Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross write about their collaboration Don’t Take This the Wrong Way from Eastover Press.
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Thirteen Ways to Collaborate
- Resist the temptation to employ metafictional techniques to mock your partner’s propensity for sending the story back to you after having added nothing more than a few paragraphs examining the origin of a single word or phrase. Especially if you are each writing from the point of view of different characters in the story, you might long to make your character roll their eyes and bemoan your collaborator’s character’s obnoxiousness, their predictability. “There you go again leaving all the hard work of making something happen in this goddamned story to me,” your character might want to say, even though, at least up to this point, the story had not been about writing a story. You could try to mask the comment, let your character say instead, “There you go again leaving all the hard work of writing up this report to me,” but know that your collaborator will not be fooled.
- Do not respond passive-aggressively when your collaborator writes a sentence like “There you go again, leaving the hard work to me” or (more likely) fictionalizes you by making you, say, a co-worker at the office who always shirks her obligations and expediently needs to run to the bathroom or run to Walgreen’s to get migraine medication when it’s time to do something difficult and irritating, like finish a boring, work-related task on deadline. For example, do not retaliate by fictionalizing your collaborator as a self-righteous office mate the next cubicle over who is always interrupting the charming anecdote you are telling about, say, your besotted French bulldogs by saying, with a tight smile, “That’s adorable, but really, we need to complete this [boring project] now.”
- Embrace the fact that characters in the stories you write together will have strange names such as Elodie and Merguez and Zazu. Maybe strange names are a San Francisco thing?
- On that note, accept that many of your stories will be set in San Francisco.
- Contemplate the irony of your collaborator not remembering that SHE was the one to come up with the name “Merguez” (the other two names are objectively normal).
- Wonder if you should be worried about how badly your memory stinks. Even though you wondered if you might be wrong about crediting all those character names to your collaborator, you still can’t say you remember coming up with the name “Merguez,” though you do think it’s a catchy, interesting name. (For the record, you thought this even when you credited your collaborator with it.) There are whole pages in the book you wrote together that you’re not 100% certain are yours or hers. Maybe because they’re both yours–because in editing each other’s sentences, they became weird hybrids? Or maybe because you are truly losing your mind.
- There will be so many meat metaphors, particularly related to steak: “streaky like a steak, “her hair is striated, like a ribeye steak,” “the crosshatch looked like griddle marks on a steak.”
- The four or five meat metaphors will not even compare to the quantity of science analogies that will force your collaborator (who like most writers was an English major and does not know a whole lot about scientific phenomena) to research “negative feedback loop” and “homeostasis,” or Google image “brine shrimp” to visualize the organism to which her collaborator is comparing a character.
- Accept the fact that your collaborator will write characters who are always working out–exercising, going to gyms, encouraging each other to exercise, married to people who exercise–without wondering if this is a message to you that you should get off your lazy ass.
- Also, there are going to be a shit-ton of plants in your stories, especially desert plants, like barrel cactus, saguaro, and palo verde.
- Wonder if your collaborator would say that it’s rather obvious which sentences are hers and which are yours because hers are objectively more elegant.
- Do not wonder if when reviewers do pull-quotes, your collaborator counts which ones are “hers” and which ones are “yours.” In that direction lies madness.
- And if all or nearly all those pull-quotes were written by your collaborator, try to spin it in a way that doesn’t make you want to throw in the towel. E.g., My sentences helped give birth to her sentences? Or, well, hey, I must not be so bad or a writer that good wouldn’t want to collaborate with me?
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Kim Magowan lives with her family in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. She is the author of the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel.
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Michelle Ross is the author of three story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award (2017); Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (2021); and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (2022). Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, The Pinch, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Witness, and many other journals, and it is anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2021 and 2023, for which her story “My Sister’s Monkey” was chosen as one of ten spotlighted stories; Best Microfiction 2020, 2021, and 2023, the Wigleaf Top 50 2019 and 2022; and the Norton anthology, Flash Fiction America. It received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is Editor of 100 Word Story.