BookLife

In celebration of Shared Worlds, Booklifenow will be talking with a handful of writers who collaborate on books.  Shared Worlds is a creative writing summer camp for teenagers interested in collaborative creativity.

Over the next week or so, we will hear from Annette Myers, Mary Buckham and Dianna Love, Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear, S. D. Perry and Steve Perry, Christine Matthews and Robert J. Randisi, Matt Forbeck and Jeff Grubb, Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge, and Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini.  These writers represent many styles and genres, including mystery, historical, fantasy, and science fiction.

Today, Kevin J. Anderson and Ed Greenwood discuss what’s best for the story and the importance of leaving your ego at the door.  Anderson and Greenwood have never collaborated with each other, but they both have long and rich histories of collaborating with others. 

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Kevin J. Anderson has written (and co-written) extensively in the Star Wars and Dun universes.  He is the author of The Edge of the World and the forthcoming The Map of All Things.

Ed Greenwood has written across the genres, but is best known for his many fantasy novels.  He is the author of Falconfar and the forthcoming Elminster Must Die: the Sage of Shadwodale.

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What are the benefits of collaborating on fiction writing?

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Kevin J. Anderson:  I collaborate with a writing partner because he or she brings something to the project that I can’t do myself.  I have written a dozen major novels with Brian Herbert (who has a philosophy degree to my physics degree) and the two of us bring a level of ambition to a Dune novel that neither of us could do individually.  My wife is a noted YA author, so when we work together our work is targeted toward younger readers.  My books with Doug Beason are cutting-edge techno-thrillers because Doug has had a career in the military and long experience working on major high-tech projects.

Ed Greenwood: Collaborations are far less lonely than writing alone, and bouncing ideas off each other and playing to the strengths of one collaborating writer where another has weaknesses can build great creative energy and make collaborations fun.

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How do you do it?  When does it work?  How does it positively affect the final product?
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Kevin J. Anderson:  We brainstorm the project carefully together, write a detailed outline/blueprint that we each work from (chapters divided equally), and after we do our own drafts, we edit each other’s until the manuscript is smooth and seamless.  

Ed Greenwood:  I deliberately do collaborations differently every single time, by asking the other writer(s) involved how they want to do it, and then agreeing to whatever they’d prefer. For me, the fun of a collaboration is in trying all the various ways of collaborating. I seem to be most comfortable in letting others handle the meta-plot (outline), and I concentrate on dialogue, characterization, and description (“putting the flesh on the bones”).

For me, collaborations succeed when they produce a good story first and foremost, and when all parties involved enjoyed the process. In the case of living collaborators (as opposed to a living writer finishing something left incomplete by a deceased writer, where the goal may be to craft a story as if the deceased writer had lived to do it all), I think a collaboration really works when the result is a “better” story than either writer might have produced solo, and that doesn’t seem to be the work of just one writer or the other.

A good storytelling team improves together, so their tales become better as they all/both benefit from working with others.

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Can you share some advice (and maybe some words of caution) for fiction writers setting out to collaborate?
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Ed Greenwood:    Make sure you have time to devote to a collaboration. A collaborative effort is never “half the work” of a solo project.

Always make sure that all parties involved in a collaboration communicate freely and fully at the beginning so everyone is agreed on who’s doing what, how, and by when. If something isn’t working, say so, right away. It’s not fair to others to keep them in the dark about your parts not being done due to continental drift, the death of your cat, or other vicissitudes of life – – or that right in the middle of doing this gothic vampire novel on possessed poodles you got a great idea about pink airships and are squeezing them in, too (or worse: instead). Everyone involved in a collaboration (including the editor and the publisher) should be in agreement on what is being created (length, genre, tone, and story elements). If a publisher wanted a noir mystery and the collaborators produce a parody or a cozy mystery instead, or when fantasy is desired hand in something that the publisher thinks is space opera, no one is going to end up happy.

Nobody likes nasty surprises. They are welcomed still less when reputations and schedules and creative flows are involved. So be up front about everything, and try to be sensitive about the way others work. If they need quiet private time to create, don’t e-mail or phone them every night to update them on your progress and ask about theirs. Unless you want to drive them mad and make them hate you forever, which is seldom a sane career or personal goal.

