collaboration

This is an elaboration of the first part of my most recent newsletter, because I wanted to spread the message a bit farther, and expand on some of it. If you want to see the rest of the newsletter, which has class news and a giveaway for a copy of the new book, it’s here.

It’s always exciting for me when a project comes out, and particularly when it’s an actual book. Last week marked a special “book birthday” because my collaboration with James Morrow and Harry Turtledove, And the Last Trump Shall Sound, came out. I wrote the novella pre-pandemic, and it was an interesting challenge in multiple ways, partly because of the subject matter and where it is placed in time and partly because of the wildly different natures of the three novellas.

Writing is inherently frustrating, because it’s a process of condensing imagination into prose”“taking countless colours and dimensions of dreaming and stripping them down to a few crude black and white stick drawings that readers can expand back in their own imagination. It’s like using an asterisk to describe a snowflake”“all you can hope to get across is the basic idea, and the hope that the audience will see something beautiful, even if it’s not exactly what you saw.

I’ve long been interested in the how this works”“not the practicalities of construction and grammar (though those are important)”“but the mental mechanics of winnowing down world into story and back again. As many writers do, I’ve tried a few tricks to get at this”“for example, telling the same story at different lengths while still keeping it interesting, or telling a story entirely in the aftermath of key scenes. When I became an editor, though, it occurred to me that I had an opportunity to study the process more broadly empirically.

The result, thanks to the hard work and goodwill of several dozen authors, is what I’ve now grouped under the imprint Verdage”“books that are, first and foremost, anthologies of great SFF, but that also look at the writing process. The first in the series was Reading 5X5, in which five groups of five authors each approached the same theme, to see how different authors work with the same material. The second, Score: an sff symphony, asked twenty authors to write stories from a common emotional score, so that while the concepts and settings are all over the place, each story evokes specific emotions on a path to goes from joy to despair and back to hope.

The latest installment from Verdage, out 1 August 2020, is Reading 5X5 x2: Duets. For this anthology, I asked five talented authors: Douglas Anstruther, L’Erin Ogle, J. Tynan Burke, David Gallay, and Evan Marcroft, to co-write a story with each of the others, as well as a solo story. The substantive results are everything I expected”“stories of loss and passion, of abandoned alien spaceships, of cross-galaxy revenge, of demonic software and clockwork universes.

Just as interesting, though, is the other purpose of the anthology”“looking at how authors’ voices change when they collaborate. Most of the authors hadn’t collaborated before, and each pair found its own mechanism for doing so”“all different, all effective”“chronicled in authors’ notes at the end of the book. Read any of the authors’ solo stories and compare that voice with how they sound writing with any of the others, and with how that second author sounds solo”“it’s a fascinating study in what makes an author’s voice what it is.

Writing is a careful process of culling and filtering decisions, using a (literally 🙂 ) limited alphabet to convey infinities of universe, emotion, and action. Doing that jointly with another person who pronounces all the letters a little differently can be a difficult process. But the resulting harmony of voices can not only have a unique beauty of its own, but can show us something new about how each of the voices sound on their own. I hope this anthology does that.

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Reading 5X5 x2: Duets is out on 1 August 2020 from Verdage, an imprint of Metaphorosis Publishing.

Find out more at metaphorosis.com and on Twitter @Metaphorosis.

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BIO: B. Morris Allen grew up in a house full of books that traveled the world. Nowadays, they’re e-books, and lighter to carry, but they’re still multiplying. He’s been a biochemist, an activist, and a lawyer, and now works as a foreign aid consultant. When he’s not roaming foreign countries fighting corruption, he’s on the Oregon coast, chatting with seals. In the occasional free moment, he works on his own speculative stories of love and disaster.

Find out more at BMorrisAllen.com and on Twitter @BMorrisAllen.

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If you’re an author or other fantasy and science fiction creative, and want to do a guest blog post, please check out the guest blog post guidelines. Or if you’re looking for community from other F&SF writers, sign up for the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers Critclub!

I announced new online classes as well as the next round of classes and news about my teaching schedule for 2014.

For Writers:

• I discussed how to write in order to have an impact on the reader and made some observations about collaborations.
• Having trouble getting a non-SF reader to enjoy your favorite SF book? This may explain why.
• Charles Coleman Finlay talks about the slush pile for his guest editor issue of the Magazine of F&SF.

I talked about these books:

• Classic feminist text Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her by Susan Griffin
• Poetry collection The Essential Rumi, translated and arranged by Coleman Barks
• Nonfiction book A Biography of the English Language by C.M. Millward
• New space opera novel Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
• Classic animal fantasy novel Watership Down by Richard Adams

Time Wasters!

