It was in those conversations that the story ideas emerged that became my second novel, A Planet Called Treason, and many of my early short stories—including my collaboration with Jay Parry, “In the Doghouse,” and a few stories that have never been published.
We all talked to one another as if we knew something about professional writing. All we really knew was how to get excited about each other’s ideas, giving each other the courage to sit down and write.
Since I was the one who had sold a story, though, the burden was on me to produce. The next story I sent to Analog was sent back with Ben’s advice that what I had was the beginning of a story, and now I needed to finish it. I was stunned—after all, I sent it to him because I thought I had ended it. But I was not so stupid that I couldn’t listen to good advice, and I found more things to do with what eventually became “Follower.”
Ironically, several people told me that they guessed the ending right from the start. I thought that was crazy, since I hadn’t even known the ending when I wrote the beginning of the story; later, though, I realized they were right: when I was flailing about for an ending, I hit upon one of the most obvious ways to take the story and used it. So of course it was predictable; I had taken it from page 5 of volume I of my Mental Cliché Shelf.
(And no, I won’t send you a copy of that collection. You have to build your own. In fact, you already have.)
Ben bought the revised version of “Follower.” Thus encouraged, I settled down to work on yet another idea I had batted around with Jay and Lane at those lunchtime writing workshops. This was the era when vital-organ transplants were still news, and I did a fairly standard paranoid what-if: What if you got an organ transplant you didn’t want, and the implanted organ started taking over your body?
Once again, Ben Bova rejected my first version. It wasn’t enough to have something horrible happen. He asked some pertinent questions: Why does the heart take over the hero’s body? Whose heart was it? What happens because he was taken over? Why was the hero chosen to receive this heart? Who did the transplanting?
Reading over this list, one can only wonder what in the world was in the story I originally submitted. The answer is: It was a very short, icky little story that I thought of, in my delusional new-writer state, as being “Poe-ish.” Sort of a modern “Tell-Tale Heart.” Except that even Poe made sure we knew why the hero would hear the thumping of the dead heart. I had given the reader nothing.
Following Ben’s lead, I came up with answers to those questions, and the result was my third sale, “Malpractice.”
But by now it should be obvious that I was not working alone. My ideas were all being tried out on two bright and talented friends, whose encouragement showed me which stories were most likely to be worth pursuing. And then I had an editor who, detecting more promise in my work than others saw, helped guide me into discovering what it takes to make an idea into a story.
Fiction writers do not work alone. Even those who hole up in an attic or take their laptop to the park and work on stories they have never discussed with a soul are still drawing from the experience of reading other stories and from the ideas other people gave them about which stories matter enough to be worth telling.
Storytelling is a communitarian act: Every story creates a community, and arises under the influence of the communities the writer has been part of. (This is the great but obvious “insight” that remains the only useful concept to emerge from the blather of Deconstructionism.) “Malpractice” was most definitely my story—every word was mine, every story decision was my own. And yet it reflects the responses of three collaborators who listened and read and made suggestions.
Skip nearly thirty years, and guess what—I’m still a supplicant, a novice writer trying to break in. Oh, sure, I have fifty-plus books published, but that’s yesterday’s news. Now I’m trying to break into the film industry in Los Angeles. I have the help of a brilliantly talented young writer, actor, and comic named Aaron Johnston, who is running the LA office of Taleswapper (the film company I formed with director Peter Johnson).
On the theory that we shouldn’t wait for me to learn how to write successful screenplays, we decided that Aaron should look over my short stories and see if there were any he’d be interested in adapting as screenplays. The plan was that we would pay him scab-labor wages as an advance against the real money he’d make when somebody funded the development of the picture.
So Aaron pored over my published story collections and chose a couple of projects—a story called “Fat Farm” and one of my oldest ones, “Malpractice.” For various reasons—not least of them the likely budget of the resulting film—we settled on “Malpractice” as the starting point.
The short story contained enough plot to get us through about twenty minutes of film. Plus, the climax of “Malpractice” is still simply finding out what’s happening, which is pretty much where a movie thriller really gets moving. Obviously the story would have to grow considerably and become much more intense.
Thus Aaron and I began sessions reminiscent of what I used to do with Lane and Jay. The danger was that because I was an established writer (of fiction, not screenplays), Aaron would take my ideas as dicta that had to be followed. The result would have been a story that I believed in and he didn’t—which would guarantee that he could not write it well.
Fortunately, Aaron was too smart and too honest to let anybody else force their ideas on him. Despite the difference in our ages (he was young enough to be my son) and whatever authority my list of publications might give me, Aaron took nothing I said as a final answer. Instead, he responded to ideas with more ideas, and when I brought up problems with the story as it was developing, he thought of solutions faster than I could. (In Storytelling: The Videogame, as with all other videogames, youth has its advantages.)
The result was a very good screenplay, entirely of Aaron’s writing, but thick with story ideas that came from both of us. It had been a true collaboration. It had also been great fun for me, and not just because Aaron was doing all the hard work.
I liked the result so well, in fact, that I pitched the screenplay to my editor at Tor Books, Beth Meacham, as a collaborative novel based on Aaron’s screenplay based on our collaborative conversations based on my short story. She read the screenplay and took our bet.
(That’s what publishers do, of course—they bet thousands of dollars that the writer can actually produce a novel, and many thousands more that readers will actually buy it. And when they lose that bet, I don’t see many writers taking up collections to make up their losses. That’s why I don’t understand the writers who get angry or resentful when publishers reject their manuscripts. It’s the publishers’ money, and so the publishers get to decide which horse to bet on in the race. If you’re a writer and nobody bets on your manuscript, the answer isn’t to whine and complain, or even to start your own race; the answer is to get another horse—to write another book or story. And another. And another, until somebody’s willing to bet on one of them.)
Once again Aaron and I plunged into outlining the novel version—which had to be even longer and more complicated than the screenplay. Movies have to communicate instantly with their audience, which means that there’s a sort of thinness required in the writing—even of the most arty and “dense” movies. It’s simply a thinner medium. There’s not as much time to explain things. And you can’t get inside the characters’ heads.
This time around, though, Aaron and I had not only each other and the normal list of friends and relatives we involve in our creative processes, we also had Beth Meacham. Inevitably, once the screenplay existed, Aaron and I became inadvertently trapped inside the decisions we had made for that version of the story. Beth helped us find our way outside, to broaden the novel and make it better. The things we learned from working with her on that project also helped me as I worked on my solo thriller, Empire—though that was also a collaboration.
Heck, it’s all collaboration, to one degre
e or another.
It’s a great thing to write a solo novel, where I get to make all the decisions and mine is the only name on the cover.
But it’s also a great thing to collaborate. That’s how I began, after all, in the collaborative world of the theatre. When I was a playwright, the scripts I wrote were never more than the plans for plays. I couldn’t know what I’d written until actors stood up and said the lines and did the actions. Working with Aaron was a return to those days—and to the days in the cafeteria at 50 East North Temple Street in Salt Lake City, where Jay and Lane and I batted ideas around like badminton birdies.
We’re already at work on a collaborative thriller based on my short story “Fat Farm.”
And Aaron is well along on his first solo novel. Because that’s where this sort of thing leads. Some hotshot young genius gets a taste for fiction writing, and he wants to turn it into a career. The only thing I ask of him is that he wait at least five years before his books surpass mine on the bestseller lists. It’s what they called, in the Vietnam War era, a “decent interval.”
—Lexington, Virginia, February 2007
Invasive Procedures Page 38