Writing As a Collaborative Act
Why we don't need to do this alone...
Writing can feel very solitary and, let’s be real, for the most part, it is something that we need a lot of time alone to do. However, I want to bust a myth about writing. Writing isn’t something you have to do alone from beginning to end. Writing doesn’t only have value if you, and you alone, worked out every plot hole, every place where the character’s conflict needed defining, if you noticed every place where you could go deeper, say more, be more honest etc. In fact, when you allow your writing to be collaborative, by sharing it with others, by talking through problems with writer friends, editors, mentors, you actually offering something really beautiful to your work.
Here are some examples from my life:
1) I shared a scene from my second novel with a writing friend and she mentioned that she noticed I was making hints at a sort of magic realist description. She suggested I take it further. I looked at her note and while I agreed with her, I was stumped, unsure how to move forward. I felt like I shouldn’t ask her more, like I needed to work it out alone. But I caved and decided to ask her. She explained what she meant, gave me some examples and my imagination took hold and I wrote what is now a favourite description of mine from my book.
2) I was talking to another writer friend who I meet with weekly to discuss our writing, talk of the perils of the writing life and keep each other afloat in the choppy sea of submissions. I told her that I was re-writing a scene of my novel and that I could feel it asking more from me but that I wasn’t quite sure what exactly it needed. She reflected back what she knows about my novel (she very kindly read an early draft) and why the particular setting of that scene was so important. It seemed so obvious once she’d said it but it had been staring me in the face and I had missed it. I needed her to reflect it to me because I was too close to it all to see it.
3) At the end of last year, the same writer friend and I started writing short stories together. Inspired by Duets (a book of co-written short stories published by Scratch Books) we began to co-write some stories. She wrote a section then sent it to me and I wrote a section. In addition, we gave each other four random words and we had to weave one word into each section we wrote. The idea was to follow the rule of improv, to take the piece we received and say “yes…and” when writing the next section. We have written two stories so far and it was not only really fun, but it also alerted us to certain crutches and habits we have when writing stories alone.
4) In sessions with one of my clients, we are working chapter by chapter through her novel. She brings questions to me and I bring questions to her and it is a beautiful way for her to really make her (truly incredible) novel the best it can be. I can also help hold some of the hugeness that is a novel so she doesn’t have to carry it all alone.
I’d love to make this a collaborative conversation. If you’ve collaborated in interesting ways in your writing life, please share and inspire us in the comments.
I hope you feel at home here. Writing this newsletter is an act of love and joy. I am committed to delving into the beautiful, the messy and the sublime that is this act of creating meaning through words. Ultimately, my goal is to remind you that you are Write As You Are.
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Recommendations
A couple of things I’ve enjoyed recently….
Short story craft: I loved this interview with Tim MacGabhann in The London Magazine about his short story collection. There are so many quotes I could pull, but let’s see if this one whets your craft-intrigued appetites: “I start off with smell. Smell is usually the most important one. Smell and physical sensation. I have such an obsequious terror of losing the reader’s attention, so I am just constantly thinking to myself, How can I remind them of their own physicality while they’re reading this?”
Interview: There is so much to love about this interview and deep dive into Ben Okri’s writing practice. He talks, among so many other things, about why the air is freer for writers who write in the middle of the night. And if you haven’t read A Famished Road, I highly recommend it. It’s a long-standing favourite of mine.
Developmental Editing
I offer developmental editing services for works of fiction and creative non-fiction.
As a developmental editor I work from a place of trust and respect for the writer. I make suggestions and offer questions rather than always providing answers. I believe the writer has the answers and it is the editor’s job to point out places where they can go deeper, be clearer, be more truthful (even in fiction), or where the story isn’t working or could be developed. It is not my job to make your voice different, but to work with your unique voice to help your work really flourish.
Here’s what a recent client had to say:
“On three occasions I have paid someone to make editorial recommendations to my long suffering writing project. The first merely flattered, the second corrected grammar and punctuation. Only Susannah did the deep restructure and took the big clippers to all the sections that slowed the story down. By far the most bang for the buck. She is the editor/co-conspirator I need.” P.R. Canada
Thank you for being here.
I love that you are co-writing short stories, would love to hear more about that ☺️
Co-wrote a zombie story with a friend of mine (back when zombie stories were a huge deal and The Walking Dead was watched by everyone). I learned a lot about my friend's affinity for action sequences (and how bad I was at writing them)! It was a lot of fun, and though we never really finished it, we learned a lot about each other.
We were each in the story, too, so not only did we learn a lot about each other's writing styles, but our families, pains, etc. It was like alternate-universe us went through a traumatic experience together, in a weird way. A whole lot of fun, since we weren't actually enduring trauma IRL.