Trust and Play: Notes on Collaborative Process from NFFR Contributors

Cole Beauchamp and Sumitra Singam: Safe to Play

NFFR: What are some of the challenges and joys of collaborating?

Cole and Sumitra: We have collaborated on a few stories now and are spotting some themes. We often start with a fragment we haven’t been able to take anywhere solo. The drafting stage is always a revelation as a story emerges. Next comes a crisis of faith (what the hell have we written?) followed by a pep talk (there’s some great lines, we can do this) and editing back and forth until the two of us are happy. We both edit the whole piece; we don’t stick to only the words we’ve written.

This one was drafted on the train to London after the Bath Flash Fiction Festival. Usually we do this over WhatsApp and Google docs as Sumitra is in Australia and Cole the UK. We typically write a few paras and hand over to the other. We’ve always kept it to one POV.

What made writing “Esme learns her lesson” fun was sitting together on a train doing it live, giggling as we wrote or read or brainstormed. What made it hard was we were brain dead after an intense weekend of workshops, socialising and karaoke. But we agreed the piece we’d been working on for NFFR didn’t work and decided to start anew at 5pm the day before the deadline. Crazy? Yeah.

Cole: The joy for me is seeing where Sumitra takes the ideas, the way we query and challenge each other so the characters and the dialogue pop. There are always a few lines we both fall in love with that survive both of our edits. It was such a high to meet Sumitra in person this year! I wasn’t sure we’d ever get to do that (we met in an online writing workshop in 2021). She’s just as funny, perceptive and probing as I thought she’d be.

Sumitra: I heard an actor talk about a “chemistry read” with a proposed co-actor, a process by which the two figure out if they will work onscreen, and that whether it will work or not is less about individual style, and more about each “opening” themselves to the other. I’d characterize our collaboration as exactly that, and I think it is why we have collaborated over more than one story. Cole has such a generosity of spirit that it feels safe to me to play and to try out the wackiest ideas, sometimes more so than when I am writing solo. She is brave and smart and funny and it makes writing together such a joy. We are both quite firm in our opinions though, so discussions and editing often go on for protracted periods of time. An external deadline is generally necessary.

NFFR: How does your ongoing collaboration influence your style? What are the stylistic or even thematic implications?

Cole and Sumitra: It is hard to know if our collaboration has influenced our individual styles. It must have, in the quiet way that each piece you read, each workshop you attend does. Perhaps it has given us a deeper insight into the other’s style, which allows for a deeper level of critiquing with each others’ stories. But collaboration seems to be a third, separate thing, different from the individual writers we are. We are early in our (hopefully long) collaboration journey, but maybe the stylistic and thematic implications are for the Cole-Sumitra complex, and not for each of us separately. Our first collaboration will never see the light of day, our second has been published, our third has been subbed and our fourth is this story! We have taken less and less time to write each subsequent story, and each story is quite individual in its style and theme. The way we have written these interview questions is also revealing – we have each confidently put our thoughts down, knowing that the other will feel safe and free to modify, and knowing that we will come together to discuss it before sending it out. Maybe the best way to think of this is as a braided story – as time goes on, each strand of the braid will be more and more like the other, but it will be its own thing, separate from each of us.

Philippa Bowe and Karen Walker: Check Your Ego

NFFR: What are some of the challenges and joys of collaborating?

A challenge is time: it takes twice as long to write and edit with families, jobs, sleep, time zones (we’re on opposite sides of the Atlantic) etc. inevitably getting in the way. And collaborating is a balancing act, you have to be writer and editor of your own work as well as your partner’s. You have to be always open to your partner’s ideas and check your ego.

A joy is the anticipation of what a partner will create next. And of course sharing the journey, every step of the way!

NFFR: What was your process like for your story in NFFR? Specifically, was the letter format (almost a kind of a nod to your two-person collaboration) an early choice?

Our letters between Duck and Marjorie were a natural choice. We’re both fans of this and other hermit crab formats.  We did start off alternating letters and prose but it didn’t click. The letter choice let the two voices develop, it was very liberating. And it works so well with the two-handed process.

NFFR: Any tips for others who are thinking about collaborating on writing? Do you have an ongoing style of collaboration?

One tip would be to let go of what works when writing solo. Collaboration can—should?—take authors in new directions. Another would be: enjoy playing! You can think of the first phase as a game of badminton with very few rules, batting your shuttlecock words back and forth and letting fly before you get down to the nitty gritty of editing.

