Lifewriting Podcast EPISODE 7: How to Collaborate without killing each other!

Welcome to the Life Writing podcast where married authors and screenwriters Stephen Barnes and.

Tananarive due talk about writing during stressful times, breaking into Hollywood and balancing life.

Every week we'll share more tips and more tips and more tips on how to build a better life while you create your dream projects.

Even if it's only one sentence a day, you can create the career of your dreams. When life writing is the application of the tools of writing to life and.

The tools of life to your writing. So the first thing I have to say, darling, is happy Valentine's Day.

Happy Valentine's Day to you too, sweetheart.

It's Valentine's Day for us. Even though this will air a bit later at the end of Valentine's week.

And even though you're at home and I'm in Wakanda.

Wakanda really is just a state of mind, isn't it? But his background, it absolutely is. His virtual background is also Wakanda. So. Yeah.

Hey, hey. It's not virtual background. I'm going to start talking about Eagly in CGI if you're not.

Uh. Oh, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Stop, stop. We like Peacemaker. I don't know if you're watching Peacemaker. We love Eagly. I call it the Eagly show. So you mentioned earlier that the Wakanda weather is great. LA is also having a heat wave, so I'm wearing a summer dress. And we drove to Laguna beach this past weekend Saturday.

Drove down there and had brunch and then drove down to the beach. And you at least were able to get your toes into the water.

I know. There was so much traffic. Do you know what this man did? Well, he was parked, and I mean forever parked in a line trying to get into a parking lot. He said, honey, why don't you just get out and go to the water and put your feet in the ocean? And I sure did. And I was gone for 30 minutes, maybe 20, 30 minutes. And when I came back, he had inched forward like maybe three spaces in the lobby.

I know, it was ridiculous.

It wasn't moving.

No, no, it wasn't moving at all. I hadn't anticipated that. So next time we'll try to. We'll try to get down there earlier and park a little further away and walk in. And, you know, I think people are celebrating the fact that very slowly life is starting to return to normal. There's a combination of, you know, people who are vaccinated and people have already contracted it and therefore have antibodies. Our understanding of social distancing and masking and how to deal with things in the hospitals. I think we're slowly. I'm hearing more and more real authorities using terms like cautiously optimistic.

That is.

Yeah, stay safe. But, you know, we are moving in the right direction.

Yeah. And admittedly, Steve is usually the one who's like, hey, let's get out of the house and go for a drive. And I become more like that person who's like, do we have to go anywhere? But I'm so glad we did. It felt good just to be in the sunshine. First of all, our bodies need the vitamin D. Great to be in the sunshine. And we actually did outdoor dining at a restaurant, kind of off to ourselves. I'm very Covid conscious, borderline hypochondriac. No kidding. So I didn't realize I was. I was this ready to be out, but I really was. So thank you, honey, for pushing for that. It was a beautiful day. It made the day feel longer. No, like you said, all the days just sort of fly by when we stay in the house.

Charlotte, I can't believe it's already 4 o' clock in the afternoon here.

Yes, that's because we didn't go to the beach today. See, that's right.

I have been out of the house.

You know, that's exactly what happened. So we are just sort of.

We really did hardly look more like the massive side of my family.

Oh, no. What? Okay, there's a little bit of massa in just about everyone, if you're African American. Anyway, so. So, yes, we have really enjoyed each other's company over these past few days. I think Valentine's Day just made us more conscious and aware of how lucky we are to have each other. I love waking up to you every morning. I love going to sleep with you every night. And all the time in between, you know, with us co raising our son Jason, Homeschooling our son, Jason. You are, honey. You're my everything. Love you.

Love you right back. You're everything that I was looking for and more. I mean, that I think about all the things that you are. I realize that, you know, you've got just one hell of a buffer. I mean, there is like, you're not even close to any edge where I'd be thinking, you know, is there a trap door here? No, no, no, no, no. You're. I'm. We're in the center of the map, honey. We're not even close to the edge.

Well, after 23 years, I certainly hope so. Right?

Well, I guess.

Absolutely. Almost 24 almost 24.

Almost 24 years. It'll be 24 this year. Absolutely. So what do we have that relationships? You know, marriages and friendships and collaborations.

