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ARTICLE |
Article from Fiction Writer Magazine, July 1999
genres
Two Women, One Story
Crossing genres is one thing, but coauthoring is to fiction as cross-dressing is to fashion. How do two presumably sane women writers, separately well-published and neither wealthy enough not to need the whole advance, come to coauthor a novel? More to the point, why? Then, having sold it and lived, why would they go and do it again? Are they rationally challenged? Don't they live 2,000 miles apart? They've never met? just how do they do this, anyway?
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Anna and Lynne meet for the first time. |
The hows and whys we'll get to in a minute. The end result was our novel Swimming Lessons (Morrow)-an example of an incredible collaboration success story. Since its publication last year, the novel has been serialized in Good Housekeeping, selected as featured choice by the Literary Guild/Doubleday Book Clubs and optioned to Hearst Entertainment. To date, Swimming Lessons has sold for translation in seven countries. Not bad for a couple of authors who never met face to face.
The "how this started" is easy. Lynne was seeking an agent and more than one was offering representation. The Writer'sDigest Guide to LiteraryAgents said, "Try to talk with someone whose prospective agent has sold." So :Lynne asked for names and phone numbers of clients. One agent gave her Anna's, and a call that should have taken five minutes lasted well over an hour. We had similar publishing histories, literary aspirations and teenage daughters. Anna offered her address, and we decided to exchange our works-in-progress. Maybe we each thought the other might have a kind eye, and maybe we even hoped for a good eye, but we never imagined we'd become each other's most ruthless, trusted editor.
Within a couple of months, Lynne purchased an antiquated fax machine for $30. The letters we were writing, now instantaneously delivered, began sparking quick answers, as did the poems and novels traveling by snail mail. Over the next six months, our fax contact increased as Anna anticipated the publication of her first novel. We offered advice and encouragement to one another, sent pictures of ourselves, our writing spaces, families and homes. (Of course, since we've still not met in person, neither of us knows which of those pictures were laser copied out of Good Housekeeping or Glamour, but we no longer care.)
Over the next year, we grew a personal friendship, sharing our notes on various edit ors and the lunatic delinquencies of our children. We were also two writers supporting one another's journey out of genuine enthusiasm for each other's work with regard to both style and subject matter. We'd established a sisterhood in our love for words, the writing life, and the compatibility of our ideas, but our first novel together, Swimming Lessons, had as much to do with our compulsive productivity as much as anything else. After we'd spent a couple of months exploring a temporarily tortured side street of Anna's love life (more promising fiction fodder than that of her long married friend), one of us commented, "Geez, too bad we weren't writing a novel; the stack of our letters is thick as a whole manuscript."
"Well, what should we write one about?" came the response.
"An unlikely friendship between two women..."
Within a week, we were hatching a general plot line and beginning to evolve a collaborative process.
We began with the idea of two very different women who were going to discover they both loved the same man. That provided our notion of plot: We'd bring the women together, let their friendship (and their back stories) evolve, and then allow them to resolve the conflict by choosing to salvage the friendship and sacrifice the man. (We liked this twist; we appreciated that it ran contrary to formula but true to the best kind of friendship.) We decided early on to structure the plot by alternating chapters in the first-person voices of our characters, which would carry the story forward in a linear pattern.
As Henry James has said, plot and character are inseparable elements in truthful fiction. Who a character is determines her actions; the events of her life determine her character. Once we had established an abstract sense of the novel's arc and defined the destination to which we'd obligated it, we turned to our characters. Initially, we'd conceived of our women as opposites, but not stereotypically so. We imagined a savvy professional woman, well-educated, poised and unmarried for a reason. She became Lynne's Laurel, a pretty mid-thirties psychotherapist with her own closeted demons. Her foil, the dowdy housewife drowning in a 13-year-old marriage of dependency, became Anna's Mama. Before our exchange of the first chapters, though, we knew nothing of our partner's design for her character: not appearance, history, personality. All we'd revealed to each other was a name.
Probably the most magical feature of collaboration with fiction is the realism sparked by the creation of character. A lone writer inventing the people of her fictional landscape must remember that although she knows her characters inside and out, her characters don't know each other- least not in the omniscient, prescient way the writer does. So she's constantly working against her own knowledge, so to speak, fictionalizing on every level the surprise Joe displays when he realizes Susi has aborted the fetus he'd decided was destined to meld their relationship once and for all. The novelist knows Susi's secret: For God's sake, she was there in the clinic when the abortion took place. But Joe has to be rendered as if he hasn't suspected a thing. One could say that for the lone writer, familiarity breeds a difficult, complex task, layered with foreknowledge demanding concealment.
Here's what happens when you collaborate with fiction: You're not working against that foreknowledge because your collaborator is pulling the puppet strings of her character independently of you. You don't know if her puppet's going to dance or fight, which makes your character's responses just about as authentic as they can be. When we first exchanged our opening chapters, as writers we were meeting Laurel and Mama for the very first time. But also-and here's the magic-Laurel and Marna were meeting each other. That charge of spontaneity, the unfolding of unforeseen motivation and response, sustained us throughout the novel, lending realism and surprise to our composing process, our friendship and our story. You could call it a kind of literary crosspollination, our single imaginations made richer and more fertile by our collaboration.