We have collaborated several times. We challenge each other with call and response (Take that! Answer that, I dare you!). We’ve also adapted existing pieces to a common theme. We love the process and definitely recommend it to anyone who has a writing partner they click with and they trust.

Ela Brave and Iván Brave: “One plus one is greater than two.”

NFFR: What are some joys and challenges of collaborating?

[Ela] Joys: I work in advertising which means I do quite a lot of proofreading for a living, so I love helping edit Ivan’s work (from proofreading to copyediting to adding my twist on plot on larger pieces). Ivan calls me his “eagle eye.”

[Ivan] I confirm this. Ela is the best. Also, she constantly pushes me to go farther, to work hard, even since 2018 when we met, and she helped me self-publish my first novel. She has been as indispensable to my literary corpus as the immune system is to the body.

[Ela] Challenges: I am Romanian so I sometimes miss the cultural background in some of Ivan’s writings, so sometimes I need explanations before I can help edit or rewrite things.

[Ivan] Ela is too hard on herself. She unironically used “rizz” the other day in conversation and I burst out laughing — only my 13-year-old students talk like that. Although, to be fair, one example does come to mind: when I wrote “came to” for “regained consciousness” in my latest novel. Ela marked it as incorrect! Luckily, things like this are only a challenge if they remain un-discussed. I must add that another joy of working with Ela are the conversations that occur off the page about every little word, nearly every single line, and almost all the macro scenes of a story on my desk. How she finds the patience to listen to me circle around the same issues like a hungry, chatty vulture is beyond me.

NFFR: Do you have models (literary or non-literary)?

[Ela] Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow — although they were not a couple. Isabella was an English magazine editor who, in 1992, discovered Alexander McQueen when she attended his MA show “Jack the Ripper Stalks his Victims” and bought the whole collection. For the next 15 years until her death, Blow stood by McQueen.

[Ivan] It makes sense Ela picks a fashion duo, since her creativity is expressed through fabrics (she once founded and operated a dress making enterprise for seven years). As for me, my collaboration models are all the couples in Alexandra Popoff’s “The Wives: The Women Behind Russia’s Literary Giants.” I get goosebumps just thinking about those pairs, since I met Ela while reading this very book. It is basically about how Sophia Tolstoy, Anna Dostoevsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam and others were as important to the literary legacy of their partners as their partners were to themselves. From memorizing scores of poems during Soviet repression, to managing entire self-publishing houses, to even carrying a gun in order to act as their body guards, these women were real badass. I remember thinking, while reading story after story, “Dang, these ladies set the bar high!” And then, boom. I marry my own powerhouse, creative, all-in-one woman who I cannot imagine living without. Forget words for a second even, I would have zero nutrients in my veins, zero laughs in my evenings, if it weren’t for Ela. And of course, sure, where would any of my work between 2018 to today be without a soundboard, an eagle eye, a guardian, a champion, my partner in crime? Hm.

NFFR: Any tips for those thinking about doing some collaborative writing?

[Ela] Find a happy medium and trust each other!

[Ivan] I’ll say this: not always, but once in a while, when a bunch of little things that are usually taken for granted start to add up, you and your collaborator will get to the last leg of a project and discover something truly special: that one plus one is greater than two.

Kate Faigen and Kyle Weik: On Writing “Lucy Goes To the Museum of American Nuptials”

We’ve been co-workers for several years, but this was our first time writing together and hopefully won’t be our last! We’re both flexible with our own ideas and always champion one another’s writing instincts and suggestions. My advice would be to collaborate with someone you feel free with. When you’re both open to any possibility, it takes you out of your head and helps catalyze an idea you would’ve never stumbled upon.

We knew the concept of the story would be weird, perhaps dystopian in nature. Then we started talking about relationships and marriage, an eternal struggle we bond over, and how one day it’s going to implode all together. We approached the world building from different points of view, and melding them together proved a challenge. But our open communication style and respect for one another allowed us to trust the process, and we were able to arrive at a middle ground we’re both proud of!

Travis Flatts and Lucas Flatts: Writing “Grief Sandwiches” Together

NFFR: What were some of the challenges and joys of collaborating, either for “Grief Sandwiches” or in other writing you have done together.

Travis: When my brother and I write together, we need to work around each other’s schedules, obviously. We send each other lots of snippy texts, get impatient, but being twins we’re used to giving each other a hard time. I tend to have a bit more free time than he does—he has two small kids. So I’m the one who’s usually getting impatient. We tend to use the same emojis and gifs, shorthand.