Yes, you know about it.

The connections that each other and thing is that marriage has business aspects. So you're collaborating on, you know, buying a home or raising a family or maintaining business. And of course, you know, Tinanarive and I more directly, we collaborate on projects, fiction and nonfiction. So, you know, give us a little talk about that. What is the subject of this afternoon symposium?

Today we are talking all about collaboration and I think the working title is how to collaborate without killing each other. So we're. We start with all the sweetness and light. We knew immediately that we could collaborate together. You know, I think that was something. Even though we never maybe talked about it that first weekend.

I think, no, I think that when we were in the airport leaning our heads against each other saying, you know, we could build an empire together, I think we, we understood the implications.

We literally said that we, we. We'd only known each other for two days, maybe three. Maybe three days maybe. It was a long weekend. We were at Clark Atlanta University for an amazing conference called the African American Fantastic Imagination Explorations and Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. It's where I met Steve. It's where I met his friend, the late, great Octavia E. Butler, for a mentor. Samuel R. Delaney was there also. Jewel Gomez was there. I mean, woo, what a heady weekend. But meeting Steve, I mean, we just knew there's a whole different. We could do a whole different. And we'll do a whole different podcast on our story, correct?

Well, yeah, I'm sure that we will. And they'll be. We'll drop pieces of it and a lot of the elements of that are going into a project that we'll be talking about later on, the Lover's Journey. But it was one of the, the very best events of my entire life because it was one of the few times in my life when my head, my heart and my gut all wanted the same thing at the same time. And I, I knew I could feel that this was what I wanted and would transform my life. And it was completely accurate. Well, I. Well, a life transforming event, my sweetie.

Oh, thank you, sweetie. Well, this. I feel the same way. Um, and I was writing a dating column at the time for the Miami Herald, so I knew I was looking for a partner. What I did not understand was how much I wanted that partner to be a writer. I don't think it was even on my list of things I Wanted in a mate. It was like I dared not dream of narrowing my list just down to people who were writers because I was having enough trouble finding people, period. You know, that felt like they were an appropriate relationship.

I didn't have a writer on my list.

I didn't know.

I didn't really dream about that. I mean, you certainly would have had to have been a reader.

Sure.

It would have been nice if you hadn't. Well, you probably would have to have had an appreciation of genre.

Yes.

Because I'm not going to be in a position of constantly having to defend why I write what I write.

Right, right.

Or like, the movies that I like. I mean, it's like, you know, we. The heart wants what it wants in that sense, but there were things that had to do with intelligence and ambition and physical appearance. Physical appearance was mostly a matter of health and self respect and discipline. You know, it was there. You. You were more than I was looking for.

You work out, I work out. We had similar values in that sense, Wanting to feel sort of alive in our bodies and. Yeah, but that writer piece. You're right. When we were in that airport at Atlanta, which is still my favorite airport, by the way, leaning our heads together when we said those words, we could build an empire. I guess you're right. We were thinking in terms of how we could put our skills together and conquer Hollywood literature, all of it. Conquer it. You know, we're still working on that part.

Well, one of the mistakes we made is when we said we could build an empire together, we forgot we were going to have to build it.

Yes.

On some level, we were thinking that people were going to come and hand it to us. Well, you guys are fabulous. You have an empire.

That's not the way we're. That ain't the way it works.

It ain't. So it was a matter of we were going to have to look at who we were and the projects that we could create, and then we were going to say, where is the audience? And we were going to have to do some work to actually find that audience and inform them about who it is that we are and what it is that we're up to. And that was going to take a lot of time and thought. I mean, in some ways, I wish that we'd started then doing the things that we're starting to do now, like a podcast like this, for instance. But, you know, we were doing the best we could and we were learning as fast as we could. So, you know, it's just one. One step at A time.

And the most important thing we had to learn in order to start building that empire was how to write together. That was like.

I'll say that. Yeah, yeah, that's perfectly reasonable.

