So where's ubiquitous?
or
How to maintain the balance of power in a collaboration


written by Anne Stephenson
(rewritten by Susan Brown;
re-edited by Anne Stephenson;
final revision by Susan Brown;
last call to the editor by Anne Stephenson.)

NOT LONG AGO, my partner Susan Brown and I gave a seminar about collaboration to a group of aspiring writers. We called it "Making Collaboration Work." A piece of cake. One way or another, we'd been collaborating since we were room-mates at Carleton University fifteen years earlier. But this was formal. We divided the research and organization, typed the same number of handouts, planned the presentation so that we got equal time, and split the fee.

It was great. Our audience was responsive – they laughed at all the right spots, asked questions we could answer, and clapped enthusiastically at the end.

Why? Thorough research, of course – but the real learning experience came from watching the finely turned dynamics of a working collaboration. We took pot shots at each other the entire time.

When Susan discussed compatible work habits, she called me a neat-freak. The crowd tittered. I countered by pleasantly suggesting she use coasters for her coffee cups instead of our manuscript. She lounged against the wall and assumed an air of long-suffering. The audience lapped it up.

When I pointed out how important it is for each partner to receive a copy of any correspondence with agent or publisher, Susan, who forgets to mail everything that isn't addressed to an editor, had the grace to blush.

She got me on deadlines. In collaboration deadlines are, of course, sacred. I get writer's block; the words don't flow; my muse is off playing squash. Susan gets on the phone claiming she needs Chapter Five, so she can get on with Chapter Six. I blame my mother-in-law. It's amazing how often she drops in on me unexpectedly. All the way from Winnipeg.

We went on to discuss how writers often have favorite phrases that grow like toadstools throughout their copy. I commented that Susan's characters "exchange glances" so often they get cross-eyed. My partner then "looked at me pointedly" and told the group how important it is to edit each other's work with kid gloves.

Writers have such fragile egos.

WE TRUNDLED through the legal jungle of what can happen to whom when one makes promises unbeknownst to the other. Susan used several examples of possible scenarios. In every one, I made wildly improbable promises to publishers, was killed in car crashes, skipped the country with hard-earned advances, or combinations of all three. She finished with a sweet smile and a somber warning that you must know and trust your collaborator or be left holding the bag.

I'm a reasonable person. It was only in the interest of education that I told them the truth about ubiquitous.

Once the project is finished, I explained, one partner has to do the clean copy and mail it. This is the position of power. In our case, it's Susan. She nodded modestly. Her computer and printer, I went on, are more sophisticated than mine, so she enters the final draft, prints it, and mails it to the publisher.

And that's where I lost ubiquitous. Ubiquitous is one of my favorite words. It has tone, it has class; Susan can't spell it without a dictionary. I had used it to describe Miss Belcher, the teacher who lurks around every corner in our juvenile mystery, The Mad Hacker. Throughout the entire writing and editing process, I had warded off Susan's attempts to cut that word.

After mailing the original to the publisher, she sent me my copy of the manuscript. I was impressed. It was beautiful – no typos, no coffee stains, no ubiquitous.

The audience loved it.

They didn't, however, hear the last word on ubiquitous. After the conference, Susan and I went our separate ways home. My route passed the publisher's office, so I decided to stop for a chat. Susan's computer, I explained to our editor, had inexplicably left out a word. Could she please insert "ubiquitous" on page five?

Ah, the balancing of power....

(Postscript: The advance copies of The Mad Hacker arrived today. The editor blue-pencilled ubiquitous.)

The above article was our first "official" collaborative piece, published in the 1988 Summer issue of Canadian Author & Bookman.

f & f Anne & Susan

The Best Titles...

Like cover art, or a quick scan through the television listings, a title can attract or repel; it can also, in as little as one word or two, tell you what the story's about. Think "Castaway" or "Dante's Inferno", "ER" or "In Cold Blood". Or even this blog...

When Susan and I first decided to adapt The Mad Hacker for television, we realized we would have to come up with a name that was perhaps a little less indicative of an axe murderer and more in keeping with a pair of adventurous twelve-year-old school girls.

Amber Mitchell and Liz Elliot had been best friends forever and were, shall we say, chips off their creators' blocks....

The plotline centred around the sabotage of their grade-eight computer projects. Rather progressive, we thought (and still do) given that we wrote the first draft of The Mad Hacker in 1985, using typewriters. Neither of us actually owned personal computers at the time. Our kids were in primary school; they had the access and we had the story.

