And More I Wrote for WVFC
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Before she and Jill Gregory wrote their first book, The Book of Names, Karen Tintori was just beginning to write fiction after a career in public relations. Then she met Gregory, whose novels have appeared on the New York Times Best Seller List and been awarded the Romantic Times Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence and Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice awards for Best Western Historical Romance from the Romantic Times.
Tintori and Gregory, whose new novel is The Illumination, live and write in Michigan. They were kind enough to answer a few questions about their writing process and their new novel from WVFC's Elizabeth Willse (whose review of the book appeared last week in the Newark Star-Ledger.)
How did the two of you meet and start writing together?
We met when our children were in a mother-toddler class together and fell in love at the age of two. We had to get together outside of class so they could play, and as they became friends, we became friends. Later, we discovered that we were both writers and decided it would be fun to write something together.
Our first novel together, Something Borrowed, Something Blue by Jillian Karr (one pseudonym back then) was excerpted by Cosmpolitan Magazine and became a CBS TV Movie of the Week, starring Connie Sellecca, Ken Howard, Dinah Merrill, and Twiggy.
How does your process of working together play out?
How do you divide up the planning and writing of the book?
We write everything together, in the same room, on the same computer, at the same time - like we’re doing right now to answer these questions.
We start our work day by first going to lunch to talk over what we’re going to write that day, planning out the scenes or the chapter, working out any plot problems. We take turns at the keyboard, on alternating days, sitting side by side so that we can both read the screen. We write “out loud,” both of us free to interject or change a sentence, or a word, and there’s a lot of discussion interspersed with the writing.
Read the rest of the interview at Women's Voices For Change.