The Sport of Team Writing
Carolyn J. Rose & Mike Nettleton
Please welcome today’s guests, a writing duo and married couple—
Carolyn J. Rose grew up in New York’s Catskill Mountains, graduated from the University of Arizona, logged two years in Arkansas with Volunteers in Service to America, and spent 25 years as a television news researcher, writer, producer, and assignment editor in Arkansas, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. Her hobbies are reading, gardening, and not cooking.
Mike Nettleton grew up in Bandon and Grants Pass, Oregon. A stint at a college station in Ashland led to a multi-state radio odyssey with on-air gigs in Oregon, California, and New Mexico under the air name Mike Phillips. He’s been with KEX in Portland since 1994. His hobbies are golf, pool, Texas held-em poker, and book collecting.
Carolyn and Mike have authored a number of mysteries. Surf to www.deadlyduomysteries.com for more information. You can also check out their book trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M36HSyesec8 .
Through the painful wrangling that accompanied our first two jointly-written books, The Hard Karma Shuffle and The Crushed Velvet Miasma (available through SynergEbooks), we discovered team writing (especially when the team is a married couple) requires the same amount of caution as relocating a beehive or brushing a rattlesnake’s fangs. Writing isn’t like painting a house or washing a car—teamwork can actually make the process longer and more complicated. With egos on the line, it’s a short hop from constructive (and too often caustic) criticism to dividing up community property and fighting over which one gets custody of Bubba.
So one of us (in this case Carolyn) acted as the driving force behind the first draft, and the other (Mike) took hard copies of the pages as she finished them, added his ideas, made notes of what he thought worked and didn’t, passed them back, and took cover. After a review and negotiation (best done in a neutral location with adult beverages in hand) Carolyn (a Virgo to the core) melded changes and additions into the next draft.  Mike (a fountain of ideas) made more notes, we drank more adult beverages, and Carolyn revised again.
But team writing, tedious and treacherous as it may be, brings additional elements to the story. Because The Big Grabowski has more than a dozen point-of-view characters, it gave us each plenty of scope to work as individuals to develop distinct fictional personalities. Because one of our main objectives is humor, no plot idea was too zany to be tossed out without consideration. And because we envisioned this as a series (the second book is now with the publisher and the third is being plotted), ideas that didn’t work for The Big Grabowski didn’t go into the trash because they might fit into the plotline of a future book.
But, after a few days of brainstorming and tossing those zany ideas into the air, it became obvious that this was a book where planning and coordination would be critical to completion. The less work we put in before we got to our keyboards, the more difficult and frustrating the writing process would be. Too much flying by the seats of our collective pants could doom the mission.
So, in addition to the fictional greedy developer we killed off at the beginning of The Big Grabowski, we also sacrificed several hundred index cards. Avid recyclers and the proud owners of two working compost heaps, we didn’t do that without pangs of conscience. But it seemed the only logical way to develop characters and character arcs, keep track of action, and litter the tale with red herrings without getting sidetracked and then stuck in a plotting cul-de-sac.
To allow readers to get to know the suspects better and to give them that smug feeling of knowing things the protagonist didn’t, we created fifteen viewpoint characters in addition to our sleuth. Those fifteen are presented in third persons points of view, while amateur sleuth Molly Donovan speaks in first person. If we’d asked the experts, chances are we would have been warned off, told that we had too many viewpoints, and assured that readers would be confused.
But we didn’t ask. And, in “texting talk,” as we named and developed our characters, we became BFF (Best Friends Forever) with each of them. We found we couldn’t silence a single one, although we did discover that some wouldn’t shut up and others had to be coaxed into talking.
So we forged ahead, using 5×7 index cards to list character attributes—physical descriptions, traits, turns of phrase, and attitudes. 3×5 cards, each labeled with the name of the viewpoint character for that particular scene, listed setting, action, and outcome.
Using the cards allowed us to generate ideas individually and as a team. And, because we knew we’d winnow them later, as we said before, the sky was the limit when it came to what might happen in the fictional town of Devil’s Harbor, Oregon.
We stashed the 3×5 cards in a plastic recipe box for safekeeping until we felt we’d exhausted our imaginations. Then we laid them out on the dining room table so we could see the big picture.
To my delight, this served two purposes—it allowed us to see all of the events and recognize what was missing, and it made a sit-down dinner impossible. That, in turn, made the process of cooking said dinner pointless. And that made me one happy, dialing-for-take-out, camper.
We laid out the order of scenes for Molly first, then worked the others in around that. By using cards, we were able to recognize when a character hadn’t appeared for a long stretch, or was popping up far too often. We were also able to see where we needed more foundation for specific scenes or where we needed to plant clues and suspicions.
The Big Grabowski
When we had that together, we separated the action into chapters and then created a master calendar, establishing time and date for each scene. That calendar became the roadmap that made the writing journey less daunting and more manageable. We were able to write from milepost to milepost, scene to scene. Instead of looking ahead hundreds of pages to the final destination—the ending—we were peering down that empty literary road only a few pages at a time. And at the end of that few pages was another character waiting to hitch a ride or, as characters sometimes do around the middle of a book, attempt to slide behind the wheel and hijack the story.
The system worked so well we used it for the second book in the Devil’s Harbor series (due out in 2010). Last month we went all out, bought cards in a variety of colors, and began plotting a third mystery. We’re not ready to lay those cards down yet, but I’m already collecting take-out menus.
Once we had The Big Grabowski written, it went through several revisions before it made its way into print. Now it’s almost impossible to remember who wrote what, or who deleted that favorite line the other had slaved over for hours. And we’re still married and still writing. What are the reasons for that? Well, we both have the ability to laugh at ourselves as well as at each other, and we both strive to put our egos aside and put the story first. But, we admit, those adult beverages could also play a part.
December 15, 2009
Posted in: Guest Blogs
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One Response
I’ve read The Big Grabowski and it is every bit as funny as these two authors. Each character came to life and everyone of them has a strong motive to kill. Somehow, Carolyn and Mike pushed this story over all edges and cliffs and yet kept full control. A wild ride. My problem is that now, I can’t get some of the zany characters out of my head. They live on!
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