Several years later...The Mad Hacker had sold over 75,000 copies in book form in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, Something's Fishy at Ash Lake, our second book featuring the girls and their friends at Ash Grove Junior High, had by then been sold to Scholastic Canada, and negotiations were underway with a Toronto production company.

We decided it was time to "rebrand" the series. Scholastic had billed the first two books as Ash Grove Junior High Mysteries but we wanted something new and a little less cumbersome. So we culled our collective memories as well as the current TV pages, listing show titles that worked, especially mysteries, right back to the early days of television.

Nine times out of 10, the most successful shows had titles which were either situation- specific or simply used the main character, or characters' names, to sell the show.

Our characters weren't that well-known but they were memorable, especially when they played off each other like that other famous pair of detectives: Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes. After all, Amber had been heard to address Liz as "my dear Elliot" more than once in both books.

So, Amber & Elliot it became.

We liked the cadence. We liked the way Liz's surname gave the team more weight. But most of all we liked the fact that it didn't sound, as "Amber and Liz" would have, like two little girls going to a birthday party.

Amber & Elliot didn't make it to the big time but we felt like we did – if only for a short time. And, among many lessons learned, we came to appreciate just how important titles can be whether it's art, music or literature.

Or, even a blog.

f & f, Anne

Show No Fear

How many times have you heard Hollywood use that line? It's like a magic talisman used for defeating bad guys, aliens and hostile adults.

Which is why Show No Fear has been replaying in my mind for months now. I have my graphs, charts, synopses and query letters ready to go. They are arranged neatly on the counter waiting, not to gather dust, but to be sent off to their future homes at publishers and book stores. But they are a little like the orphans in a lot of cheesy movies – they have watched other kids find a home, but the prospective parents always pass them by despite their best smile and the viewer knowledge that this one, this one, is the true gem. If only...

This, dear readers, is the real crunch for a writer, the difference between the person who is going to write “some day” and the writer who is fighting to be published. The completely schizophrenic certainty that the manuscript is the best ever written and obviously second-rate can get the most confident writer tied into knots of delays and indecision. To my mind, challenging a dream by sending it out into the world takes courage. Despite the assertion that it isn’t the writer’s worth being judged, but only that of the work, the real writer knows that a piece of her soul has been interwoven with those black letters on the white page. Who in her right mind would risk that level of destruction?

A writer will risk that. The silent courage to create in solitude is transformed into the determined courage needed to take on the world. How magical is that?

One life. One dream. Show all the fear you want – just go for it.


f & f
Susan

My Aide-Memoire...

When I was little, my favourite picture book was "Out of My Window". Each verse began..."Out of my window, I can see..." and went on to list such domestic staples as the milkman, the postman, the little boy on his way to school, the baby on its mother's knee ending with, in typical fifties-fashion, "my Daddy coming home to me".

I loved that book, picket fence and all. It's still on my bookshelf alongside my mother's Bobbsey Twins, my Buster Brown piggy bank and Funny Bunny, a pop-up book full of cuddly creatures and cottontails. Anthropomorphism aside, it was "Out of My Window" which taught me I could bring the outside world in.

Several decades on, I use a small bulletin board instead of a picture book to jump start my imagination. It sits on a desktop easel just behind and slightly to the left of my computer screen and displays, in no particular order, the following items:

An "oilette" postcard from 1904 depicting London's Ludgate Hill. Pedestrians gingerly share the street with horse-drawn vehicles, motor cars and omnibuses; a steam engine roars across the Ludgate bridge and the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral looms in the distance. On the reverse is a half-penny stamp, postmarked London. The card is addressed to a Miss Brooks on the Woodhouse Road in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. The script is bold and loops to the right, but there is no message. I wonder what it means.

Also on display are a 14ct, gold-filled pocket watch circa 1908, and a brass watch chain and fob from roughly the same era. I have no idea who in the family once owned the fob and chain or how they came to be mine, but they dominate the centre of my bulletin board, the chain held by three pushpins to simulate how it would hang on a gentleman's waistcoat.

Tucked in the corners are photographs from last month's trip to the U.K. including a picture of me and Heather, Susan's daughter, taken on a beautiful day in Hyde Park after a morning's research; a long shot of Oxford Street West with its eclectic mix of tiny shops and grand department stores; there's a small map of the Paddington and Bayswater area where a large part of the action takes place, and a "paper" hallmark I made at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

But perhaps my most tantalizing piece rests on the edge of the easel. It's a silver vesta (matchstick) case which I bought at a local auction last winter. It's marked with the Birmingham anchor and the lion passant, and its letter code dates it as 1915. The case was made by C. E. Turner, a firm working in Birmingham in the first half of the 20th century. And, it's engraved: From Mac to Frank, London, 1917.

