Here’s another of our blind question-answering blogs about the process of writing Clovenhoof. We deliberately didn’t look at each others’ answers, and I find it interesting to see how we both pictured something entirely different at the start of the process, and we both experienced some grief / depression when it was all over.
| What were your thoughts on collaborative writing before this project? | Iain: I had thought about collaborative writing before teaming up with Heide. There are some aspects of my writing I’m often not happy with. I’ve felt that the themes and storylines I write around have frequently led me astray and that I’ve found myself having written a novel and then looked back and thought, ‘why did I choose to write that?’ I had always wondered if a collaborator would keep me on a path that stayed closer to conventional storylines. | Heide: I thought it was something that looked really interesting. Gaiman / Pratchett, Elton/Curtis, and latterly Wilson/Strand/Konrath/Crouch all gave accounts of a fun, productive time and I wanted to try it.I came across lots of writers who hated the idea. I chose to ignore those people. I’ve met plenty more since trying it out, and it tends to be the same worries – HOW could you share a much-loved character / idea / whatever and not fret that they would suffer at the hands of a writing partner? We found the solution to that before we even started, by creating our characters together and knowing them really well. |
| When a collaborative project was first suggested, what sort of thing did you imagine it would be? | Iain: Honestly? I thought it would be a train-wreck! Experience has shown me that you should never go into business with friends, lend money to them, borrow from them or impose on their hospitality. I feared that a collaborative writing project would end equally badly and, one year down the line, Heide and I would no longer be on speaking terms. I am glad to be wrong. | Heide: I pictured a short story, or some small project that would test the water. I knew it would be fun, doing the planning, but that mostly we would form a story from beginning to end, then discuss and refine and write-up. |
| How did you picture it working, how did that stack up against how it actually worked? | Iain: I subconsciously pictured myself to be much more controlling. I am a planner and a plotter and a details kind of guy. I pictured myself criticising everything that Heide did and defending everything of mine she tried to change. I pictured a clash of styles and having to devote much more energy to re-editing it all to make it resemble a single writing voice. It was none of those things. I have no idea why… | Heide: I think I pictured a couple of planning sessions, some individual writing sessions, an editing session, and then a story with two names at the bottom.It quickly became an exercise in up-selling. A short story was never going to do. Having decided that comic fantasy was what we wanted to do, we started to play through all the funny things we could do with our characters.
We more or less decided that we were writing a novel after two or three sessions of chatting about it, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world. |
| Was there any part that you looked forward to? | Iain: I did look forward to tackling a writing genre that I hadn’t really considered before. I’ve written a lot of horror and supernatural fiction. I’ve also written a lot of (what I’d consider to be) witty dialogue. Putting the two together to write something that was not meant to be big or clever but was definitely meant to be funny was something I really looked forward to. | Heide: I do remember looking forward to the actual writing. Getting a balance between my natural inclination to dive in head first, and Iain’s serious planning habit meant that by the time we started I was DESPERATE to put words on paper. |
| Was there any part that you were apprehensive of? | Iain: Editing. I feared the process of tidying up each other’s work, stitching the whole thing together and making it work. I spent too much time at the beginning saying “But where’s the arc story? What is the high concept that holds it together?” I worried. I should have learned to sit back and enjoy the ride a bit sooner. | Heide: I was reluctant to have spreadsheets in the process. They have always seemed like the antithesis of creativity to me, with their horrible bean-counting control-freakery. I tried to have a “no spreadsheet” rule at first, but realised that I would only drive them underground. Secret spreadsheets seemed like an even worse idea. I have just counted the number of spreadsheets we have and it stands at sixteen. Sixteen! I have to say though, that I have found some of them invaluable. One is even taped to my monitor for reference. |
| What was the best part of writing Clovenhoof? | Iain: The jokes. In my not very humble opinion, it is a funny book. Heide came up with some brilliantly funny situations (such as the carnage-filled primary school assembly) and some hilarious characters (did I mention that Joan of Arc and Francis of Assisi deserve a spin-off novel?). I laughed at what Heide had written. She, allegedly, laughed at what I had written. We both laughed when an octogenarian member of Birmingham Writers’ Group gave an impromptu recital of the comedy sex scene from chapter six. | Heide: A tricky choice. I’m choosing two things: 1. The constant striving to out-do each other. I believe that it’s stretched us both. It applied to the ideas that we had for the outlines and the speed that we wrote at when we were turning out the prose. It definitely got competitive, in a good way.2.Developing the characters. It was such fun creating the main characters in the first place, but then some others (like St Francis) came along while we were writing and we tweaked them as we went. Our understanding of them always seemed to be aligned, so it was a really satisfying and entertaining process. |
| What was the worst part? | Iain: It would be cheesy to say ‘stopping’ but that is probably the truth of the matter. We were paradoxically impatient to get to the next bit, to write the next chapter, to speed ahead of one another and when it was over… I always get a bit depressed when a novel is finished. It’s not because I’m unhappy with it but because it’s a little world I’ve inhabited for X months which I am suddenly forced to leave. The temptation to write a sequel right now is strong but I am determined to resist. | Heide: We did become Clovenhoof bores. When we spent time with our friends at Birmingham Writers Group we had to make a special effort not to just talk about our project. A couple of times we failed. It’s just not polite! |
| Will you change how you do things in future? | Iain: Heide and I encountered few genuine barriers in our collaboration and we found a good rhythm in our collaboration (plot-write-edit, plot-write-edit, etc). I wonder whether I’d find that again with another collaborator or on a future project with Heide. I think that if Heide and I collaborate on another novel then we’d simply hope to replicate the success we’ve felt with Clovenhoof. | Heide: I definitely will. I won’t pretend that I will be making spreadsheets if I can help it, but I am much less suspicious of planning and structure. |
| Are you now interested in collaborative writing with other people, now that you’ve done it with Heide/Iain? | Iain: I do like the idea of collaboration a lot more now than I did eight months ago. I like the speed of collaborative writing and I like the fact that it’s not just you, alone with your PC, hammering out prose and hoping that people will like it. I think the main obstacle to collaborating with someone else is finding a writing partner with a similar style and a similar taste in stories. | Heide: Having seen how well it can work I would definitely be open to the possibility. I would be fairly careful about who I chose to work with if it was a larger piece of work though, I think we have been very fortunate to find that we have a similar outlook, style and work ethic. It occurred to me a few times that there’s quite a lot of scope for failure if those things were misaligned. |
| How does it feel to write by yourself having spent the past 8 months writing collaboratively? | Iain: I’ve just finished writing a story for a competition that I know Heide is also entering. It feels weird to have completed it and not immediately turn to Heide to ask her opinion. I’m not going to get any feedback until the competition adjudication. That is strange. | Heide: I wanted to lie about this and say that everything was hunky dory. It’s not though, it’s a bit strange. I miss the rhythm of it. We had a regular pattern of plotting / writing / editing and I had built my routine around it. I feel as though there’s a bit of a hole there. It’s like grief, almost. I’m not sure if it’s for the end of the project or the end of the process. |
