Today, I am delighted to welcome the next guests to my Autumn Spotlight - the lovely Cass Grafton and Ada Bright. I've always had a fascination with writers who successfully co-write (writing alone is hard enough!) so invited Cass and Ada to tell us how they have managed to make their partnership work.
Cass:
Hi! My
name is Cass and Ada is my good friend and writing partner, and we’re delighted
to be here on Wendy’s Writing Now to
talk about our co-writing process when working on our recently released book, The Particular Charm of Miss Jane Austen!
First
and foremost, we’d like to say a huge thank you to Wendy for hosting us! It’s
lovely to be here, participating in your Guest Blog openings this autumn!
By way
of background, Ada lives in California and I live in Switzerland. Aside from
the thousands of miles between us, there’s also a nine-hour time difference,
but funnily enough, that really worked in our favour during the writing process,
as you will see from Ada’s comments below!
~~
Ada:
If
you're a writer, imagine being told you could write a book and skip some of the
things you don't enjoy about writing. That is what our co-writing process is
like, and I love it!
What
Cass brings to the writing table is exactly what I lack and vice versa. What
I can produce quickly is what takes her a long time to process. So, maybe
with someone else I might feel selfish by suggesting she take ‘xyz’ while I
work on ‘abc’; but with Cass, breaking duties up to suit our strengths
generally ends up making us both happy.
Does
that mean it was the easiest thing in the world? No, we had our share of
difficult times. When things were moving along well in both our lives, we
were working pretty much continuously on the book: I would write while Cass
slept, she would edit my draft or start something new when I went to sleep and
so on But, invariably, one of our creative and/or personal lives wouldn't quite
cooperate and that meant the other person was pretty well stuck whether or not
they were feeling the same.
Still,
if I was coming back from a difficult week away from writing, I always had a
cheerleader and a partner in Cass to come back to; to get my writing juices
flowing again.
Our
process involves a lot of teasing each other as well. Never did I laugh more
than when typing "Cass writes
something brilliant here" rather than fixing the section I was
supposed to fix…or, if I'd already used that one recently, giving all the
characters Valley Girl accents just to make Cass's brain explode in the
morning. I would snicker to myself, imagining that somewhere, a half globe
away, Cass was opening up my draft, keen to work on what I'd sent her - then
innocently read the part I'd mangled and right then be cursing my name!
We would
often stage FaceTime debates for a particular section we wanted cut or kept.
The battles never felt like losses though, because whenever we were struggling
with something it would invariably be worked out better in discussion and often
lead us to exactly where we needed to go next.
We also
both swore to each other, before we'd made airline reservations, before we'd
created an outline and before we'd written a line, that our friendship needed
to come first. It felt silly at times that we'd have thought we'd need
such a promise. But maybe, by making
the promise, we'd already proven ourselves good enough friends to work through
whatever might come up!
~~~
Cass:
So there
you go! That’s how it worked on a day-to-day level - a total collaboration
where we’d each pass the baton to the other and back again, tweaking scenes
again and again until neither could remember who had written what!
We used
FaceTime frequently for brainstorming and ‘meetings’ (so much so, we felt quite
bereft once the book was out and the need for these chats dropped from almost
daily to about once a week)! This was where the time difference was a bonus
again, as early morning is my most creative time, and late at night is Ada’s!
We also
used OneDrive to upload the sections we’d worked on, along with any pertinent
notes for each other (though our most frequent lament was, ‘I hate OneDrive’)!
Oh, and
despite the challenges, we laughed - a lot! One of the abiding things we will
take from this whole co-writing process is that it was fun! After all, we had two writers working on one story - that’s
twice the energy, twice the imagination and creativity and half the workload -
what’s not to like? Yes, it was hard work; yes, we had tough decisions to make
and problems to work through or around, but fun is what it was, and we can’t
recommend it highly enough to anyone thinking about giving it a try!
Ada Bright is an author, wife, mother, friend and
all around lover of stories. She grew up
in Southern California, where she maintains a fun household and
yearns for rain once in awhile.
Cass Grafton is an author and explorer who
loves travel, words, and wine. She is a British ex-pat living in Switzerland
with her patient and lovely husband.
Cassandra (Cass) Grafton
Visit me:
Rose Wallace, Bath resident and avid Jane Austen fan, is looking forward to the annual Jane Austen Festival hosted by the city.
Her anticipation isn’t just for the events she will enjoy, though. Also attending this year will be one of her best friends, an American called Morgan, and this will be the first time in their 7-year online friendship they will meet in person! To add a further frisson of excitement, it’s the one time a year she gets to see her secret crush, an eminent archaeologist who often comes to the Festival to deliver a presentation.
What Rose doesn’t know is that one person attending the Festival has a stronger connection to it than anyone else; someone who will turn Rose’s orderly life upside down by sharing an astonishing secret with her, after which the entire legacy of Jane Austen’s work fades into oblivion.
With the happy melody of her life in tatters, Rose has to face up to a new one; a life devoid of her favourite books, characters, her beloved job and home and even some of her friends.
With the support of a displaced two hundred year old author and a charmed necklace, can Rose help to bring back some of the most beloved stories of all time and turn her own life around in the process?
