A Dynamic Duo: Writing as a Team
I was delighted when shadownyc asked me to talk a little about writing collaboratively, and of course, I immediately asked chering if she would contribute her recollections and insights to this essay. She agreed; her contributions are in brackets and bolded.
The sorts of questions that come up about our partnership include:
• Did you two know each other before you started writing together?
• How did you decide to write as a team?
• What are the advantages of writing with a partner?
• And, mostly, how do you do it?
You and chering live a continent apart. How did you two meet?
In the olden days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Showtime maintained a message board for Queer as Folk fans. During the hiatus between Season 4 and Season 5, I finished viewing S4 on DVD (Thank you, Hong Kong bootleggers!), found the Show Boards and went looking for my kind of people. Among the people I found were chering and wordsalone. They were getting through the seemingly unending hiatus by recapping every episode in the first four seasons. They had an elaborate schedule worked out that would result in finishing their last recap on the eve of the first episode of S5. wordsalone would write a recap, and chering would comment, much as she is here. chering would then write the next recap, and wordsalone would comment. So I knew, right from my first ‘meeting’ with chering, that she could write collaboratively.
How did you start writing together?
Sometime in 2005…I’m not sure of the date…I was vacuuming. My mind was less than fully engaged in my activity, and I started thinking about Brian Kinney’s childhood. The result was the first chapter of Kinneygarten. I needed a beta, and chering was there for me. I eventually wrote a chapter for every year of Brian’s grade school and high school.
Early in this process I realized how well chering and I worked together. I need a beta I can rely on to be absolutely honest with me - not a cheerleader - and at about the third chapter of Kinneygarten I sent chering a chapter that I thought was O.K. She sent it back, telling me I was on the wrong track, to toss the whole chapter, and start over. I was delighted. That kind of criticism takes guts. I knew then that if chering said it was good, it was good.
chering also contributed to the story arc for Kinneygarten. I started out with the idea of shining a light on Brian’s home life and the influences that molded the complicated man he grew into. chering said, “O.K., make each chapter show how the seed of a specific trait was planted,” and she assigned traits to chapters. That seems obvious now, but it was a revelation to me. I realized how valuable her grasp of outline and plot was to my more unstructured approach to fiction.
I’ll let chering tell how our partnership made that huge leap to becoming full writing partners. [It was in the fall of 2005, and I wanted to do something special for our original group of Showboard friends for Christmas. I thought up the idea of Announcements after listening to “Scorpio” by Stephen Kellog. It just seemed to fit Brian and Justin so well. I was enamored of quinn222’s fics back then and wanted to do something that would incorporate writing, music, and pictures, but I knew I couldn’t do what she did with illustrations. I had originally planned on writing the whole thing, but after writing that first chapter of Brian, I realized there was no way I could do justice to both view points. I posed the idea of each of us writing one of them, and fansee happily ran with it. I wanted to do Justin, and she didn’t care which character she did, so we were off and running.]
What did each of you bring to the partnership?
If you want to tell a story from multiple first person points-of-view, how do you make sure the speakers sound different? Have different people write the characters. chering and I are both competent writers, but we have distinctly different voices. Her Justin never sounded like my Brian, and vice versa.
[After writing Brian in “Dominance,” I knew I’d never be satisfied writing Justin again, and fansee had developed such a deep Justin character in that fic that I also knew I couldn’t do justice to him any more! So fansee happily settled into the Justin role, and I into the Brian one. I think that was easy for us to do because in real life she is attracted to Brian/Gale, while I am attracted to Justin/Randy. Consequently, we had no trouble getting into the heads of the characters we wrote.]
Dominance demonstrated another way our different skills come into play. I started “Dominance” as an AU to be told from Justin’s point of view. Half a dozen chapters in, I realized that Justin’s motivation for the next chapter was in my head, not on the screen. I needed to insert at least one, probably more, chapters before moving forward. When I turned to chering for help, she suggested pulling the whole story and reposting it, interjecting chapters from Brian’s point of view in between the Justin chapters. That allowed me to insert my missing chapters without totally embarrassing myself. After some discussion, we also decided that, in the future, we wouldn’t post works-in-progress, which should insure that when we did post, our fic was ready for prime time.
Our readers have chering to blame for most of the angst in our stories; she is far better at causing our boys pain than I am. I bring grammar, punctuation, and structure to our writing, as well as having the ability to write almost anything I’m asked to write. I am a real journeyman writer…and I consider that a compliment.
