Co-Writing Interview with E.D.E. Bell and Stewart C Baker
Having recently edited a co-written book got me thinking about co-writing in general, so I decided to talk with some folks who have co-written stories and books. Here’s the second interview!
DV: Tell me a little about each of you.
Emily: I’m a quiet fantasy writer, small press editor, and mom of three who works from a tiny former porch in Ferndale, Michigan. I especially value connections in writing, the ways we touch and inspire each other through art.
Stewart: I am an academic librarian, author, poet, game writer, and etcetera, based in the traditional homelands of the Luckiamute Band of Kalapuya in western Oregon, although I was born in the UK. I like character-driven stories, have two kids and anxiety (unrelated!), and am generally a huge nerd. I use too many parentheses.
DV: Tell me about your co-writing process. (Do you send a file back and forth, work in a shared Google Doc (or other), take turns, work at the same time, etc.?)
We worked on an outline together, adding content to it here and there. Sometimes one of us would end up stuck on adding something, because it relied on a joint decision, and then we’d throw the other person a chat and make that decision asynchronously. Then back to the outline. The outline was designed around the idea that we’d be alternating character POVs, and that each of us would write our character.
We wrote the chapters in order, handing them back and forth, because, as the story filled in (and the characters made their own edits) it would change the course of subsequent chapters. Then, when we had a completed manuscript, we each went through a few rounds of edits: to edit each other’s work, to edit dialogue written by the other author for “our” character, and especially for consistency. We did these edits in the same back-and-forth manner as the others, more or less.
Overall, the process worked really smoothly.
DV: What do you love best about co-writing?
Emily: I loved the idea of creating something that was an equal product of two different minds. I love making art, and sharing art, and having that art be personal, but the idea that we could step forward and say: we made this, and it is different than what I would make or what Stewart would make is really so cool to me. It’s a special connection, too–a special type of emotional support. (Not unlike what our characters find in the story!) I really enjoyed it.
Stewart: I agree–it’s fantastic (both figuratively and literally) to go in with individual ideas and emerge from the writing process with something that’s a merger of both authors’ conceptual worlds. I think it definitely makes for a richer, more interesting world than anything I (at least!) would have written alone. Another benefit of co-writing for me is accountability. There are times when I would probably have abandoned the story for months at a time if it was just me writing. Since I knew Emily was waiting for her turn, I had that external motivation to finish my sections.
DV: What aspects of co-writing cause you difficulty?
It’s funny; we worked so well together that the biggest difficulty was entirely unexpected. We’d agreed on the outline and world of the story, yet as we went to fill it in, we started to realize that we’d interpreted elements of it differently. For example, one of us thinking something was intended as a metaphor and the other as literal magic.
So while the writing went smoothly and we didn’t have any writerly arguments, we did need to go back through and make sure our interpretations of some parts of the book were on the same page. The good news is this resulted in even more interesting content than had we been clearer together in the first place.
DV: Where can we find your work?
You can find Emily’s work, links, and more at edebell.com. Stewart’s site is infomancy.net. We’re in the process of finding a home for our co-written novel, and we look forward to announcing the day when that has happened!
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