Kevin J. Anderson:  You have to leave your ego at the table, don’t get proprietary, and do what’s best for the story.  Work well as friends in addition to being partners.  Brainstorm a lot, share your ideas, and most of all learn from it.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

Accept that you can’t please everyone when writing about a character of another gender, race, or religion.  Avoid using the first image that comes to mind and steer way clear of stereotypes.  Don’t take the easy way out.  Challenge your own assumptions when creating characters even remotely different from yourself.

In other words, forget the blue scales and spaghetti noses.

Below, three novelists talk about their experiences writing “the other.”  The questions were provided by Nisi Shawl, co-author with Cynthia Ward of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction.

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Nisi Shawl: What is your best and worst experience writing a character of another race, sexual orientation, age, ability, religion or sex?

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James O. Born/James O’Neal is a Florida law enforcement officer and crime writer.

Writing police novels there are a number of characters from all walks of life.  I usually try to base them on someone I know personally.  My series about the ATF features a young agent whose parents were born in Uruguay and I have had many people tell me I captured the Latin concept of family.  At the same time my worst experience was writing a Panamanian military officer who plans to commit an act of terror against the U.S.  It is a fine line to write a character from another ethnic background in a negative light.  It is now considered politically incorrect.  You will always upset someone.  But there is often no choice.  Someone has to be the antagonist.

You cannot make everyone happy.  I was once at a book festival where a woman approached me and said that I wrote the best female characters she had read by a male author.  The very next woman who spoke to me, less than a minute later said that I had no idea how women thought.  I couldn’t argue that point.

Ed Greenwood is a prolific Canadian writer, best known as a fantasy novelist and game designer.

My best experience in writing a character of another gender was a short story about a shy, withdrawn, rather awkward teenaged female. Several reviewers and dozens of readers were absolutely certain that the story must have been written (could only have been written) by a shy, withdrawn, rather awkward teenaged female – – so I deem that tale a success.

My worst was a project I backed out of, in which a television production company wanted several science fiction writers to each design an alien race for them, for characters to be used in an ongoing science fiction series. The problem was, they started shooting scenes, doing cheapie makeup jobs on actors to give them a different-hued skin and scales or floppy ears or weird spaghetti-tube noses, and they repeatedly changed “what the aliens looked like” without telling us writers (or showing us the rushes, which had to stay “top secret.”) And then castigated us for designing alien races that didn’t look, behave, or speak like the characters they’d filmed.
In the end, we all bailed, after the first few of writers were fired for this “incompetence.”

Tobias Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer.

As a mixed race, but white looking dude, who grew up in the Caribbean, raised somewhat British and somewhat Caribbean, but now living in the US, I’m usually playing off people who are pretty different than me every time I sit down to write, and that’s always a great experience.

My worst experiences always come from noticing little dominant culture assumptions that seep in anyway. I wrote a story set in Africa once, and it was set out in a dry, dusty, war-torn Africa featuring aid stations and jeeps with guns mounted on top. Places like that exist, but I realized later I reached for the first image a lot of people reach for, thus perpetuating it. I vowed that my next story set in Africa would be set somewhere like Lagos, that has skyscrapers and a financial district.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.

A book has a long way to travel from the writer’s mind to the reader’s eye.  The writer writes.  The agent sells.  The editor edits.  The publicist publicizes.  Many months, even years pass by. 

These days the roles and jobs for all concerned are much less delineated.  Writers can – and should – learn from all the folks involved in the production of their books.

Below I’ve asked one member of the team – the editor – to comment on another member of the team – the agent – in order to help the writer make informed decisions.  The editors I spoke with represent a wide range of publishing houses, from New York to London, from San Francisco to Lexington, KY, from small press to big.

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What sort of agent do you find to be the most effective?

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Gabrielle Harbowy is a freelance editor, and editor-in-charge at Dragon Moon Press.

Gabrielle Harbowy: Agents who have done their research on publishing houses, and who send submissions that are within the scope of the publisher. Agents who promote their clients realistically. Too much hype only builds unreasonable expectations, and it actually works against the author if the manuscript can’t deliver. I would rather have an agent tell me what style an author’s manuscript is in, so that I know what to expect when I open it, than tell me that the author is “the next” Tolkien or Rowling or Asimov, or what amazing sales the film based on this manuscript will have if it ever gets optioned. If you prepare me for the top, there’s no way for a manuscript to exceed expectations. Tell me what it is, not what you want it to be!

