronymus Warhol.

Jen is extremely organized and focused, even as she was making me laugh so hard I cried. So it was really great to share the reins with her on that project. Did I mention the laughing? I also learned a lot about collaboration with that project. As someone who usually writes without a collaborative partner I learned how to let go of a certain amount of control, and that when you work with someone you trust that can be a relief rather than a source of stress.

 

What can you say about working with your current collaboration partner, Devon Miller?

Working with Devon has been awesome so far. We spent some time brainstorming, then exploring the world via prose until we struck the right note. From there we made decisions about what the story was about, how the plot was going to move. She lives in another state, so we had weekly phone meetings during which we went over the previous week’s work, and then we assigned each other the next scene that needed to be written. Because we were so organized in our approach, we were able to skip around chronologically while we were creating the first draft. This aided in productivity a great deal, as it allowed for one of us to work on one story arc while the other fleshed out a different arc.

One thing we did before going in was talk about how we wanted to work, what the parameters were going to be, who would take charge of which task. This was easy, because Devon and I have been friends for much longer than we’ve been writing together so trust was established well before we took on this project. One thing that was really surprising was the speed with which the first draft of the first book came together. It only took three months. We’re in editing stages, currently, and are set to start work on the second book late September.

 

How does writing solo differ, for you, from working with a partner? How is the process impacted, in your specific experience? Does it influence subject matter, theme, tone?

The biggest difference in terms of process is that when collaborating, you are not the only one making decisions, and some decisions that you aren’t used to making before getting to the work have to be made before you start. Devon and I worked with a loose outline in order to enable some organic growth of story within certain parameters, but we had to understand who our characters were, and what was crucial in this case was having a shared understanding of the worldbuilding, how the society in the story operates, what the geography is like. It isn’t that you don’t think about those things with solo work, but when working alone, you can kind of wing it and fix it later if it doesn’t work. If you are writing genre fiction with a partner, and you decide the sky is always gray, but your writing partner decides the sky is always orange then those things will come into conflict with each other pretty quickly. A small detail like that can have big implications later. A gray sky might mean the world is moist and there is drama around certain kinds of infections, an orange sky might suggest a desert planet and therefore a lack of water would be a bigger issue. (Assuming we’re talking mammals.)

Working with a collaborator absolutely influences subject matter because you both have to be invested in what plays out on the page. So you’ll look for shared areas of interest, ideas that are exciting to you both and then within that you’ll look for opportunities to play to each other’s strengths. Devon loves horror fiction so we looked for places in the story to use that. I like to blend unexpected elements to create something offbeat but with an emotional undertone so we developed other areas of story to facilitate that.

During the course of a first draft there will inevitably be places where the tone does not match. Part of our editing process is to make sure that it does, and that the tone we choose is what best suits the story. What was a relief and a happy surprise for Devon and I is that the way we write individually works well together, we often find we’re on the same page about things like tone before we’ve even discussed it.

 

Anything else you’d like to teach us about collaborative writing?

That’s an intimidating question coming from the masters of collaboration! I will say that I learned a lot about the benefits of plotting and planning a given work through collaboration, but that learning to leave room or when to be flexible in a writing partnership is as important to a collaboration as having a plan in place. That flexibility applies to everything in the process, from unexpected plot deviations that work better than the original plan, to having to cancel meetings because life, sometimes, intervenes. The second thing is that everything on the page from your favorite character to your most beloved sentence is on the table for discussion. When you work with someone you know well and trust, it is easy to be open in this way. But that openness is crucial to arrive at the best possible version of story.

 

What have you learned from us?

So many tangible and intangible things about writing it’s really hard to figure out where to start. One of the things that I always admired about your collaborative process was that you both were always really committed and disciplined about the work and organized in your approach to it. I learned a lot about the value of that and I’ve applied them.

The critique group you run taught me a million things that all speak to one concrete truth about what one absolutely must do when writing fiction, and that is to do everything in order to serve the story.