If two heads are better than one (not to be confused with Two Heads are Deader Than One) then two writers should be better too! This week I'm thrilled to include a crime writing duo, ITW Debut author J.T. Rogers is actually S.T. Pelletier and Amanda Schuckman. Here they are as my guests, talking about their process and their first novel, In From The Cold
THE AUTHORS
The
product of a bilingual education and an alumna of a handful of universities,
J.T.’s passions include history, comic books, and Shakespeare. She has lived
all over North America and loves to weave threads of authentic local color into
her stories. Just ask her about Lucy the Elephant.
Currently,
she’s living the dream of being overworked and underpaid. She writes to stay
sane—or that’s the story she likes to tell, at least.
Learn more about J.T. Rogers:
Tumblr:
http://jtrogersfiction.tumblr.com/
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/jtrogersfic
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jtrogersfiction
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jtrogersfiction/
They
say two heads are better than one, but that well-worn bit of folksy common
sense isn’t typically thought to apply to the world of novel-form storytelling.
As a writing team, we’ve encountered a lot of curiosity from our
peers—particularly since we share a nom de plum. When we were invited
to do a guest spot for today’s lead-up to ThrillerFest, we thought this post
was an obvious opportunity to discuss some of the advantages of cowriting.
S.T.
Pelletier: For
me, I think the biggest advantage to having a cowriter is having a built-in
sounding board for ideas. I never have to worry about getting stuck. Amanda and
I have similar interests but different strengths when it comes to writing, and
when we hit our rhythm, it’s amazing how much we can accomplish in a couple of
hours. I’m reminded of one of the earliest editing passes for In from theCold: Our editor asked to see more from our secondary point-of-view
character, Wes, and we were under a tight deadline to deliver a revised
manuscript. In the space of a Sunday afternoon, we wrote 4,000 words of new
material—a feat I doubt I’d ever have been able to accomplish on my own. I’m a
relatively slow writer, but having a writing partner lights a fire under my ass.
With an immediate audience to please, for lack of a better word, I’m less
concerned about getting the phrasing right so much as I’m eager to get the
phrasing down. First and foremost, the story is for us. We get to tell
the story to each other first.
A.
Schuckman:
That’s an excellent way of putting it. When I’m writing alone, I will get hung
up on how to move into the next moment of a scene for months, or be stymied by
a passage that doesn’t lead where I want it to. Having Sarah at the ready to
suggest something or even remind me of something we’d discussed previously, it
keeps me from getting stuck. There’s also a wonderful security in knowing a
writing partner’s process and strengths, or even just how they think, because I
can leave things blank and not panic about doing so, knowing that Sarah will
get what I’m aiming at and be able to help me fill that blank in. I will
literally put placeholder text in brackets describing what needs to go there
and move along to keep up momentum, something I haven’t managed to trick myself
into doing in solo work.
There’s
also the added benefit of having to think things through and be able to explain
them to another person before you can dive in. If I have an idea or the spark
of something I really like, but haven’t followed that through to any kind of
end point, I can get mired in detail and character and increasingly elaborate
justifications for those things, long before I figure out the idea just doesn’t
work the way I wanted it to. When we have to walk each other through those
ideas, it makes the process of adjusting them, fixing them, making them better
and making them work much faster and less painful.
S.T.
Pelletier: As
a writing team, our most frequently asked questions are usually about our
process. I’m not really sure how other writing teams collaborate, but our
process relies heavily on technology because we don’t even live in the same
country, let alone the same time zone. (At time of writing, we have only
actually met in person once, about six years ago, for under six hours.) We
always start with a conversation, usually over instant message. One of us will
have an idea, and that idea quickly becomes a game of ‘Yes, and…’, with each of
us taking up characters on the fly as we craft the rough beats of a story.
Because we’re huge nerds, we pretty much do this every day, but when we’re
particularly taken with an idea, I’ll copy and paste the chat transcript into a
Google Doc. From there, we’ll create a skeleton of the story—basically a
barebones outline to get us from start to the finish. After that, the story
gets broken down chapter by chapter. Our outline for In from the Cold
was about 20 or so pages. Each chapter then receives its own document in a
shared file. We’ll copy and paste the relevant notes from the outline, and then
write out the full chapter. Sometimes we stay very close to the outline. Other
times we ad lib an entirely new subplot.
A.
Schuckman: I
don’t know how other writing partners do it, but this system has proved
incredibly fruitful for us. It allows us to track how ideas evolve, to shelve
and catalog obsolete versions of things that we can then mine for good language
later, and it allows for incredible flexibility. We write until we’re stuck or
satisfied and then shoot each other a quick ‘tag!’, tapping in and out as each
chapter progresses. The final work is, as a result, deeply collaborative. Our
styles of writing are quite different, but with In from the Cold
especially, using pulp thrillers as a guidepost, the close back and forth of the
process helped us match and blend our voices.
S.T.
Pelletier: We
each tend to favour certain characters—Amanda wrote all of Flynn’s dialogue,
for example, while I wrote all of Wes’s—but other than that, there are no hard
and fast distinctions. Amanda’s better at spatial descriptions than I am, so I
usually leave a placeholder for her to fill when she’s online, but I love
writing action scenes, so I take care of those. Once the first draft is
complete, we start piecing together the entire story in one single document. I
work as a freelance editor, so I do the first pass, and then Amanda follows
with her notes and adjustments. Then I do one final pass and ship it off to the
editors!
A.
Schuckman:
We were pretty thrilled with the minimal grammatical notes we got back. Having
another set of eyes constantly reading and rereading your writing as you write
means a lot of typos and oddities get caught—and fixed—instantly. It’s also a
lot less daunting to go through notes when you have backup right there, someone
to divide and conquer the feedback with.
S.T.
Pelletier: Ultimately,
the thing I like best about cowriting is that it takes a traditionally solitary
activity and turns it into one I can share with a friend. Time zones and
technology can get tricky sometimes, but the benefits far outweigh the
disadvantages.
A.
Schuckman:
There is something fundamentally important about sharing stories, and having a
partner means you’re doing that, for a receptive audience, constantly. It also
means you are being the given the gift of someone else’s storytelling with that
same frequency. Every time Sarah taps me to jump back into the document we’re
working on, I’m excited to see what’s there, what’s new, how she’s moved the
story along, and am inspired to do the same, in turn.
Such an interesting process. Thank you both for letting us get a glimpse inside J.T. Rogers.
Lots of big things this week! Don't miss my interview with our first and 500th ITW Debut Author (posting July 12) and my posts from ThrillerFest in NYC next weekend.
See you all soon!
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