Lou Anders is the editorial director of Pyr, a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Prometheus Books.

Lou Anders: I find agents who specialize in the genre to be far more effective than those who don’t. Generally, an agent who works exclusively in SF/F and is familiar with my line and my tastes has a much better chance of offering me something I’m going to respond positively to than one who doesn’t. I see a lot of manuscripts from mainstream/general fiction agents who “don’t know anything about science fiction” but took one manuscript on as a test and looked us up online. Generally, these manuscripts are about what you would expect. This isn’t to say that SF/F has become insolated & exclusive with its own tropes (though you could argue that), but that the agents feel that because it’s SF, they aren’t equipped to judge it. When in truth, it is the same qualities in genre fiction that make any fiction worthwhile–great characters engaged in struggles that readers can care about and invest in. If a work doesn’t have that, it doesn’t have anything.

Philip Athans has been a full-time staff editor at TSR, Inc. and Wizards of the Coast since 1995. 

Philip Athans: In my experience agents tend to fall into one of two categories: agents that see themselves as salesmen, and agents that want to be lawyers.

The former are always easier to work with, and tend to have clients with longer careers. If an agent is acting as a sincere advocate for his client, really believes in the work and the person, and wants to help that author get a reading, editors will always be more responsive, and to be quite frank the authors will get better deals.

Agents who “come in for the kill,” begin from an argumentative or defensive stance, and make negotiations unnecessarily contentious, make the author less attractive, even when the author is someone you really want to work with. If an author feels he’s in need of a lawyer, and that does sometimes happen, he should hire a lawyer.

Paula Guran is the editor of Juno Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Pocket Books.

Paula Guran: Well, I’m an agent, too, but not a very good one, so I can’t hold myself up as an example.

Seriously, for what I am doing right now, I really appreciate agents who know the genre I’m working in. There are too many agents who’ve not got a clue about the differences between “urban fantasy” and “paranormal romance” or even “science fiction”, “techno-thrillers”, etc. There also seems to be some who don’t understand “young adult” and “teen” books are not published by “adult” imprints.

So, an agent savvy enough to understand what to try to sell me is more effective than one who doesn’t.

James Lowder has worked as an editor for both large publishers and tiny independents, on projects that include New York Times bestselling shared world novels and small, critically acclaimed creator-owned titles.

James Lowder: Agents are most effective when they know more about a work than its projected sales or its author’s general market share. A book’s commercial potential is important, but the content should matter, too.

An agent who can suggest strategies for coping with a client’s shortcomings, the traits that may cause problems during the book’s creation, can also be invaluable to an editor.

Susan J. Morris is the Forgotten Realms® line editor at Wizards of the Coast.

Susan J. Morris: Personable agents who are genuinely passionate about their authors, who research our publishing company’s needs, and who facilitate a collaborative relationship with us and their authors.

Simon Spanton is the editorial director at Orion/Gollancz Books in the United Kingdom. 

Simon Spanton : The sort who’s willing to work in partnership with the publisher. Publishing is team work.

Deb Taber is the senior book editor of the Apex Book Company, an independent specialty press.

Deb Taber: As a small press, we only rarely get agented manuscripts. The agents who are most effective are those who keep their authors on the timetable we’ve set, respond quickly to emails, and are polite and professional at all times.

Jacob Weisman is the founding editor and publisher of Tachyon Publications, an independent specialty press.

Jacob Weisman: Well organized, responsive, reasonable about striking a deal that mutually benefits the publisher and the author.

Chris Schluep is a Senior Editor at Ballantine/Villard/Del Rey.

Chris Schluep: Hands on agents, just like hands on editors, are the best in my opinion. That means agents who follow the progress of the book from start to finish, the ones who will chime in with ideas and, at times, be a pain in the ass for editors. Keeps us on our toes and helps the book, too. I grudgingly admit this.

For someone looking for an agent, my advice is to research agents who represent books you’ve loved and/or authors that you feel write in a similar vein. They’ll know which editors to get the book to, and they’ll probably give the best feedback.

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Jeremy L. C. Jones is a freelance writer, editor, and part-time professor.  Jones is a frequent contributor to Clarkesworld Magainze.  He is also the director of Shared Worlds, a creative writing and world-building camp that he and Jeff VanderMeer designed in 2006.