Collaboration: A Recalibration

In spite of all the off-the-wall State of the Collaboration posts we’ve been doing, most of the time Bob and I are pretty serious in the exchanges we have because we’re both very serious about the books. One of the problems we have is that we’re very, very different in the way that we write, but it’s also one of our strengths. And what we’re doing now, in our eighth book, is recalibrating the process. Well, I’m recalibrating and Bob is being flexible and understanding and patient as all get out.

We can get around the fact that he’s a day person and I’m a night worker. (It’s 6AM as I write this and I still haven’t slept because I didn’t wake up until noon and then there were naps.) I have no idea why I’m a night person, I think I’m just wired this way because every time my body has a chance to sleep the way it wants, this is where we end up. Bob, on the other hand, was trained to rise with the dawn. I’m pretty sure that even if we were in the same zip code we’d never see each other. He likes the sun and I like the stars. But all of that really isn’t a problem; we overlap enough that we can still talk in e-mail/text, and that’s plenty.

The bigger problem is our processes.

Bob is very organized, very clear-thinking, very linear, which is no surprise to anybody here. He’s a lot more intuitive now than he was when we first started working, which is fun because he comes up with stuff that surprises us both. For example, there’s a cottage in the woods in this book. You’re probably about to point out that there was a cottage in the woods in the last book, but that one was mine. Bob came up with this one out of left field, a different kind of abandoned living space, a Bob cottage, and it’s right for this book, so even though we’re going to get snark from reviewers on it–if they call us cottage core, I’m gonna have words–I mostly don’t care. It fits perfectly into this story, so Bob is right again, even if this isn’t a logical move. See, he can grow, he can change.

Unfortunately, I can’t. It’s making me crazy on this book trying to be linear. I am not linear. I need to see patterns, relationships, motifs. So Bob writes words and I look at them and do diagrams and collages and tell myself the story as I go. I pull scenes out of the story and see the relationships, doing documents that are all the daughter’s POV scenes, or all the Rose and cottage scenes, or all the love scenes, so I can see the arc. Meanwhile Bob is reading my Scene One and writing Scene Two and leaving a space for my Scene Three, and writing Scene Four and . . .

You see the problem.He’s trying to finish Act One (he doesn’t write in acts, I do) and I’m writing scenes that will go in Act Four. He’s figuring out the consecutive clues to the mystery and I’m making floorplans with characters talking in my head as I draw. It’s impossible, but it works because Bob has the patience of a saint and I’m trying really hard to be more linear. I might as well try to be shorter and more organized because it’s not within my reality, but I really am trying.

OTOH, at least now we have a floor plan.

You might not be able to tell by looking at that, but I know three more scenes in the book because I drew that. I just have to write them now.

Please send good vibes to Bob. He’s suffering silently, aside from the occasional sigh. But now he has a floorplan! Yeah, he’s not excited, but his patience is endless, so there’s that.