Storytellersunplugged

From birth, I had the best possible training for becoming a writer. I was born an only child. That I was also an angry, sneaky, antisocial creep with a rancid imagination only sealed the deal. When there was nothing good on either of the two TV channels, I had to make up my own fun, and my games usually took the form of ridiculously elaborate fantasy epics, which I would illustrate as comics or act out with my rubber dinosaurs and Fisher Price Adventure People (banding together against hyper-Freudian Play-Doh tentacle-monsters). Coming up with these spellbinding shenanigans was as easy as sleeping, but sharing them with–or inflicting them upon–others was a much taller order.

Like many beginning writers, I began with projects that were much too ambitious, and soon lost momentum, as the story got bogged down in arbitrary choices and uncertainties, and died out. For years, I would cultivate ideas I couldn’t trap on paper, and develop them by talking about them with friends, or strangers I hoped to freak out.

Another bad habit I took years to kick was my aversion to organization; my ideas tend to form as nonlinear blobs of story elements, and I fought with every ounce of my right-hemispheric dominant brain against imposing a linear structure on the process. It wasn’t until college, with weekly essays and research papers that demanded rigid outline structure, that I began to think through my fiction with any coherence.

Having worked so hard to become a functional one-man party, why would I complicate things by inviting someone else over? If you’re really handy with a Kleenex and a bottle of Jergen’s lotion, you might not see the point of going out on a Saturday night, either.  But because I wasn’t ready to write a whole book by myself, collaborating with another struggling writer seemed like a good strategy. Someone whose skills complemented mine, would be just the crutch I’d need, to get my hopelessly elaborate ideas into shape.

Writers aren’t always solitary loners by nature, but to some degree, you have to be; if you don’t love to frolic alone in your own brain for hours on end, you’ll never finish anything, so having a partner there to play bongos, pack bowls and change the music, at first, sounds like a dandy idea. But I had few examples of literary duos to build on, as a reader. Lovecraft’s “collaborations” were for-hire hackwork, and Ellison’s Partners In Wonder and Medea collections were like stunt shows, feats of derring-do that nonetheless bore Ellison’s stamp as indelibly as if his words were printed with radium ink. I could name the successful collaborative teams of genre fiction writers on one hand, if I was Gumby. (And please, commenters, jump in with pre-1980’s precedents, and if possible, send them to me, circa 1987.)

But then, one fateful spring day at the 7-11, as I was paying for my Fango, Marvel comics and a seven-layer Slurpee, two scary guys came over the counter, beat me senseless and took my comic money, and my arcade and pizza reserves, to boot. Though they left behind only a cartoonish composite sketch, I would never forget their names, or the book they traded for my allowance, along with my naked soul, and hopes for a normal future.

The book was The Scream, by Skipp and Spector. I won’t go overboard with the impact their books had on me, beyond observing that what they did would have been remarkable from one author, but the fact that two guys wrote them seemed to make it more of a daring highwire chainsaw-juggling act. It was like dressing up in a pantomime horse outfit, and entering a rodeo, and throwing every rider. You couldn’t see the seams in the suit that held them together. They didn’t use each other as a crutch, or split the book down the middle in some artificial way. They became a third writer, a giant capable of superhuman feats few writers would dare to dream up alone.

My own collaborative efforts were not so fruitful. One guy I worked with was a great sounding-board, and helped develop ideas wonderfully, even if he never seemed to actually finish any of his end of the work. He was a great teacher, as I had to learn to do all of the work myself, and to see that having nobody else to blame was a wonderful incentive to finish. Another guy had enormous drive and plentiful ideas, but our tastes and instincts collided so often that the final products were deeply conflicted in tone, and doomed. I think we both learned that if you’re chronically fighting with the other guy to get your ideas down on the paper, you’re more than capable of doing the whole thing yourself.

I went to college to become a screenwriter, but the most valuable lesson I learned there was that if I wanted a story told my way, I would have to write it as a book. I had come full-circle, back to the sneaky, hermitic weirdo who made up monsters with Play-Doh. I could finally do the whole thing myself, and I knew that even if nobody came, I could throw one hell of a party. What would I have to gain, by adding another host?

I ultimately discovered that only once you’ve gotten your own writing chops in order, can a collaboration become more than the sum of its parts. In trying to team up with somebody who covered for my own weaknesses, I was stunting my own growth, and trying to become something less than I could be, alone.

Only when I could write a whole novel by myself, did the attraction of working with another writer start to really kick in; as a way to reshuffle my own creative deck with new cards that would play off my own familiar obsessions in new and intriguing ways. Someone who could keep up and even set a demanding pace, would add surprises and strange new noises to the mix, and do more than just dump his own ingredients in with mine. If it were to work, the other writer would have to know how to subordinate his creativity, in tandem with mine, to an empty suit, which we would jointly inhabit, and thereby become a three-legged giant, capable of running full-tilt and kicking every ass we passed, along the way.

How fitting, that the guy I ended up working with was one of the punks who mugged me, that fateful spring day in 1988.  (For readers eager to take a lesson and bug out: if you’re going to collaborate with another writer, try to find someone of at least equal abilities, and, if possible, a gigantic influence on your own work.)

I wasn’t actively looking for a partner to form a genre-bending Voltron, but soon after I met Skipp, we naturally drifted into working on stuff together. Music came first, because it was loose and intuitive and accidental, and the results were a laugh riot. Acting in a couple film projects he directed, I observed and learned from his instinctive ability to soak up feedback and evolve his vision to make it a compound, all-seeing fly-eye affair. We did a couple short stories, simple impromptu games that took on an almost mystical urgency, as they began to inflate that empty third suit, and our work together developed a fluidity that soon bamboozled even our own efforts to pick it apart.  The partnership quickly grew up, got off the couch and went out looking for work. We’re both proud as hell of that kid, and expect to hear great things from him, any day now.

Since the Puritan days of my childhood, tag-team and shared-world projects have become much more common, and duos like Preston & Child and sometime teams like Blaylock and Powers (as William Ashbless) are allowed to openly cavort in public, while literary sluts like Keene, Golden and Lebbon seem hell-bent on scoring with everybody in the genre. Working with Skipp carries, naturally, a mantle of prestige and some anticipatory baggage. Our first book together builds on some classic splatterpunk shock-tactics, but Jake’s Wake is going to shock readers who expect a Skipp & Spector rehash; this third guy doesn’t write like either of us, or anyone we know. And the stuff after that aims to tilt the whole mainstream like the deck of the Titanic, dumping all those hapless, squeaky-clean suckers into our backyard.
He’s an arrogant bastard, our third guy, but show me a three-legged giant who isn’t…