Holy Plotting, Batman, a Writing Duo
There aren't that many people who write with a partner. It's pretty much just a handful who do so, and even fewer parent-child teams. Well, I might just be about to enter this elite group.
Last evening while out driving with my daughter, Nina, who has returned from college for the summer, she started telling me about the magical world she's created and the novel she's begun writing. I can tell you, it made my motherly heart go pit-a-pat hearing about the wonderful creativity she's got and the fact that she's really trying hard (in her extremely limited free time at college) to write a book.
Our conversation then streamed into epistolary novels and we both agreed that that would be a fun thing to write. Naturally, the next thing she said was, "We should write one together!"
One of my daughter's favorite books when she was in middle school was Sorcery and Cecilia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer,
a regency-set epistolary novel about two young women, their romances and adventures with magic (it's a great book, no matter how old you are, I highly recommend it).
The story of how the book was written enthralled both me and my daughter almost as much as the novel itself! It was born out of a writing exercise by two friends who had no plot to begin with, just two characters, which they each took on as their own identities as they wrote letters to each other. From these letters grew the plot and the story.
My daughter and I really wanted to do something along those lines at the time, but life and school got in the way.
Well, Nina is now looking at a summer filled with online classes and other tasks which will take up not quite all of her time and, while I've got plenty of my own work to do, I'm wondering how I could possibly pass up a chance to write a book with my own child (my son and I once came up with an idea for a story, but then he thought I was going to write it on my own. I thought he was going to write it. It never got written, but it’s still there in my file of stories to maybe, someday write)?
So, last night as we both sat down with our knitting, Nina and I began to plot. We aren't going to attempt to replicate the magic of creating a plot as you go as they did in Sorcery and Cecelia, but will, instead, do this the normal way of plotting out a story, creating characters and then beginning our letters to one another to build the story. I fully expect things to twist and turn and not stay within the confines of the very sketchy plot we thought up last night, but I'm open to whatever may come out of this.
I've never tried to write with anyone else. My husband has, at times, helped me plot, but then he's left me alone to do the actual writing. With this book, we’re plotting it together and then, I guess, each of us will work on our own, writing our letters but riff off of each other depending on what occurs in the letters.
I've always thought it would be fun to write an epistolary novel. Now I have to figure out exactly how one does that--how to write scenes, action and dialogue all within the confines of a "letter" without "telling" too much. And then I've got the added dimension that my letters are actually going to be written in response to someone else's letters—not ones that I’ve written from another person’s point of view-- and we've got to build a coherent story from all this!
Whew! This is definitely going to be a writing challenge for both of us! But fun, I think. My daughter and I are already extremely close, hopefully this exercise will draw us even closer, and who knows, maybe we'll even end up with a novel at the end of the summer!
Have you ever tired writing with a partner? How'd it go?