An inscription which teases my imagination daily...

I won't go into all the post-it notes and other aide-memoire which clutter an otherwise carefully-ordered arrangement, but there is this one piece...

It's my horoscope from last year which says, if I don't make my mark over the next 12 months, it's because I'm "not breathing". That's the good news; the bad news is there's only fifty-two weeks in a year. My birthday's in three. But I am an optimistic Scorpio – and, if all else fails, I'll still be two months younger than Susan.

We are each other's aide-memoire.

f & f Anne

On Location – Not

It’s pouring rain outside my Washington window and Anne is junketing around England researching her book. She’s there. I’m here and probably will be for the foreseeable future. A person could get seriously bitter!

However, I have my own travel secret – I am a daydreaming junkie. If not, I never would have become a writer. I can go to all those exotic (and today, warm) locations in my mind – all without the expense and hassle of those airlines, fuel surcharges and security checks. And I’m not about to deprive readers of that pleasure either.

My last three manuscripts are set in New Mexico, Alaska, the Far East, Australia, Mexico, Peru and Lebanon – locales that I had never been anywhere near when I wrote about them. As my imagination wandered, stories about dragons intermixed with humans grew into Dust Dragons with turquoise as the catalyst. New Mexico was the place to be. Ice Dragons required massive glacial ice caves – Alaska. Stone Song catapulted the hero into exploring mythic connections in different locales around the world. And it’s a big, exciting, curious world.

Here’s the rub. I was originally trained as a journalist and I’ve become a stickler for facts. So, do I forget my stories because I can’t go there? No chance.

My research is two pronged. Second hand book stores provide me with more guide books and maps than any human ought to have. The internet gives me the rest – not in articles but in ordinary traveler’s photos.

I don’t know how many vacation pictures I’ve scanned looking, not for smiling Bob and Janie standing in front of an anthill, but at the background – the landforms, plants, shadows, sky and colors. Professional photographers give an unrealistic picture of terrain. Perfect light, framed landscapes, and picturesque scenery do not give any sense of what it is like to walk that land, how the less than perfect plants bend and break under sleeting wind, or how heat will bring sheens of sweat to the reddening foreheads of the travelers. Travel snapshots aren’t chosen for perfect light, but for the excitement of that one moment in a person’s life – kind of like a book.

I’ve since traveled to New Mexico and Alaska (after all it’s research!) and I’ve found my armchair travel descriptions were absolutely accurate. I took my own backup photos to double check against my descriptions, and it worked.

So, if you can’t get on a plane, I highly recommend the magic of your own imagination – especially when you can back it up with the magic of technology.

Happy travel writing.

f & f
Susan

On Location

Two days from now, my husband and I are flying to England. We'll be in the U.K. for about a month, visiting friends and family in the Midlands before travelling back down to London where poor me; I get to walk in the footsteps of my main character for the better part of a week.

She's a bit of a demanding sort is thirty-one-year-old Libby Maxwell, but then research does require sacrifice as well as repeat visits to Selfridges, Oxford Circus and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Which is where, during a conversation with one of V&A's foremost silver experts, Libby inadvertently reveals a key piece of information which will propel her, and my storyline, into the past. There is a man, of course, but more on him another day.

I did a lot of preliminary work when we were last in London. But, now that I'm well into my first draft, I go back with a particular focus – to check out the locations I've used so far, and the ones I'm considering but have yet to visit. So spending a few hours in Hyde Park soaking up the atmosphere, taking the odd stroll through Bayswater, Paddington and Marylebone, and cruising the Portobello Market on a Saturday morning isn't time wasted; it's all about making what I hope will be a good book, better.

Given that eighty percent of the novel is set in 1909, this research business is a bit trickier than it sounds. Like Libby, I too must try and navigate the life of a working woman in another time, where she lived, what clothes she wore, and what route she took to work each day. Lucky for me, this is London and, yes, the tour guides are right -- history can be found around every corner. I go prepared. The camera is packed alongside my walking shoes, a pocket recorder and a comprehensive to-do list so that when I return home I'll have what I need to evoke that all-important sense of place.

More than mere setting, richer than mere description, the location in which your characters live and breathe gives their story, and subsequently yours, the veracity it needs to draw the reader into the world which you've created. Make a mistake, however small, and readers will notice.