How do you do it? What are the mechanics of writing jointly when you are 2,500 miles apart?
I think that question is best answered by discussing how we wrote Scrabble, which we agree is one of our best collaborations. Scrabble is written from the third person point of view, and I think, if you read it, you’ll be hard-pressed to tell who wrote what…unless you remember that chering writes Brian and I write Justin.
[In most cases, we would lay the basic storyline out from start to finish before we started writing, then determine who was going to begin telling it, then go from there. I remember that many times I would be waiting for fansee’s next installment, thinking that it would go one way and she would surprise me with an entirely different twist. Almost always it was better than what I had been waiting for, but if I couldn’t work with it, fansee was always willing to modify. I think that is what made us such a successful team. Both of us were always open to changing things to accommodate the other, kept our eye on what was best for the final outcome, and didn’t take anything personally.]
As to the mechanics, we did it all via e-mail. Using Scrabble as an example, I wrote the opening, then attached my Word document to an e-mail and sent it off to Chering. She wrote Brian’s first play, sent it back to me, and I wrote Justin’s response. Mostly…even within the body of “Scrabble”…the changes in view point didn’t come as quickly as they do at the beginning of that fic; often each of us were writing a segment that was as long as a free-standing fic.
I can only remember a handful of times we discussed a fic on the phone or in person and then it was always about plot: new fics or continuations of existing fics. The back and forth of the actual writing was always via e-mail which, I think, took a lot of the personal out of questions or requests for changes.
[I have to add, we (this is chering speaking) didn't do it ALL via e-mail. The seeds for the skiiing vacation we sent the boys on in "Dominance" were planted during the intermission of, "The Glass Menagerie" at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis! fansee and I have had the good fortune to travel together several times a year since QAF brought us together. As you can imagine, fanfic often became a topic of conversation at many locations throughout the country. I recall one lovely June day sitting around a table outside the Cafe Flore' in San Francisco when we met xie_xie_xie and gabbed for hours. I shudder to think what the nearby diners thought!]
For both of us, our partnership has led us to write more and differently than we would have written on our own. It has enriched our lives and, I hope, brought enjoyment to our readers.
[chering again. Unlike fansee, prior to this the only thing I ever wrote were business letters, school papers and typical correspondence. She taught me a lot and forced me (I'm thinking about Another Time, Another Place here) to write things I never dreamed I would be able to. For that, I am forever grateful.]
The sorts of questions that come up about our partnership include:
• Did you two know each other before you started writing together?
• How did you decide to write as a team?
• What are the advantages of writing with a partner?
• And, mostly, how do you do it?
You and chering live a continent apart. How did you two meet?
In the olden days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Showtime maintained a message board for Queer as Folk fans. During the hiatus between Season 4 and Season 5, I finished viewing S4 on DVD (Thank you, Hong Kong bootleggers!), found the Show Boards and went looking for my kind of people. Among the people I found were chering and wordsalone. They were getting through the seemingly unending hiatus by recapping every episode in the first four seasons. They had an elaborate schedule worked out that would result in finishing their last recap on the eve of the first episode of S5. wordsalone would write a recap, and chering would comment, much as she is here. chering would then write the next recap, and wordsalone would comment. So I knew, right from my first ‘meeting’ with chering, that she could write collaboratively.
How did you start writing together?
Sometime in 2005…I’m not sure of the date…I was vacuuming. My mind was less than fully engaged in my activity, and I started thinking about Brian Kinney’s childhood. The result was the first chapter of Kinneygarten. I needed a beta, and chering was there for me. I eventually wrote a chapter for every year of Brian’s grade school and high school.
Early in this process I realized how well chering and I worked together. I need a beta I can rely on to be absolutely honest with me - not a cheerleader - and at about the third chapter of Kinneygarten I sent chering a chapter that I thought was O.K. She sent it back, telling me I was on the wrong track, to toss the whole chapter, and start over. I was delighted. That kind of criticism takes guts. I knew then that if chering said it was good, it was good.
chering also contributed to the story arc for Kinneygarten. I started out with the idea of shining a light on Brian’s home life and the influences that molded the complicated man he grew into. chering said, “O.K., make each chapter show how the seed of a specific trait was planted,” and she assigned traits to chapters. That seems obvious now, but it was a revelation to me. I realized how valuable her grasp of outline and plot was to my more unstructured approach to fiction.
