text: Writing Collaboration: Not for the Faint of Heart

Having a writing partner has been an amazing experience.  There’s a synergy there, a cohesiveness that spackles the deficits of a particular skill.  If I have a weakness in one area, generally my sister does not.  The benefit to our partnership is incalculable.  That is not to say it’s always been a path strewn with roses.  We’ve had to figure out what works for us as a team.  When we first began our collaboration, I had visions of us sitting side by side, computers perched prettily on our laps typing away, stopping only to beam at one another across the bluish tint of our screens.  I quickly discovered that being in close proximity to my writing partner was a complete and unmitigated disaster.  I seemed to develop some type of rigor mortis in my hands.  I willed them to at least “assume the “position” on the keyboard, but no luck.  My hands were frozen in a rictus of terror while I listened to the blaze of my partner’s fingers flying across the keyboard.  Click-click-click-click.  And with each machine-gun fire click, my mind fired back with possibilities:  she had secretly scribed the entire novel.  Worse, she had whipped out a second one and had secured a movie deal while I was downstairs asking our elderly mother to rub Ben-Gay into the unbendable claws that used to be my fingers. 

This was so not working for me.   And if I didn’t get my act together soon, she would work out the final touches on a future Pulitzer-prize winning investigative piece certain to reveal the cure for cancer.  Yes, I needed a different approach and quickly.   When I finally decided to migrate back to my own home (yeah, it had only been about thirty minutes), settle into a comfortable chair with a seriously caffeinated drink right at my elbow, ideas flowed and the novel was born.  Or at least my share of it. 

Oh, and all that writing she was doing:  facebook.  Lol.