So, I said I was reading Rocky Start by Jennifer Cruisie and Bob Mayer, right? Yes, I did; that was right before Christmas.
I hope you all had a lovely Christmas!
And now, here’s a fun post at Cruisie’s blog where she’s talking about how she and Bob handle this collaboration, thus:
The two questions/suggestions Bob and I get most often are:
1. How do you collaborate?
and
2. You should make your texts into a book.
And the two answers we usually give are
1. Lots of communication, lots of back and forth, occasional arguments, and a lot of wordplay when we get to the point where we can’t write fiction without a break.
and
2. Because the vast majority of our texts are boring as hell to anybody but us.
What I’m thinking now is that it might be better to show what we do which would also explain why nobody would want to read an entire book of our texts. (And it would be a big book. I think Bob figured out we’d written 600,000 words of text to do the Liz/Vince books alone.)
And then there are many samples of texts, which are mildly interesting as apparently Jennifer Cruisie is thinking of getting a dog, so there’s that. No dog pictures or anything like that, though.
Then Jennifer says,
You know, a major difficulty in collaboration is trying to remember where the hell everybody is and what they’re thinking. Especially if we’ve both wandered off center and so are writing two different Roses. So for another nine minutes, we tried to figure out where everybody was in our different versions, with examples of trying to figure out where people are until Bob says, “You can kill the kids if it makes it easier.” And of course they are not going to do that, but it’s funny in context.
And the whole thing is making me think about how hard it was to keep track of where everyone was and what they knew and when they knew it and who told what to whom in SILVER CIRCLE, and right then I thought, Ugh, no collaboration in my future, because seriously, this is hard enough when it’s just me having to work it out, without someone else sending characters who knows where.
But it’s sort of interesting to read about how other people collaborate, so here you go, click through if you’re interested.
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I originally started following Jenny Cruisie about the time she began the She Wrote/He Wrote blog.
The original idea was that she was to write the female POV and he the male POV. But that didn’t quite work so—if I have this right—they each wrote their own POVs but then she went back and smoothed out the differences. Which sounds all right in theory but in practice seemed to have led to her threatening to come beat him over the head with her keyboard. (I’m not judging. Rewrites are hell.)
I found the idea of the different male/female mindsets (generally speaking) being handled by writers of each gender to be intriguing. But the end result was uneven. For example, in the first book, most of the sections written by the male writer were very rigidly Male Military Dude. And then he went and confounded all expectations by writing a tender love scene. Drat you, Bob Mayer!
They seemed to have smoothed things out and found a rhythm but all the same, my general feeling is to distrust collaborations. It might just be a bias, but in general if I see a book is written by two people, my first impulse is to scroll past.
I know nothing about book collaborations except that I’m glad that working with Bob Mayer got Jennifer Crusie out of a decade-long writer’s block, since I enjoyed her books and now their books.
Off topic, I found something you might enjoy too: George Penney, a writer in New Zealand who puts up five short, 1 sentence scenes sketching people she sees around her when she’s out and about, every day on Threads. They’re funny and kind, a positive point of shared humanity starting off every day on a good note.
It’s also wonderful, from a writing craft point of view, how much character can come across in such a short vignette!
https://www.threads.net/@georgepenneyauthor
The thing about collaborations is that each of you has to do 90% of the work.
I stopped reading Crusie’s later work, and her books with Mayer because they were too chaotic with too many people running around.
Sorry, off-topic, but FYI the Tuyo series now has its own page on TV Tropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TuyoSeries
This is great, Rowan, thanks for telling me about it!
I’ve never heard of TV tropes, but what a great analysis of the Tuyo series!!
I am a long time fan of Sharon Lee & Steve Miller’s Liaden Universe books. They have written about their collaborative process as it evolved over the years. The earliest book, in pre-word-processing days, was started by one of them typing a sentence or two and leaving the paper in the typewriter for the other one to add to. More recently, they would do general plotting together but each of their collaborations had a lead writer who did most of the drafting and had tie-breaking authority for that book if they disagreed. Steve, unfortunately, passed away last February. Sharon wrote recently that it was a good thing she was the lead writer on the next main sequence book when Steve died, because she could finish it and she’s just returned the galleys. Steve was working as lead writer on a side sequence book and she says she isn’t sure that one will ever get finished.
OtterB, I heard recently about Steve Miller’s death, and I was certainly sorry to hear it. A tragic, shocking loss for Sharon Lee, and very sad for a good collaboration team as well.