Two of our favorite collaborative-writing authors are Douglas Preston and Lincoln
Child, the duo who created The
Relic, The Cabinet of Curiosities, and multiple other page-turning
thrillers. But they live half a continent apart.
How do they do it? You’ll have to
ask them. But we suspect they use an electronic version of “transom writing.” Transoms
are those windows over doors that open for ventilation. You’ve seen them;
they’re in virtually every schoolhouse across the nation. In transom writing,
each author writes a passage and then passes it on to the co-writer, who then
takes responsibility for writing the next section. They exchange drafts back
and forth like circulating air through a transom. It’s a kind of turn writing. Preston
and Child co-author some books and individually author others. And they do it
all well. Still, in their collaborative projects, we can spot now and then a
subtle change of voices among chapters – a shift in favorite vocabulary and
rhythms of syntax. That’s what tells us they’re turn writing.
We don’t do that.
We’re a lot more intimate in our
approach.
Our readers tell us they can’t
detect any shift in voice in our writing. That’s because there isn’t any:
FADE IN:
Kym and Mark sit on the bed, crouched over a laptop.
Mark types as they talk.
KYM
(dictating)
Pleasance
stood atop the Pyramid of Kukulcán, hoping to –
MARK
(interrupting)
– escape
the sticky mid-summer –
KYM
(interrupting)
– swelter.
MARK
Yeah, I like that. And then how
‘bout, Trying to ignore the sweat that pooled at her bosom.
KYM
No, change that to between her
breasts.
Mark deletes and
retypes.
KYM (CONT’D)
And we need
to describe the jungle before we get to the sweaty breasts.
Mark moves the cursor to
the end of the first sentence.
MARK
(typing)
The Yucatán
jungle stretched in all directions, islands of –
KYM
– stone
ruins occasionally interrupting the monotonous green –
MARK
– of dwarfed
cedar and chakah trees.
They give each other a
high five.
FADE
OUT
Okay, that may not have been exactly
the way we wrote that particular passage from our latest novel, All Plucked Up: Book Two of the Silverville Saga, but it’s how we co-author – one of us
starts a sentence and the other finishes it. Plus, Mark is dyslexic and Kym
catches misspellings as we go along. (We’re doing it right now as we type this
article.) In our case, Mark is the typist because Kym can’t use the touch pad
on the laptop. It’s all pretty efficient except when one of our six house cats
jumps on the keyboard. There’s nothing transom-like in the way we compose at
the sentence level. And this technique allows us to test out loud as we go
along just how naturally the words flow on the page.
We’d be the first to admit that
this is probably not the fastest way to write for most people. But it works for
us because we like to write together, and we decide up front on a project that
we both feel passionate about. The biggest challenge, of course, is to find or
block out regular periods of time when we’re both available. Kym is an early-morning
person (she’s up before the sun) while Mark isn’t even coherent until 11 a.m.
Our best compromise falls mid day, and we plan accordingly.
It also helps that we both have equally
twisted senses of humor. In our first novel, The Silverville Swindle, we have a scene where the sheriffs of two
counties meet to decide jurisdiction over unidentified human remains found more
or less straddling the line:
“It’s
not Silver County’s problem,” Carl said at last.
“Wait a
minute!” the other sheriff objected. “You guys found as many bones on your side
as we did.”
“C’mon,
Andy, you’ve got the skull,” Carl said. “That officially gives you more bone
mass than we have.”
“Yeah,
but you guys have the teeth.”
“We
don’t know for sure those dentures are that fellow’s teeth. Maybe somebody was
out here hiking and dropped them.” Carl looked pretty satisfied with his
deduction.
“Oh man,
that ain’t right. We had to bury one earlier this spring. You haven’t had one
in a couple of years.”
They
argued back and forth for several minutes . . .
To us, this scene was a howl to
write, and we were having too much fun to worry much about whether or not
readers would agree. We enjoy this type of book, and we hoped the same kind of
readers would discover our novel. More important to us was writing true to what
we thought was funny.
The best writers say to write
what you know. That’s exactly what we did with Silverville. We drew upon real personalities and real situations
that we’ve experienced or heard about living in the mountainous West. The scene
above – or something close – actually took place between Gunnison and an
adjoining county. To be truthful, nearly all of the situations in our book happened
somewhere in at least one of our pasts.
For instance, we inserted an
anecdote where townsfolk flee from an apparently rabid dog with a frothing
mouth. That dog, in reality, was Kym’s childhood pet. “Roscoe” had helped
himself to a meringue pie cooling on someone’s front steps. The dog scared the
wits out of the neighborhood until the cook discovered her empty pie plate.
Another scene in the book has a
real sense of authenticity since Mark’s family owned a mortuary business:
Buford
gawked at the open shelves neatly stacked with rows of embalming fluid bottles,
instruments, and linens. He’d never been in the room long enough before to get
a close look at the mysterious equipment kept there. Picking up a cardboard
box, he plucked out a small pink disc that was shaped like half a hollow
marble.
“What
are these?”
Howard
dropped his towel into a hamper. “They’re eye cups. We stick them under the
eyelids after someone dies.” Then he added, “So the eyes won’t sink.”
Buford
took two of the little cups and raised them to his own eyes, squinting to hold
them in place like two plastic monocles. “Like this?”
He heard
the door open behind him and turned, blindly, in that direction.
“Buford,
what are you doing in here?”
Opening
his eyes, Buford felt the cups slide down his cheeks toward the floor. Denton
stood with his hands on his hips, and he didn’t look pleased.
Of course, Mark never played with
eye caps. (At least he never got caught.)
The advantage should be obvious –
two heads mean two sets of experiences. It also means two sets of critical eyes
because we each bring to the Writing Bed individual strengths that mitigate the
individual weaknesses. Kym’s journalism background makes her succinct to a
fault. Mark, on the other hand, comes from the halls of academia and doesn’t
know when to quit. Somewhere between these two extremes is the point we shoot
for using each other's complementary strengths.
[This is an excerpt from an article by Mark and Kym that was published in an anthology entitled An Elevated View: Colorado Writers on Writing,
by Seven Oaks Publishing. To get your hands on this excellent
collection of writing advice, see the link on our blog to their
Website.]