I mean, I'll just say really quickly, and then I want you to talk a little bit about your background. I had never collaborated, really, with someone creatively. I found, like, an old manuscript from college that my. My former college roommate, Susan Jordan, I knew her as Charlie. We worked on a little play, you know, when we were in college together. But in terms of professional work out of college, grad school, maybe I'd collaborated on a newspaper story or two when I worked for the Miami Herald, but I had never even dreamed of the necessity or reasoning behind collaborating with someone, because writing has always been a very, very private playground for me. I had never thought about inviting someone in.

You know, I guess I first knew I was going to collaborate when I realized that I wasn't a good enough writer. And I was looking for guidance. So I would find ways to ask professional writers, you know, if I could get either feedback on my stories or, you know, could we conceivably work on something together so I could learn what your process is?

How old were you? At what. When you.

I was in. I was in my 20s when I started looking around like that, and I. I remember talking to Harlan Ellison and Ted Sturgeon and Gordy Dixon and a few other people, and they were all very polite, and they all offered advice, but they did not offer me their creative time. And I totally understand that I probably wasn't good enough yet. I continued to write on my own. I continued to do my work. And eventually I asked my question of someone who was willing to give me a chance. I think that my writing had gotten good enough that he could take a look at it and see, oh, he's done his work. He's done his homework. That was Larry Niven.

Yeah.

Larry basically said, well, there was a story that I wrote some time ago, and I wasn't able to finish it. I wasn't able to get it to being where I wanted it to be. Would you be interested in taking a look at that? Well, I thought about that for about a hundredth of a second and said, oh, yeah, great opportunity. Oh, it was an amazing opportunity. And in. In much the same way that when you meet someone who you're really attracted to, your brain gets faster, you know? And it was. It was. I knew this was the opportunity of a lifetime. So when I read the story that he gave me, I was at My smartest, you know, I was just, I was humming. I mean, all cylinders were burning. And I looked at the story and I realized that I was in luck. Because if the problem with the story had been the biology of the physics, I wouldn't have had anything to contribute because Larry simply knew more about those things than me. But the problem was in the psychology. He did not understand something about group psychology. And I, I spotted it quickly and I realized, oh my God, there is, there's room for me here. There's something I can do. There's something I can contribute to this story, honestly. So I told him my thoughts, actually, I rewrote it. And he liked very much what it was that I'd done. And I, there were a couple of different things that I added to it. Then his partner, Jerry Pornell, who he'd collaborated with, you know, on many books, including the first science fiction book that ever made it to the New York Times bestseller list. And Jerry had ideas. I mean, we had this great time of at Larry's house, them drinking Irish coffee. Meet us drinking coffee up until like 2, 3 o' clock in the morning, just burning, just, just brainstorming. And it was just talk about a peak experience. I got to watch the way these guys would bounce ideas off of each other. And so that story became the Locusts, which was my first major publication, my first, my. It was a Hugo nominated novella. And that led to working with Larry and other things. Now there were some rules that we had, you know, that Larry taught me about collaborations. One of them is that somebody has to have the kill switch. One of the other person is always the one who can say no. Now, because of my psychology, even at this point in my life when I work with Larry, I'd still like for him to have the kill switch. Because it's, you know, I, it's the, it's the relationship that we understand. It's the relationship that we've had for 40 years almost, right. You know, you know, over 30 years. So there's a certain. We both, it, we both take some comfort in that. It's a lovely thing. And I watched him and Jerry working together and sometimes Jerry would have the kill switch, sometimes Larry would have it. But then when I was asked to come in and work with the two of them on a project, then it became a three way collaboration. And that was an amazing experience because I would take their ideas and then I would go off and I'd write the first draft and then I'd take it to them and they would tear the draft apart. That was the legacy of hero. I'm not sure that in the history of the world, anyone has ever had two different bestselling writers sitting on opposite sides of the room, tearing apart their prose at the same time. And Jerry would take what I can only describe as sadistic glee. I mean, yeah, we're ripping apart Barnes's precious pros. Barnes, was your mother scared by a gerund? I mean, it was.

Wow.

And I would drive home. I remember I would drive home crying because it was so rough. He was, you know. But I knew that if I could survive this, if I could last in that environment, it would be like. It would be like a white belt invited to fight in the black belt class. You got the hell beat out of you every week, but you were learning. You were learning at mach speed. I could learn things there that I could not learn anywhere else in the world, and I think that I did.

