Work With Me Here

I have never collaborated with another writer or even considered doing so.  The idea and opportunity have just never presented themselves. The closest I’ve come to collaborating on fiction is to interview real live folks who are willing to share their experiences to lend authenticity to a story. 

So many people have stories to tell, but unfortunately, most industry professionals will tell you there’s no market for memoirs or autobiographies unless you are a celebrity or in the national news in some way. That doesn’t mean people don’t have amazing experiences to share. 

This creates difficulties of its own.

The biggest difficulty is in presenting that you are using their experiences to bring integrity and depth to the story but you’re not writing about them specifically.  This gets very muddy and awkward when people don’t see this clearly and can’t detach themselves from the facts they are sharing.  No matter how many times you emphatically insist that you are not writing about THEM, they may not see it until they read the finished product (after publication) and may or may not be disappointed.  Or angry.  They may feel disappointed or betrayed because they didn’t understand (or didn’t want to understand) that this wasn’t their story. Sigh.

It may help if you share a little about the character as you go along, the direction you are going and perhaps the outcome, if you know what the outcome will be before you reach the end.  And even then…

Happily, people are generally gratified to be part of the writing and creative process and recover from any disappointment or misunderstanding when they see their names in the acknowledgments.  Hooray for acknowledgments!

We would love to hear if anyone has had experience – good or bad – in interviewing real life folks for fiction or has been interviewed and can give some insight.

Collaboration: Heaven or Hell?

Most of what I've published is non-fiction, the meat and potatoes of my writing career.

 I regard fiction as my guilty pleasure-- doesn't usually pay the bills like nonfiction does, but it's as yummy and costly as any dessert.

One of the skills I've learned in non-fiction is the art of working with another writer. Or a non-writer, as the case may be. Today's roundtable is an examination of the pros and cons of using your writing skills in conjunction with someone else's ideas--or collaborating in any form.

I've published four books now in which I was the writer and someone else(s) were the source of the ideas. I regard this kind of writing as much harder than working alone. One reason is that almost always the person to whose ideas I'm giving shape is someone who won't ever write a book. In most cases, it was the other person's life story or life's work. And for that reason, I am much more self-accusing when I try to handle someone else's "baby," so to speak.  It truly is nerve-wracking for me.

Latayne, the only way I would collaborate with someone is if I came into the project before one word was written. I have a journalism background, so ideally I would want to interview the person, study the notes, organize the material, and interview some more before I even started writing. There, of course, would be tons more interaction between drafts.

That's not really collaborating, but taking other people's work and sorting, editing, shifting, and mutilating another--and I think you're dead on about the collaborator being a non-writer--person's writing sounds more like hell to me.

The challenge of writing a truly engaging story from a true story must hold many pitfalls. Most real-life stories don't follow a strong story arc, so there would have to be some heavy editing (cuts) of the parts that don't move the story along. I'm only speaking from minor experience with this, but people with a story aren't too happy about dropping bits to satisfy the reader. They want to writer their story. It would help if I had a more assertive personality, perhaps.

Now, if you're out there with a story about your trip to heaven, hell, or Fresno, give me a call.

Fresno, huh? Happens to be where I was born.

The idea of collaboration makes me nervous, and I often wonder how writers make it work. I think of Jenkins and LaHaye with the Left Behind series, and more currently, Ted Dekker and Tosca Lee. I'd love to interview  a pair of collaborators to see how it works for them. Perhaps we can line up Ted and Tosca for one of our author interviews this year? It's worth looking into. There are certainly authors I'd be honored to collaborate with, but I think it would be my biggest writing challenge yet.

Latayne's experience and wisdom about the writing process amazes me. I have never collaborated with another writer - or a non-writer - and never wanted to. But Latayne speaks about the process with such equanimity that even if she says it is harder than working alone, it sounds at least doable. I have read works by the other ladies on this blog and offered suggestions, and I've worked especially closely with Sharon. Our first published novels were practically birthed as twins, with Sharon and me passing manuscripts back and forth as they were written. All lovely, positive experiences.

Which leads me to conclude I might not mind collaborating, so long as I had a good chemistry with my collaborator, and loved their story as though it were my own.

Sharon, Ted Dekker also collaborated once with Frank Peretti - once - and I believe it was not a good experience for them, simply because their styles were so different.

Writers are unwieldy folk. Part of what makes a writer stand out is unique voice, ability to skew perspective, and original feeling story (I say feeling because story is never 100% original). Part of what gets a writer paid these days is collaboration. A young writer working with a bestseller views this as his/her "big break" and a sure ride to the bestseller list, not to mention a paycheque. Sounds good to me! But the marriage between the utterly original writer and collaboration with another writer is rife with drama. I imagine there is an even split for collaborations that go well--mostly marked by partnerships like LeHaye/Jenkins where the idea came from LeHaye and Jenkins wrote the books. The Dekker/Lee books are different. Tosca did the writing for the first draft of each chapter, but Dekker was very involved at every step. Somehow, they both have made it work and they continue to produce books people love together. (Also, I was late adding my thoughts to this roundtable. Wonder what that says about my desire to collaborate??)

Would I wish to collaborate a fiction title? Would it be difficult? I'm happy to remain open to the idea. It's writing. I love writing. Difficulties can be overcome in the name of a novel people love.

Novel Writing Dream Teams

I’m in the throes of a new novel idea—actually, a series of novels. But the idea wasn’t mine. It’s the idea of a friend of mine, who is a licensed professional counselor who works with traumatized kids.

She has the brains, I have the brawn (writing brawn, that is; kind of like writing about the archaeological discovery of Sodom.)

Her job in the collaboration is cool: calling on bits and pieces from the times she has testified as an expert witness, from heartbreaking counseling sessions, from case files and a lifetime of research into the depths of the human condition, remembering the ways people find their sanity and hope for the future in situations that would bring you and me to despair.

 Many people combine their expertise with the writing talents of others. I’m thinking of Tom Clancy’s novels co-written with others. In the Christian fiction realm, we’ve seen that recently with the collaboration of Ted Dekker and Tosca Lee.

What is your favorite novel-writing collaborative team? Or, if you don’t have one, what would be your dream team? Whose technical or experiential expertise, and whose writing skills?