In her 1998 autobiography, Time to be in Earnest, P.D. James refers to a gaffe she made in A Taste for Death. She "sent" a traumatized woman, who had discovered a corpse in the vestry of a London church, off to Nottingham to recuperate. Unfortunately, she chose to have Miss Wharton travel from King's Cross instead of St. Pancras, a much more direct, and shorter, route. A very small oversight from my point-of-view (only two readers wrote to Miss James), but then I'm not a Londoner.

And that's another challenge I've tried to overcome by making Libby a Canadian; she's from Toronto, where I grew up and frequently visit, and I gave her a backstory that reflects my own – British grandparents, an interest in antiques and a fascination with the Edwardian era. It might be a lot easier these days to go online and search out all kinds of obscure information, but nothing quite does it like being "on location".

And if this sounds like a well-honed pitch for yet another trip to London, it is; my secret plan is to turn this novel into a trilogy. Two or three trips per book should just about cover it because you must sniff the air and make sure your daffodils bloom at the right time of the year, and that perfect shirtwaist blouse you want your main character to wear? You'd better get it right – or at least, get it on sale.

Ah, the ongoing travails of a working writer.

f & f Anne

Long Division with Remainders

When I was in 5th grade, Mr. Dilworth used to dump my desk on the floor at least once a week – paper, notes, pencils and books heaped at my feet. I didn’t organize my desk the way he thought I should, and this was his way of making me toe his line. Well, it didn’t work. Aside from scaring the bejeezus out of me, his methods confused me and I lost things. The moral of this story is that everyone needs to organize the way it works for her. Anne and I are polar opposites when it comes to working styles, but we both have structures that allow us to manage our writing.

Anne is a master of structure and organization. She writes outlines to die for, researches thoroughly, and organizes her notes before she writes. Her house always looks good too.

I am more of a nester, happily building my piles of notes and drafts until they surround me with a comfortable quilt of ideas and paper. Aaahhh. Everything right there where I can see it and put my fingers on it. A few coffee stains are simply the seasoning for fine ideas. And my house…well, it’s better since the kids grew up.

But style should not be confused with sloppy organization. Anne and I both spend serious time ensuring our prep work and the structure of the story keep things moving. There are two parts to that – the internal plan of the work which is mostly evident when it falters (Anne discussed this quite elegantly) and the external handling of large files that contain a myriad of ideas and scenes. When that falls apart, scenes are lost and rewrites vanish. It’s an ugly place to be – I know because it has happened to me, once when notes were lost and again when a computer crashed. It felt like Mr. Dilworth had gotten into my cyberspace!

As a result, I have built a straight-forward system for managing my files which protects me from the vagaries of space, time and déja vu.

First, I like color coding and compartmentalizing. I buy colored file folders and I sort my hand-written and printed notes according to subject with specific colors for each topic. For example, landscape plays a large part in my writing, so research on flora and fauna goes into (surprise!) a green folder. My new computer allows me to color code files on my desktop, so those are also coordinated. Books are tagged with color-coded post-it notes. I will have literally hundreds of articles and snippets of research before I am finished a manuscript, so this at-a-glance system is critical.

And where to put the files when they are not actually in use? The all-over-the-floor storage worked for me until I produced children and acquired affectionate dogs with muddy feet. I bought a clear plastic file box that sits beside my desk and holds the files for the project-in-progress. A second tub lives under the printer table with the projects that are in waiting. Completed work goes into a traditional filing cabinet. The kids are grown up, but the dogs still have muddy feet, so the system stays.

My outlines are mostly a few pages of scribbles and then I write. This means I also rewrite a lot. Sometimes the next great idea isn’t so great after all, so I want the old version. To keep my drafts accessible, I copy files and rename them numerically or by date, saving every version and working ahead on the latest document until I want to try yet another direction or idea. Usually I end up with between 15 and 25 saved drafts for any one book. I print about every fifty pages or so, only reprinting anything that is radically new. Documents are saved every few days on a flash drive or disk, and emailed to a separate account where they reside in cyberspace.

As I write, my characters and story lines become more complex. No matter how absorbed I am in this alternate reality, I can’t remember all the bits and pieces. So, I create tables and charts either on my computer or across large sheets of paper that are pinned to my bulletin boards. Everything at a glance.

And organizing this stuff doesn’t even have anything to do with the story! But it builds the bridge between the wandering dream and physical world. Only the one who creates the bridge knows what went into the supports that hold it up.

f & f
Susan