In the very final pages, Marna muses on whether or not she and Laurel will take their mothers along on a celebratory trip to the Bahamas. As soon as the first draft of that scene made its transcontinental trip to Lynne's fax machine, she picked up the phone and called Anna. "They can't take their mothers to the Bahamas!" she protested. "Why?" Anna asked. "Because that wouldn't be any fun!" While we ended up preserving the reference to the mothers, it became one of those countless moments in our shared process when the collaboration - our own characters- surprised us with their independent choices. The collaborative process of fiction allows you to mimic the unpredictability of real life, which makes the story realistic and the writing a whole lot of fun.
Once we had our characters established by those early chapters, we turned back to plot. Because we'd designed the novel as linear, we had to be obsessively accurate about what events happened in whose chapters. To create forward movement, which we handled on meticulously detailed storyboards posted by our computers, we devised plotting that involved a gradual leaking of information to each character. Our plan was to create tension about the revelation of the man's identity (not for the reader's benefit, who would figure out early on that Laurel's Jake was Marna's J.W., but for the characters'). We wanted the suspense to arise from dramatic irony: The reader would know more than either Laurel or Marna, and the big question would be about when they would uncover Jake/J.W.'s duplicity. We were very businesslike about our storyboards, although the sorcery of our darn characters had us revising and fine-tuning until the very end. Before we let a soul lay eyes on our manuscript, we devised an intense pattern for editing sessions. Our habit was to swap a pair of chapters by fax, entrusting our words and characters to our partner's keen eye. We'd each sit down with pen in hand and mark through the entire chapter we'd received. Then, once we were finished, we'd hold marathon phone sessions when we worked line by line, talking through each other's work Points of fact and misplaced details were easy to fix, and we'd note on our own hard copies what the editor of the moment had noted. Sometimes matters of style or clarity inspired lengthy discussions: Lynne pointing out that Anna had used four adjectives when one would suffice, or Anna fiercely removing Lynne's commas, even the ones of which Lynne had grown particularly fond. We became AT&T's favorite customers as we underwrote a year's profit margin.
If you talk to people about collaborative writing, most of them will say that once is enough. That didn't happen with us. After we'd sold Swimming Lessons to William Morrow, we both went through a grieving period. Lynne wrote to Anna soon after and described what she was feeling as "Laurel missing Mama." Our sorrow was so profound, in fact, that we felt the only way to cope was to start another collaboration. Not surprisingly, since our interests are both centered in women's issues and women's relationships, we picked another female paradigm: a mother-daughter story. Just as our friendship was strengthening with time, the characters we were choosing were growing closer, this pair bound not by friendship but by blood.
We'd proved with Swimming Lessons that we could write salable fiction, but both of us were hankering to tackle another challenge. Baby's Breath, the novel we've just finished represents more crossings, from plot- to character- from commercial to literary fiction. This time we were concerned with depicting tougher social issues from a more complex narrative strategy. We wrote Baby's Breath in alternating third-person points of view, presenting ourselves with the difficult job of maintaining stylistic fluency. We weren't so symmetrical with our arrangement of voices; we let the scene at hand determine whose point of view should control it. And, maybe not so oddly, we found ourselves becoming more of one mind, almost as if together we form a third novelist neither Lynne nor Anna, but somebody totally her own self.
An important observation: A successful partnership may turn on a crucial similarity and a significant difference. Producing a seamless manuscript is much easier when you work with someone who fishes in the same pond for imagery. Our personal characteristics are, lucky for us, strongly similar. We love an excuse to laugh, are socio-political liberals, passionate readers, and addicted to patiently, beautifully crafted written words. Both of us are hikers. We keep dogs and fish, feed birds, plant extravagant gardens, love streams, lakes, rivers, oceans. And chocolate. Because imagery comes from the worlds we inhabit, observe and engage, our common interests provide a heuristic unifying element to our separate voices that produces a manuscript which appears to come from a single author. That, we've learned, is a crucial point for editors when they're considering a collaborative work.
On the other hand, our differing work styles are like opportunistic viruses that attach to our partner. Lynne loves composing first drafts. Anything else she has to do becomes an irritating intrusion, whether it's go to the grocery store or get a load of underwear washed. On the other hand, Anna suffers through drafting, memorizing the color of the screensaver or counting the cat hairs surrounding her work station, but she adores revision. As you might guess, Lynne would pretty much prefer a root canal to rewriting. So Lynne flogs Anna through the composing process, often working on ahead of her, which drives Anna flat insane until she gets to take over the whip, insisting, "Yes, you can too beef that up before it comes back to me for final editing." This is one difference it really helps to have. If you're thinking about collaborating, try to match yourself with someone whose preferred mode is opposite to yours.
But serving as each other's ball and chain isn't why we collaborate.
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Celebrating their second book. |
We do it because collaborating is fun, and an antidote to the aspect of being a writer that's a lonely rather than a lovely solitude. When we get rejected, we prop each other up. When the acceptance comes, we get on the telephone and pop the champagne corks in concert. FW