Lucas: Yes, he’s impatient and pesters me a lot. But he’s an absolute machine and writes like a hundred stories a day or something and I don’t work like that. I write a little most days and brood.

NFFR: We love that the story involves siblings (and you are brothers). Is that perspective/detail a feature of other collaborative works of yours?

Travis: This story comes from a real place. The two of us experienced a loss in our family similar to the one in the story. That was the seed of “Grief Sandwiches.”

Lucas: We both write about that loss a lot, but it’s our first collaboration on the subject. I think it’s maybe easier to face it this way, for both of us. We lost our mom a year ago and it’s not something we talk about directly.

NFFR: What was your process like for “Grief Sandwiches”? Do you have an ongoing style of collaboration?

Travis: I talked to Lucas about a way I’d like to tackle the subject and he said go ahead and write it out and send it to him. I wrote a sketch and he cut probably 300 words out, then we talked through it and polished it, bouncing it back and forth via email.

Lucas: I feel like you’re leaving out that I then added all of the good parts, but yes, that was the process.

Seriously, though, any time we collaborate, Travis will write the first draft. He’s the idea guy, between the two of us. I don’t think of story ideas often, at all. He gives me ideas, sometimes. And I use them and don’t give him any formal credit.

Lucas: This is really only the second story we’ve fully collaborated on and submitted as co-authors. But we help each other with our stories all the time.

Travis: More often than not, when one of us writes a story, we’ll send it to the other one to read over, like a beta reader, and we’ll at least give our thoughts if not even line edits.

Lucas: I already said that.

Travis*: I answered first. I sent my answers to you and then you added yours after complaining a lot about me pestering you to do it.

Lucas: They don’t need to see how the sausage is made.

(*This is probably what Travis would say; I (Lucas) am taking liberties.)

NFFR: In what ways do your writing styles complement each other’s?

Travis: I mostly write flash, stories that lean toward speculative or slipstream. I’ve written a few genre stories. Lucas writes short stories and probably has a darker, more realistic style.

Lucas: As far as complementing one another, I think it’s likely more that we have similar voices and so we have an advantage, there. We’re identical twins; you couldn’t tell us apart on the phone. I mean, I sound a little smarter, if you’re a judgy listener. But we can slip into each other’s work easily, making it a little better (me) or a little worse (him).

NFFR: Do you have any tips for others who are thinking about collaborating on writing?

Travis: If you want to collaborate with someone, find someone who you’re not trying to impress or worried about insulting with criticism. Lucas and I understand that writers can be sensitive, so we aren’t needlessly blunt, but we’re not hesitant to joke around or cut to the point.

Lucas: He hurts my feelings literally every time I show him something that I write.

Christine Fugate and Rina Palumbo: On “Jealousy Always Brings Out The Best In Her”

This duet is a collaboration between writer/filmmaker, Christine Fugate, and writer, Rina Palumbo. The story attempts to blend the verbal with the visual to evoke time and place in the context of an immediate and past point of view, in the same way a camera frames scenes and a director decides scene cuts. It was a joy to develop this piece of writing in a multidisciplinary collaboration.

Rachel Harbaugh and Sarah Hurd: Following the Vibes and the Imagery

NFFR: What are some of the challenges and joys of collaborating? 

Rachel Harbaugh: The act of sharing my writing, especially close-to-my-heart pieces, is akin to being naked. I have a tendency to bleed myself out onto the page. There’s apprehension there, and anticipation. My writing “voice” is distinct and it’s a constant fear that somebody will tell me to make my words smaller and quieter. When Sarah approached me about doing this collaboration with her, I was honored.  She’s somebody I admire and trust as both a writer and friend. Her “voice” is wonderfully unique and beautiful and it was a pleasure to see the way our two styles intermingled and played off of each other—like a mixed media piece of art.

Sarah Hurd: I think as writers, we’re always pursuing vulnerability. The work I create is often intimate, but as a solo writer, I still have control over how and when my work is read. For collaborative writing—at least in the way Rachel and I approached it—there’s a huge level of vulnerability throughout the writing process, which I find challenging with my perfectionist nature. Working with a writer I trust and admire makes the process as rewarding as gossipping with an old friend—we’re familiar enough with each other’s writing and personal lives that we don’t have to loiter in the acquaintance period—we can play freely without fear of judgment.

NFFR: We appreciate your austerity, the descriptions in “The Valley of the Shadow of Death.” How did you as collaborators arrive at the overall style and approach? Did it come about organically, for instance? Or did it involve planning?