I’ll let chering tell how our partnership made that huge leap to becoming full writing partners. [It was in the fall of 2005, and I wanted to do something special for our original group of Showboard friends for Christmas. I thought up the idea of Announcements after listening to “Scorpio” by Stephen Kellog. It just seemed to fit Brian and Justin so well. I was enamored of quinn222’s fics back then and wanted to do something that would incorporate writing, music, and pictures, but I knew I couldn’t do what she did with illustrations. I had originally planned on writing the whole thing, but after writing that first chapter of Brian, I realized there was no way I could do justice to both view points. I posed the idea of each of us writing one of them, and fansee happily ran with it. I wanted to do Justin, and she didn’t care which character she did, so we were off and running.]
What did each of you bring to the partnership?
If you want to tell a story from multiple first person points-of-view, how do you make sure the speakers sound different? Have different people write the characters. chering and I are both competent writers, but we have distinctly different voices. Her Justin never sounded like my Brian, and vice versa.
[After writing Brian in “Dominance,” I knew I’d never be satisfied writing Justin again, and fansee had developed such a deep Justin character in that fic that I also knew I couldn’t do justice to him any more! So fansee happily settled into the Justin role, and I into the Brian one. I think that was easy for us to do because in real life she is attracted to Brian/Gale, while I am attracted to Justin/Randy. Consequently, we had no trouble getting into the heads of the characters we wrote.]
Dominance demonstrated another way our different skills come into play. I started “Dominance” as an AU to be told from Justin’s point of view. Half a dozen chapters in, I realized that Justin’s motivation for the next chapter was in my head, not on the screen. I needed to insert at least one, probably more, chapters before moving forward. When I turned to chering for help, she suggested pulling the whole story and reposting it, interjecting chapters from Brian’s point of view in between the Justin chapters. That allowed me to insert my missing chapters without totally embarrassing myself. After some discussion, we also decided that, in the future, we wouldn’t post works-in-progress, which should insure that when we did post, our fic was ready for prime time.
Our readers have chering to blame for most of the angst in our stories; she is far better at causing our boys pain than I am. I bring grammar, punctuation, and structure to our writing, as well as having the ability to write almost anything I’m asked to write. I am a real journeyman writer…and I consider that a compliment.
How do you do it? What are the mechanics of writing jointly when you are 2,500 miles apart?
I think that question is best answered by discussing how we wrote Scrabble, which we agree is one of our best collaborations. Scrabble is written from the third person point of view, and I think, if you read it, you’ll be hard-pressed to tell who wrote what…unless you remember that chering writes Brian and I write Justin.
[In most cases, we would lay the basic storyline out from start to finish before we started writing, then determine who was going to begin telling it, then go from there. I remember that many times I would be waiting for fansee’s next installment, thinking that it would go one way and she would surprise me with an entirely different twist. Almost always it was better than what I had been waiting for, but if I couldn’t work with it, fansee was always willing to modify. I think that is what made us such a successful team. Both of us were always open to changing things to accommodate the other, kept our eye on what was best for the final outcome, and didn’t take anything personally.]
As to the mechanics, we did it all via e-mail. Using Scrabble as an example, I wrote the opening, then attached my Word document to an e-mail and sent it off to Chering. She wrote Brian’s first play, sent it back to me, and I wrote Justin’s response. Mostly…even within the body of “Scrabble”…the changes in view point didn’t come as quickly as they do at the beginning of that fic; often each of us were writing a segment that was as long as a free-standing fic.
I can only remember a handful of times we discussed a fic on the phone or in person and then it was always about plot: new fics or continuations of existing fics. The back and forth of the actual writing was always via e-mail which, I think, took a lot of the personal out of questions or requests for changes.
[I have to add, we (this is chering speaking) didn't do it ALL via e-mail. The seeds for the skiiing vacation we sent the boys on in "Dominance" were planted during the intermission of, "The Glass Menagerie" at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis! fansee and I have had the good fortune to travel together several times a year since QAF brought us together. As you can imagine, fanfic often became a topic of conversation at many locations throughout the country. I recall one lovely June day sitting around a table outside the Cafe Flore' in San Francisco when we met xie_xie_xie and gabbed for hours. I shudder to think what the nearby diners thought!]
For both of us, our partnership has led us to write more and differently than we would have written on our own. It has enriched our lives and, I hope, brought enjoyment to our readers.
[chering again. Unlike fansee, prior to this the only thing I ever wrote were business letters, school papers and typical correspondence. She taught me a lot and forced me (I'm thinking about Another Time, Another Place here) to write things I never dreamed I would be able to. For that, I am forever grateful.]