The Focus and The Freak, Concentrate
I’ve been working for some time with the eminent Vancouver-based writer and sibling of mine, Darren Groth on a series of short young adult novels. The first of these is now available on the Kindle platform.
I’m often asked how we go about collaborating on a work of fiction. While all books are collaborative to some extent, shared authorship duties are relatively rare in our game. To be honest, it took us quite a while to figure out a collaborative approach that worked for us. We tried a few approaches unsuccessfully. Although our styles of writing are not that different from each other, the trick is finding a way to make them flow together. What we realised is that every project needs a champion and, while sharing text is relatively easy, a story’s vision can’t be doled out in a 50/50 split. Concentrate, a young adult novel, marked the first time we worked as a writing team, each of us taking on roles as necessary to serve the story. Here’s how I described the process three years ago:
Read MoreWe have tried collaboration before a few times. We tried taking alternate chapters. We tried taking on different characters. Nothing really worked and I consigned the whole endeavour to the ‘revisit one of these days’ file. Little did I know Darren was hatching his own variation on the concept.
What we eventually hit on was taking alternate drafts. The result was similar to writer-editor only with the editor taking a far more active role adding character layers and additional narrative. Our model was less ’50 per cent text each’ and something more like what Joel and Ethan Cohen do: share the writing credits where one or the other might take the lead on any individual project. Seems to work well for them. Why not us? We are already brothers after all.
QWC Blog Tour
Since Somewhere back in October, the Queensland Writers Centre has been quietly winding its way through the blogs and backwaters of Queensland’s writers. Today the bus has parked outside and a ragtag bunch of blog tourists are welcomed in. Make yourselves at home. The coffee machine is on, but I can only do two cups at a time.
Anyway, to answer your questions…
Where do your words come from?
I could be a smart arse and say ‘the English dictionary’, but instead I’ll respond in the spirit of the question.
The words come from characters and scenes. The better I can imagine those two things, the better the words. Words come easily when I have characters I know well bouncing dialogue off each other. That stuff is fun. Other times I can be moving so slowly through a scene or stretch of narrative that I wonder how the hell I will ever get to some kind of conclusion. Such stretches are hard, but inevitable in a big manuscript. My only hope is that it won’t be obvious in the final draft which bits came in the blink of an eye and which bits contain blood and sweat and other body fluids that no one wants to see on a page.
Where did you grow up and where do you live now?
I grew up in Mitchelton: a standard Brisbane suburb in the shadow of a shopping centre. We literally lived a block away from the thing. I spent much of my childhood watching the place expand like the Blob, devouring land as it went. I went to school next door to it. On weekends I rode my bike illegally through its carparks (ah, those days before Sunday trading…).
Mitchelton has little literary tradition that I know of (though I heard Janette Turner Hospital lived there for a while), but then both my brothers and I have ended up writers. I think it’s a combination of genetic predisposition and clearly some kind of social engineering experiment conducted by the the city council on our suburb during the seventies and eighties.
Right now, I’m in exile by the beach (it’s a nice exile), but in a few short weeks I’ll be back in the city surrounded by good coffee, restaurants, and extended family (that’s not necessarily in order of importance…or maybe it is…let me think about that).
What’s the first sentence/line of your latest work?
I don’t tend to decide that stuff until very late in a work’s composition and I don’t usually overload that first sentence with Dickens or Tolstoy style witticisms. I looked up the first sentence of the new novel and it’s not all that flash (and my editor has suggested a new intro anyway). I looked up the last and realised that it will probably remain the final sentence regardless of whatever further work will go in, so here it is:
Brisbane is beautiful this time of year.
At least I can keep that line in now.
What piece of writing do you wish you had written?
Pretty much anything from the Twelves. If I had to choose one, it would probably be To Kill A Mockingbird. If it meant though that, like Harper Lee, I would never write another novel? That I would have to really really think about. That would be a classic deal with the Devil, wouldn’t it?
What are you currently working towards?
A balance of work and life with some kind of writing taking the fore in the work side. Simple.
Complete this sentence… The future of the book is…
…assured. Readers will continue to read. Writers will continue to write. And there will be something in between that we call a “book”.
Read MoreShortlisted for the Queensland Premiers Awards
Some time ago I started a blog to chart the creation of a new novel. The idea was to follow the ups and downs in writing—the long drawn out pauses between frantic flurries of activity that make up the writing of a larger work into something that might be something of a success.
That same novel, now titled None of the Other Flies Follow My Crooked Lines, has been shortlisted in the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards in the unpublished manuscript category.
Wahoo! They even plonked my name on the front page of the site after JM Coetzee and David Malouf. How’s that for strange?
Read MoreThe Books
