Why Can’t You Hear What I’m Not Thinking Yet?

I’ve collaborated half a dozen times, though I don’t think they all really count.
I co-wrote three science fiction/fantasy short stories with my friend, romance writer Kathy Chwedyk. In each case, I accepted an invitation into a themed short story anthology, then realized I couldn’t think of a story. (I’ve been in about sixty themed short story anthologies; and every so often, I stare at a blank screen and realize I shouldn’t have said “yes.” But I don’t like to back out of a contract.)

Kathy happened to be doing a lot of research on ancient Mesopotamia at the time, a background about which I knew nothing but which I thought would be a rich setting for a (very) vague idea I had in mind. Thus we co-wrote “Qadishtu” for Warrior Enchantresses (DAW Books, 1998). After that, over the next year or two, I twice more said “yes” to short story anthologies when I should have said “no,” and I again asked Kathy to co-write something with me.

After the third story we delivered, though, we gave up. The experience was fine, our friendship remained intact, and we’d found co-writing three stories a rather interesting experience… but “rather interesting” was as far as our enthusiasm went. We’d had no problems or tension working together, but we both found co-writing a lot harder than writing alone, without commensurate rewards to make the extra effort worthwhile.

My reaction to collaboration (which Kathy echoed) was that it doubled the work I had to do—without increasing the quality, quantity, or satisfaction of the results. Even with a friend I communicated well with, and on a short project, I found collaboration cumbersome and laborious. I didn’t hate it, but it was soon clear to me that I prefer writing alone.

Although I outline books before I write them, and although I have a climax in mind for a short story when I start writing it, my writing is process-based. Apart from some (very) vague ideas I’ve got in mind when I sit down at the keyboard, I find out what’s going to happen by wrestling with the story as it unfolds on the page. And I’m confused, incoherent, and bewildered until I reach a point where I’m done wrestling with it, until I’ve finally figured it all out in excruciating detail, polished all the text, revised it thirty times, and now it’s carved in stone.

I don’t have a period of articulate clarity about my story ideas or intentions between the inchoate mess that I can’t even picture in my own mind… and the material that’s suddenly so finished that the whole story will fall apart if someone changes something.  This isn’t a process that a collaborator can really participate in. A collaborator can’t hear what you’re not even thinking yet about the work-in-progress, never mind saying aloud in cogent language; and a collaborator can’t co-write a finished, final story that you’ll kill her for altering.

There’s a channel of sharing and communication needed between collaborators that relies on each partner having phases of clarity in the ongoing work that I almost never have until after the work is all done. Kathy and I managed to articulate our ideas for each other while co-writing those short stories, but we both found it tough and laborious to do so. And we both agreed we’d never want to co-write a novel, it would just be too exhausting to maintain that kind of process for the length of a book.

In my next attempt at collaboration, I had, yet again, accepted a short story assignment that I should have said “no” to. (In fact, I did say no; but I owed the editor a favor and he needed a writer, so I wound up agreeing to fill a slot.) So I asked Ron Collins, a then-new sf/f writer, if he’d like to collaborate with me. Since I had absolutely no ideas for the story, and he did, I urged him to go ahead and write the first draft; then I’d polish and finish it. But, as it turned out, Ron didn’t write a draft; the story he sent me was finished, polished, done, sparkling. I couldn’t find a word to change or add. (Similarly, I don’t know how to send a document that isn’t finished, polished, and done. Either my work-in-progress is a rubbish-heap-of-a-chaotic-mess, or it’s done. I don’t do drafts.) So I took my name off the project and told him to send it to the editor and keep the check. And thus I got out of a project I hadn’t really wanted to do… so I’m not sure this even counts as a collaboration.

My next attempt probably doesn’t count, either, because I got kicked off the project. It was my only-ever ghostwriting venture. Ghosts are typically hired to write a book that will appear under someone else’s name. (Many books “written by” famous people were actually written by a ghost.) In this instance, I was contracted to revise and expand an existing manuscript, for what was expected to be a high-profile release. (And, like most ghosts, I signed a confidentiality clause, so I can’t talk about the project or who was involved.)

As it turned out, though, I was all wrong for the job. Having spent years developing my own fiction voice into something strong and readily identifiable as mine… I had no ability to mesh my voice with that of the original author so that my additions and revisions fit seamlessly into that writer’s text. Every line I wrote stood out like a sore thumb, and every plot idea or character of my own that I added was clearly mine and not the original author’s.

Good writers’ individual voices don’t disappear in a good collaboration, but they do find common ground. And I simply couldn’t do that with the other writer’s work. I’m also not sure I could do it with any writer. More to the point, since I don’t enjoy collaboration anyhow, I have no real desire to find that common ground with another writer. Which makes me a bad collaborator. (Not surprisingly, the author of the original manuscript noticed the problem before long, and I was dropped and replaced by a different ghost. But since I got to keep the money, and by then I also had a new offer elsewhere for two of my own books, it all worked out for the best.)

My remaining collaborative adventures involved my dad, science fiction write Mike Resnick. A year or two ago, he edited a round-robin novel, Your Title Here, for Fictionwise.com, an electronic publisher. A round-robin novel is one wherein each chapter is written by a different author.

I was scheduled to write Chapter 6. And when I received Chapters 1-5… I was so stumped, I’d have backed out of the contract if it had been for anyone but the old man. The experience of trying to figure out how to continue a novel started by FIVE other people ensured that I’d rather eat ground glass than ever again be in another round-robin book. (Here’s one simple, concrete example of why I hated the experience so much: The preceding writers had not even been able to keep the female lead character’s name straight! Without explanation or coherence, she has two completely different names in the first few chapters.)

Unlike me, my dad enjoys collaboration. He’s co-written about forty short stories and one or two books, and he co-writes a regular column in the SFWA Bulletin. For years, he’s been nagging me to co-write something with him—at least a short story. It bugs him that despite dozens of people collaborating with him, his own daughter won’t.

If I co-wrote something with him, I’d soon be unable to resist the urge to kill him. And my mother doesn’t want to be a widow. So in refusing to collaborate with my father, I am simply putting family first.

However, as a peace-offering, I did agree to write the introduction to a collected volume of Dad’s collaborative short stories, called With A Little Help From My Friends, which essay you can find posted on my website at www.LauraResnick.com on the “Short Fiction” page.

Award-winning sf/f writer Laura Resnick’s new book is Rejection, Romance, and Royalties: The Wacky World of a Working Writer, a collection of her columns and essays on the writing life and the publishing industry. The author of such fantasy novels as Disappearing Nightly, The Destroyer Goddess, and The White Dragon, which made the “Year’s Best” lists of Publishers Weekly and Voya, she has also written more than a dozen romance novels under the pseudonym Laura Leone. You can find her on the Web at www.LauraResnick.com.