That sounds horrifying. That sounds that. I'm going to write that down as, like, my next horror story because, oh, my gosh. But. But you're right. It was a great learning experience. And it's funny. It's funny you say that because even though I had not dreamed of collaboration, part of what was in my mind, because I knew you were coming to the writers conference before I met you, a friend had said, oh, there's this black writer named Stephen Barnes, kind of like, you're black, he's black. But, hey, I can't. I can't put it down. It worked okay. But you're black, he's black. Someone had done some research into you, and I had quite accidentally stumbled upon your episode of the Outer Limits called A Stitch in Time, starring Amanda Plummer. And it's fantastic. It's such a great episode that when the series wrapped up, they actually went back to those characters and used your.

Yeah. They considered that to be the best episode of the entire series. And it was a real collaboration writing for Hollywood. If I had not had that experience, Larry and Jerry, I don't think I could have succeeded as much as I did in Hollywood, because it's all about, can you. Can you be flexible enough to hear what the other people are asking? Can you give them what they're asking for in a way that they did not anticipate? That's an important thing that I've learned. And can you keep your integrity in the process?

Yeah. And I do know how much I wanted to write for television and film then, but I was curious. I'd had an experience in college where my friend Robert Vamosi directed a short film based on one of my short stories. So it was both a peak experience, like all my classmates coming together, working late hours in the cold to make this little student project. And at the same time, those of you who have ever been on a film set, it was like pulling teeth. It was, like, miserable. It was cold. It took forever to get the lighting set up just by itself. I was like, oh, my gosh, why do people do this? So I was about 10 years or more out of that process when we met, and my curiosity had risen again because by that time, people were optioning my first novel, the Between. And then subsequent to that, there was interest in my second novel, My Soul to Keep. And I was starting to get curious. And I, like you, didn't think well, in fact, worse than you. I had no experience writing screenplays. So not only didn't I think I wasn't good enough, I didn't even know the mechanics of writing screenplays. The formatting had been such a mystery to me. I really envy new writers now who can use programs like Writer Duet, which is what we use to collect.

Great program, by the way. And it's free.

Yeah.

Writerduette.com use it if you're.

I mean, nothing against final draft. It is the industry standard, but you can convert your Writer Duet documents to final draft without having to pay the final draft prices. So just, you know, word to the wise. But we didn't even have. We didn't even have collaborative, you know, software. I was just sort of mystified by it. And when I saw your Outer Limits episode and I knew you were so far ahead of me in terms of writing for television, at the very least, I wanted to pick your brain. I knew I could learn from you. When I first approached you, it really was sort of with a thought, oh, maybe this could be a mentor.

Yeah. And the honest truth is that that was the only thing in my mind once I realized how skilled you were, how talented you were. I. My commitment was just, how can I help her? You know, I had no thought of any personal gain from that. It was like I was. I hadn't even noticed that. I found you attractive. I buried that because I wanted to be. I wanted to help, you know, I didn't want to be on the make from you and have you feel, oh, he's just trying to help me because he's trying to get in my pants.

And none of that. I felt none of that coming from you. But somewhere along the way, in those two and a half days together, we totally fell in love with each other. Right.

It definitely happened. We'll talk about that another time. But, yeah, there was a point at which all my clean and elevated intent went right out the window. Boy.

So, I mean, that brings us sort of to the collaborative aspect of it. It takes a lot more than just wanting to collaborate or just realizing, oh, we should collaborate. Because at that time, a very unusual thing had happened. My Soul to keep was at Samuel Goldman Productions, and they reached out clearly out of desperation. I had never seen a draft, but the drafts apparently were not working. So because of that, out of desperation, they reached out to the author. And it was only later I would realize how desperate an act that actually is for studio executive. Especially back in those days, there was not a whole lot of interest in bringing the author into the process or.

Helping for some reason. And some of the reasons for that are good.

Yeah.

Awful lot of novelists cannot collaborate in a room full of people. They get very upset. They also have a hard time being flexible about their concepts. You know, to be able to see a different way of doing it, you know, it can be. It can be difficult, or they might not be. They might not be familiar with the format, or they might not be able to compromise in terms of production. Yeah.