• A review of several books about the OWS movement talks intelligently about the history and implications of the movement.
• Scientists discover new poems from Sappho.
• G. Willow Wilson will be writing the Ms. Marvel comic.
• How moles dig. Because you always wanted to know.
• Some absolutely stunning photographs by Russian photographer Elena Shumilova of her children and farm animals.

Interesting Social Media Links

• A piece I did for the SFWA blog on Shelfari.
• Not social media related, really. but if you are working on the Internet, I strongly recommend two-factor authentication.

This video can be read as an inspiration for writers:

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Here is some of the stuff that appeared on my blog and social media in the week ending 1/26/2014.

Stuff I posted on the blog:

I announced I am running for SFWA Vice President. #sfwapro is a tag you’ll be seeing on posts intended to appear on the @sfwaauthors feed as well.

The Women Destroying SF Kickstarter will sponsor my destroying Fantasy if they hit a $35k stretch goal.

I talked about my January writing news and provided a teaser from a still-untitled steampunk piece

Stuff for Writers:

• I talked about the demands of collaboration.
• Industry discussion of an editor here by Tobias Buckell
• How to handle a synopsis when you have a lot of characters
• Thoughts on “Do What You Love”.

In the new You Should Read This series, I read:

• Writing classic from one of the greats, About Writing by Samuel R. Delany
• Classic fantasy novel, The Forest of Forever by Thomas Burnett Swann
• Self (and writing) help, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense by Suzette Haden Elgin
• 19th century novel of manners, Miss Mole by E.H. Young
• Terrific book for MG/YG writers of any age, Turn Not Pale, Beloved Snail by Jacqueline Jackson

I blurbed this book by Django Wexler.

Time Wasters!

• Bad fantasy covers.
• A guy singing heavy-metal with his cat.
• How the history of civil rights is being retold.
• A murmuration of starlings.
• Onion piece that hits too close to home.
• Zebra finches rocking out.

Interesting Social Media Links:

• 33 Ways to Get More Pins on Pinterest.
• Excellent piece on GoodReads giveaways.
• A great response to trolls and nasty commenters.
• Kickstarter phrases that pay.
• Moving from a blog to G+.
• Useful Twitter hashtags for writers.

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Collaborations can be a lot of fun. My first collaboration came about when Jeff VanderMeer asked if I’d be interested in working together on one and tossed me a 1500 word lump that would end up becoming “The Surgeon’s Tale.” That story remains among one of my favorite pieces of writing, in part because reading back through it evokes the pleasure of batting it back and forth, adding thousand or so word chunks each time, until it ended up in the land of the novelette. I think we managed to make the final result pretty seamless – I have trouble remembering who wrote some bits, although others stand out clearly in my head as Jeff’s or mine, because I remember first reading them or spinning them out.

I haven’t done that many. “Logic and Magic in the Time of the Boat Lift” with Ben Burgis resulted from Ben describing what he wanted to write a story about — Miami and were gators and coke dealers — at more than one Wiscon. I wrote the beginning and sent it his way, and the back and forth began. Now we’ve got a similar lump in process.

Gio Clairval and I just finished up a flash piece recently. One of the things I’ve done to encourage collaborations is stick a bunch of word lumps up in a Google doc and just shared the doc so people could take a look and see if anything sparked. She liked a piece I’d done based on an image of a female acrobat.

Right now Bud Sparhawk and I just finished the novella “Haunted,” which started as a short story and kept growing and growing and growing. Bud plots things out a bit more thoroughly than I do, and it’s been interesting so far. Here we worked in Scrivener and laid out a story arc in cards before really setting to writing. I enjoyed it, because I think we’ve got a killer idea, and some clever twists, and some things that will hit nostalgic sweetspots.

So here’s my advice on collaboration based on my experience, which is somewhere past utterly new at it and yet not in the range of people like Mercedes Lackey, Andre Norton, Mike Resnick, and countless more.

• Pick a collaborator whose speed (roughly) matches yours. Bud was writing faster on ours, and I know there were several times where I was the holdup. Too much of that can get frustrating, as I’m sure he can attest.
• Pick a collaborator who doesn’t take things too seriously (and don’t do that yourself). If someone has got something (real or imagined) at stake, the pressure may be uncomfortable.
• Pick a collaborator who is flexible, and similarly be prepared yourself to sacrifice cherished ides, because you can always use them elsewhere.

Collaborative benefits include (for me, at least) new energy, someone to discuss a story with as it’s written, new insights into process, fresh ideas, and a kick in the butt to be productive.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.