SH: When I saw the call for collaborative writing, Rachel was the first writer I thought of as a partner for this project. While we’d never worked on a shared piece, we regularly workshop together and read each other’s work. I really wanted the piece to feel like an equal effort, so we developed a system for idea generation and the writing process. We each created a handful of opening lines then chose two from each other’s list. I tend to find my story while writing, rather than starting with a fully fledged idea, so we played tag with our first lines, working on four stories simultaneously until we felt one developing into something we both loved.

I tailored my prose style slightly to emphasize the shared traits we both embrace in our individual writing: sensory imagery, figurative language, themes of grief and loneliness. Because we were alternating line-by-line, I think the tone and style of the piece developed quite naturally as we worked to follow the other’s lead.

RH: Sarah and I both tend to play with similar themes and mediums in our writing: strong imagery, analogies, language as rhythm, melancholy and grief.  Sarah had a wonderful idea when she suggested we both write a few opening lines then let the other pick two of them we felt drawn to. We added to them line-by-line, as we strove to follow the vibes and images of each story to their completion.

It was really interesting to see how the stories all evolved from where the writer might have imagined it when they wrote the opening line. For example, while we wrote four stories total, “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” grew from an opening line of mine. I had no idea why Silas was sitting on the rotting porch steps, waiting. Together, with Sarah, we managed to figure out his family history and trauma. Isn’t writing magic?

NFFR: Any tips for collaborators. Do you have an ongoing style of writing together?

RH: I found that our method of each using different colors to write and add sentences to the story was very effective. It helped us see where we were and also gave us the opportunity to read the other’s writing as they intended it. We changed the text to black after the initial draft and then left comments and suggestions on anything we found to be glaring or a bit “off.”

My advice is to find a writer you know and trust to collaborate with. Trust me when I say that while it can seem daunting initially, the end product might just make you giddy with joy. There’s something really beautiful about seeing your style cohabitating and merging organically with a writer’s that you admire.

SH: Collaborative creative writing is a new process for me, and it’s something I’ve shied away from up until recently, preferring to have full control over my work. This experience has been incredibly positive and a great means for creative growth. The two key aspects I feel are necessary to the process are trust and equal roles. Having a pre-existing relationship with Rachel and her work allowed me to go into the project without reservations of our ability to communicate and complement each other creatively. Developing a framework to keep the work equal also ensured we both felt ownership over the piece.

Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross: On Voice/Voices and Friendship

Kim: We’ve been collaborating on stories since 2017 and have published about 30 of them. Our co-authored short story collection, Don’t Take This the Wrong Way, is forthcoming this March. A surprising thing about our collaborations is how often a third voice emerges. Our independent writing doesn’t sound that similar, but somehow, when we do these collaborations, our voices seem to blend. When we were rereading our manuscript this summer to make final edits, I very frequently would encounter a sentence and literally not remember if I wrote it or Michelle wrote it.

Michelle: Which is weird because for the most part we’re not heavily revising each other’s sentences. I write a few paragraphs; Kim writes a few paragraphs. We occasionally tweak what the other wrote or add or subtract, but this revision isn’t standard. That is, there are plenty of sentences in our stories that were solely authored by one of us, but over time, it’s harder and harder to pick those out, to be sure that this or that sentence is all mine or all Kim’s. Maybe this is partly because to collaborate well, you have to surrender so much of your control. You have to be willing to follow. At the same time, you have to assume ownership of what the other writes. That is, you have to commit to it in order to continue the story. As a result, in the end, it all just feels like ours.

Kim: Many of our stories, like “Courtesy”—and our collection title Don’t Take This the Wrong Way speaks to this—concern failures in communication. The shampoo lady in “Courtesy” is violating something the narrator sees as an obvious social contract: if someone lets you cut in line, don’t dillydally. We both strongly identified with the narrator’s outrage, even though it’s petty and overblown. Another thing that many of our stories are about, and this may be baked into our stories because of our collaboration process, is friendship. The narrator here is really pissed off, at both the shampoo lady and the checker. But once she starts texting her friend, who validates her feelings of outrage (“Ugh”), her anger alchemizes. Now the narrator is the one being rude and pissing off someone else for abrogating another tacit social contract (say “No problem” when someone apologizes, however insincerely); now she’s the one smiling; now she’s experiencing “delight.” Michelle wrote the ending for this story—a new ending, not our original one. I love it, because it feels to me like a metaphor for the collaboration process. An annoying situation becomes a story she can’t wait to tell. Straw turns into gold.