Storytellersunplugged

by David Niall Wilson

I’ve seen a lot of posts here about collaboration, but I thought I’d share something a little more personal this time. One of my longest standing collaborative relationships is with author Brian A. Hopkins, who I’ve worked with time and again to wonderful results. This essay is slanted toward a single piece we wrote together, but shows the process is a more detailed fashion than my earlier piece on collaboration.

I have written and worked with Brian for years, but if I had to choose a single instance where the work typified the blend of his style, and mine, it would have to be the story Virtue’s Mask. We’ve bonded over many a fine bit of prose in the past, the La Belle Dame stories, which I am certain have not seen their end, “Another Mile,” “A Poem of Adrian Gray,” two stories (so far) about a Scary Cowboy with a weird Eye – “One-Eyed Jack,” and “Once Chance in Hell,” and some others we have tossed about, worked over, not finished and shelved. Who knows what will be the end of it all? The point is, on “Virtue’s Mask,” the shades of our selves we blend into the fiction were more apparent than normal.

In my own writing, until recently, anyway, the word research is four letters long and hated. I have always figured if I could write around a detail, I could avoid looking it up. If I got it wrong, but did so very skillfully, no one would really notice. I’m here to tell you – Brian would notice. He would also rewrite it, fix it, and lecture me on the nuances of every intriguing detail I’d missed. If I let him.

There are a couple of aspects that are the core of “Virtue’s Mask.” One is a society so anal and repressed sexually, due to a fear of disease and governmental control, that physical contact is virtually unknown. The other is the instinct within a man that would make him willing to risk life itself to know that intimacy. I can both anticipate that sort of horror growing from within our own society, though possibly not to that extent – and feel the pain of that man.

We made the man a musician. I don’t remember which of us made that choice, but I believe it was Brian. He and I both attack the theme of musical creativity often, though I repeat it more than he does. I don’t know Brian’s musical background. I played in bad bands, sang through a lot of chemically induced nights and got lost in parking lots at concerts for years. I have written lyrics that have never been sung, have performed in ski-lodges in Spain and Karaoke clubs in Long Beach – I love music, and somehow it sticks to my writing like last weeks lumpy potatoes to my guts.

Anyway, the protagonist is a musician, and he uses his creativity to lash out. I brought in Alice Cooper. Brian brought in more research. We batted it back and forth a bit, getting our boy closer and closer to both death – and his physical “encounter.” We dug ditches and tossed him in. We wrote him – and ourselves – into a predicament that nearly stopped us cold. In fact, if I’d been writing it myself (which I wouldn’t have) – I would have had to backtrack and start over from some point where escape was possible. We needed a POINT to it all, a reason for what happened.

I will now tell you the point of this diatribe. Brian did NOT back up. Brian researched. He thought, and damned if he didn’t come up with a rare variant of the critter known as a “vole,” living in some small part of the southwest (I believe) that had a certain gene, that MIGHT if you pushed and stretched and cajoled it into place, fill what we had left as a gaping plot hole and create something very, very cool. I think that is what happened.

Brian does the research that brings us credibility. I don’t know what I ad…mood? A different twist on the characters? I think authors tend to write themselves into a few of their characters each time they write. Brian and I are BOTH in some of these . . . and that was a strange ride, all on its own.

I won’t go into the sordid history that led to this piece FINALLY seeing publication, but I will voice my opinion that it is about time it got wider readership and a chance to be seen. I will also voice my thanks to Brian. I learn something every time we work together, and for all the constant banter and rewriting, the words grow in strength. It is and always has been about the words.

DNW