To give credit where it’s due, Bec suggested we should try this long ago. We look at a lot of things in similar ways, and our writing voices and styles are compatible but not identical. All that’s well and good, but didn’t exactly factor in that I’m a control freak. It was an email from my mother that gave us the way in. She forwarded some spam – she gets plenty, but forwards selectively – and in it two US college students, at very crossed purposes, set out to write a tandem story for an assignment. Hostilities break out immediately and, after a few funny and very contrary paragraphs, it goes nowhere.
We had our idea straight away: two Year Twelve Extension English students, with an established antipathy towards each other, thrown together by a quirk of fate (or their English teacher) to write a tandem story. Each day, one of them would write a paragraph, and they would alternate. Meanwhile, one of us would use that day as the basis of a chapter told from the point of view of our main character (Bec’s from Cat’s point of view, mine from Joel’s), and each chapter would finish with that day’s paragraph of Joel and Cat’s tandem story. We knew their story would run off the rails. What they didn’t know was that we’d be pushing their lives off the straight and narrow as well. There would be a lot of stories that would need straightening out, and a range of awkward truths would come to the surface …
I told my partner Sarah that Bec and I were writing a novel together. She told me I couldn’t go ahead with it until I’d called Bec and told her I wasn’t in charge.
My partner, Brad, on the other hand made the helpful suggestion that in order to write a novel with Nick, I may actually have to cut down on my daily diet of daytime television and, well, you know, actually sit at the laptop and write stuff. My response? I sighed, rolled my eyes and told Brad we’d discuss it during a commercial break. I was glued to Dr Phil at the time.
And so the writing process began. Nick wrote so fast I suspected he was taking performance enhancing drugs. I, on the other hand, came up with a number of excuses as to why I hadn’t managed to email Nick back with my latest chapter within the agreed two-week time frame. These included "my email is down" (LIE), "I'm just fixing the opening sentence and need another day or two" (LIE) and my favourite "What do you mean you didn’t receive it? I sent it yesterday." (REALLY BIG LIE - particularly considering I hadn’t actually started writing the chapter yet).
It dawns on me as I type this that perhaps Nick didn’t actually know how many fibs I told him last year ...
Frankly I had no idea until now. That whiny tone in the emails and answering machine messages was completely convincing. Will your publisher be reading this? (Supplementary question: do you have any grasp of consequences?)
So, I carried you through that first draft, clearly. Despite that, we remained cordial and played pretty well as a team. I was the one on the field taking the hits, Bec was on the bench wrapped in something warm and cosy and with a secret stash of Tim Tams and a barely concealed TV, but we were wearing the same colours. And I wasn’t the captain (see Ground Rule #1) so there was nothing I could do but write, send and hope. Eventually Brad would wrestle the remote from her grasp, the whingeing would subside and she would turn out something great.
The challenge each time was to match what had just landed in your in box, to take it somewhere, to make the other half of the team laugh when they least expected it. Bec’s good at that, I have to say. If her TV broke, she could be anything.
Brad took the TV remote control away from me. He called it “tough love”. I called it “grounds for divorce”. It was certainly a different experience as compared to writing solo. In a way writing with someone else was more fun and felt less like actual work. This is probably because Nick is the funniest person I know and his chapters had me laughing out loud from the first page. This was wonderful and depressing at the same time since I figured I had to at least attempt to match him. So each day my mood would swing between “let’s see if I can make Nick laugh out loud” and “let’s see if I can totally screw up what Nick is trying to do with his character’s story”. At one point, a day when I was feeling particularly bitter, I cut out Nick’s character’s tongue. “Take that!” I said while thumping the send button on the keyboard. It was moments like that one when I knew I was taking the story a little too seriously.
What surprised me the most about the process was how much insight this book actually gave me into how seventeen-year-old boy’s think. No wonder I was always single at school …
How is it that Bec always has the last word? And gets to name things? I never cut anyone’s tongue out …