Shall We Dance? Writing With a Partner

Greetings devoted readers!

Maybe I should make that “devoted reader” since it’s not clear we have more than one groupie – yet. Anyway, much of writing is discipline so here is the second installment in our blog. We intend to be semi-regular bloggers in order to entertain our readers on topics as diverse as cultural influences on our writing (or, where to find the best Mai Tai on Waikīkī), our favorite Hawaiian music groups and why we are writing them into our books, the canine and feline inspirations for our four-legged characters and true stories behind some of the inanities our character encounters in the corporate and technology worlds.

One of the questions friends often ask is how do we manage to write together, particularly when we are three time zones removed from one another. Surprisingly, it hasn’t been a challenge for us, not that it has been all beer and skittles (for the record, one of us likes Skittles, the other prefers Coconut M&Ms). Perhaps we did all our squabbling growing up. (Mom liked ME best, I just want to say for the record.) (Believe what makes you feel good, even if it’s wrong.)

One of the things that makes writing together easy for us is that we do not have the same strengths as writers but, as the Apostle Paul would say, we are all part of the body. Meaning, one person is a hand and the other is a foot in terms of getting the body of work up and running. (I know which one of us is the ‘okole, and it isn’t I, hee hee.) That is, one of us is “the organizer” in terms of plotting, outline, structure, and the up and down lifting of writing. The other one is the “tarter-upper.” That’s “tart” as in “adorn or decorate,” NOT as in “promiscuous.” The TU adds a turn of phrase, pads out the scene (What does so and so look like? What are his or her quirks? What does the scene look like?). It’s not quite that black and white, but you get the idea. We write well together because we acknowledge and use each other’s strengths.

A challenge for writing partners is ensuring that the writing hangs together and there is no obvious change of voice (i.e., when one of us takes over the writing). We are lucky that, as sisters, we share the same demented sense of humor, to the point where neither of us can, in many cases, remember who wrote what. That’s the idea, really, because “Maddi” is THE writer and nobody reading our work should be able to tell when The Other Sister started writing. Even more telling, in some cases when one of us is reviewing/editing/adding to a section, we find that the other one had the same idea. You end up deleting things you added because the other sister already put the same ideas in there. They say that old married couples can finish one another’s sentences. We do that a lot – only in our case, we start one another’s sentences – the one the other one was about to say. (For the record, I thought of spanikopita in the Greek restaurant scene first).

Writing with a partner has many advantages. For example, someone else is always editing your writing. That someone won’t hesitate to tell you when something isn’t working or needs to be changed (or she might just go ahead and change it). Or the reverse: when one of us needs reassurance that our writing is witty, the other is there to provide it (lying when necessary). (Except my stuff is always funny.) When you are having trouble writing a scene or a chapter, you can turn to the other writer to finish it up. Perhaps the best thing about writing together is it’s great fun. We email one another wacky articles (reality is more hilarious and odder than anything you can imagine as fiction) and bounce ideas off one another. We delight in writing particularly entertaining sections and sharing immediately.

We aren’t expecting that Maddi Davidson will be added to the pantheon of great American writers (Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hawthorne, note the absence of Hemingway because one of us things he is the most overrated writer on the planet…). (The other one of us thinks Dr. Seuss should be on the list.) We write because we like to laugh, and we like escapism, and it is a sad world in many respects, especially now. The nicest compliment – and validation of our writing – we received was when someone in a writing workshop said that she’d so much “awful stuff” in her life that she hadn’t been able to read more than a page or two for several years, until she started reading our writing submission. She was drawn in, found herself laughing, and read the entire chapter. That’s validation enough for what we do. Jesus put it more grandly: “In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer! I have overcome the world.” We are not going to overcome the world, but we hope we can deliver some good cheer to our readers that might help them overcome at least some tribulation in their lives. “A merry heart doeth good like medicine.” We hope so.

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