See, It’s Not Just Us
As a member of a writing duo, it’s interesting to read books written by other duos. Kent’s reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. right now, by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. (Halfway through, and it’s excellent so far.)
It’s almost impossible not to project our familiar process onto this other writing team. That’s just how collaboration works, right? But really, every writing partnership is unique. Having read quite a bit of Stephenson, but nothing else by Galland, makes it tricky to speculate about what each of them contributed to D.O.D.O. It’s full of Stephenson’s tropes, especially regarding technology and history, but it’s not like he holds patents on them or anything. To this Stephenson fan, it mostly feels like a Stephenson book. To Galland’s fans, does it mostly feel like one of hers? More research is needed.
Being a member of a collaborative authorial entity does provide some useful perspective. Galland and Stephenson’s exact process might be a black box, but from the characteristics of the output we know a little bit about how they did it. The voice coheres. In other words, it doesn’t sound like two writers taking turns telling the story in their own styles. It sounds like a single, consistent storytelling voice. This is something Jen and Kent pay a lot of attention to as Rune Skelley, and something that over time has become second nature. In the early going, we were systematic about revising one another’s drafts so that our individual quirks didn’t get too dense.
There very much are distinct character voices in D.O.D.O., so it’s reasonable to suppose that each of the writers took responsibility for certain viewpoints. That’s the way it usually goes for Rune Skelley, so we might just be projecting again, but we do it that way for some good reasons that would probably generalize to others’ workflows.
Another thing we know is that they converged on this subject matter. Collaboration on something as deep and wide as a novel can’t work unless both authors are invested in telling that story. You both have to be passionate about those characters. After all, if the author doesn’t care, why should readers?
What are some of your favorite novels that were written by duos? Let us know in the comments.