Take your partners

What to post about when nothing has happened all week.
I could have a rant about the way spring stuck its head above the parapet a couple of weeks ago, then ducked out of sight to avoid the Arctic wind that began to blow yet more snow in from the Russian steppes. But if I did, this would be a very short post.
I could also rant about the parlous quality of copy-editing from even large, well-established publishers who you’d think would have a reputation they wanted to maintain. Everything I’ve read recently without exception has been littered with minor errors and inconsistencies that any kind of editor should have picked up. But if I did that, this post would be very long and very boring.
Or I could... No, that won’t work either.
Ah. I know.
I thought the book I’m currently reading was a debut. I’m fond of debuts, especially if there’s a chance they could turn out to be the first of a new series I may want to collect, and I’d say this one has distinct possibilities.
But when I looked closely, I found it’s not a debut at all; it’s a collaboration. The author is not one person but two: an established crime writer and a high-profile expert in forensic investigation.
I’m always intrigued by this way of writing, partly because I’ve tried it myself a couple of times and found it didn’t really work. For me, writing has always been a solitary occupation. If there are other people around, I have problems producing anything more demanding than a shopping list. Even the possibility that someone may appear at my office door is enough to play havoc with my concentration and focus. Every writer of fiction will be familiar with the way we lose ourselves in the imaginary worlds we’re creating, sometimes to the extent that we wonder where the heck we are when the real world pulls us back suddenly.
So how on earth do two people inhabit the same imaginary world simultaneously, in a way which allows the story to grow?
Another no-no for me when I’m writing fiction is starting with someone else’s idea. I tense up and go all non-committal when someone at a party says, ‘Oh, you’re a writer; I have a good story for you.’ And when I was starting out and attending workshops, my mind invariably stayed quite blank when we were given one of those exercises where the tutor gave us a skeleton scenario and told us to turn it into a story. I know it can be done; I’ve provided those skeletons to countless workshop groups, and marvelled at the variety of narratives that people produced. But I can’t do it myself.
I know it’s possible to work in tandem with someone else. Nicci French does/do it. And P J Tracy. I’ve enjoyed every one of theirs I’ve read, and both partnerships sell lots of books, so something must be working for them. And so far, A D Garrett, the one I thought was a debut, is holding up with the best of them.
But laying aside the process of writing which, for me at least, requires my own brain to provide the spark of an idea, then long periods of uninterrupted solitude to add the fictional layers – don’t they argue, or at least pull in different directions? Writers tend to be protective of their work, and rightly so; however valuable an editor’s input, it’s still the author’s name on the cover. So what happens when there are two authors, and one wants to go in one direction and the other has a different view?
I was going to suggest that maybe it’s easier when the two people are family; Nicci French is a married couple, and the Tracys are mother and daughter, so maybe they find it easier to climb inside each other’s minds. But the two people who make up A D Garrett aren’t related as far as I know; and there are probably other writing partnerships with neither blood nor marital affection in common.
Maybe I should stop trying to understand how they do it, and get on with enjoying the books.
And maybe, sooner or later, it will stop snowing, and publishers will start paying more attention to detail again.