And I think the most common thing is, no, I don't want to change that. No, that has to be that way, or this entire story doesn't work. Which sometimes is a valid point, and sometimes it's just not Understanding the process of adaptation. A novel will always exist on its own. Nothing can ruin that. An adaptation is just an attempt to tell the same story, as you often like to say. Like, two people heard about the same event from two different directions. So you're looking at the same event from two different directions. And that's kind of the way we look at adaptation. But so let me set the stage here. Samuel Goldwyn Productions has called. The executive wants to put me on the phone with the Samuel Goldwyn himself, who I believe was the grandson of the original Samuel Goldwyn, but he's like a Goldwyn. I'm doing a phone pitch. We're supposed to pitch My Soul to Keep. And it was horrible. I've mentioned this, I think on past podcast. It was such a bad pitch because. And the reason it was a bad pitch was because my attitude was, well, you read it. I'm going to do that, you know, kind of thing. Like, I didn't have a take. You know what I mean? It's like my take is here's the book, and we're going to do this. So he was like, wow. The. Just the fact that I was so new was wafting off of me. Okay. And the.

We have to do a show sometime on the skill of pitching, which is a separate issue.

That's a whole different thing. So. So in any case, the executive called, kind of like really apologizing to me for even putting me on the phone to embarrass myself in that way. It was that bad a call. And to further contextualize the story, Steve and I really needed a break. We were either engaged or just married. I forget what the chronology is, but we needed money. I had moved or was about to move from Miami to Washington.

I think we were just married.

Right? We were just. We're newlyweds. I've left my job, so I had a job as a reporter for the Miami Herald. We were going to follow this romantic notion. Two writers, no, one with a job creating together. And let's just say I wasn't going that great at the beginning. We were not pulling in a lot of income, and we were struggling. We needed a big win.

Yeah. I had moved away from Hollywood because of family issues. I was living in the Northwest, so I was not able to pitch. You know, I was not there in Hollywood to get the jobs, and I thought that it would be okay. But after a couple years in the Northwest, those jobs started drying up, and the people who lived in Los Angeles got the jobs, and I did not. So, yeah, it was. It was a scary time.

It was rough. It was rough. So even though some of the suggestions they were making didn't sit well with me and were not in integrity with how I saw my book, I was in that point of sort of desperation. Okay, okay, okay. Let's see what they say. Let's see what they say. Let's see what they say. And so we wrote, like, a page and a half take to try to, you know, pull something together from the shambles of that. That meeting. And then we faxed it to them. That's how old this story is. We faxed it to them, and we probably sat over the fax machine like it was a warm fire, waiting for a response. And finally we called the guy or whatever and we heard this phrase that will haunt us for all of our marriage. He's like, yeah, I got your treatment. He says, full of enthusiasm. I love. And when he said that, man, we saw our bank account filling up, our bills getting paid our future set. And then he finished that. I have this I love that I have this. And it's like, oh, okay, well, yeah, guts. You have it.

You have it.

You know, I didn't. Again, I didn't understand that in Hollywood, it's just all enthusiasm and it's kind of a cliche and a joke, but it's true. People really do talk like that. If they've heard of you, they're a fan. You know what I mean? Never mind.

Super excited to be talking to you. It's not just excited, it's super excited. Everybody is super excited about everything.

I think a lot of caffeine and cocaine in the past have contributed to that attitude, but it's.

That was definitely true on one of the shows I work. I won't mention which one it was, but we're having a, you know, good time with Bolivian marching powder.

Wow. So, you know what, What I didn't get, and the reason for this is not that they're intentionally trying to be fake, even though it sounds sometimes like they are. It's really because it takes that kind of enthusiasm to get a project moving if you're going to go from an ide to the screen. First of all, it's a miracle on a small scale. Every single time that happens, it is a miracle something gets on any kind of screen. Yeah.

You know, the first time I. My first hour long episode of the television show when I was over at 20th Century Fox and I watched all these people and it was. It was shot partially on a soundstage where they'd shot a Matthew Broderick movie, Project X. So they had. It was a big set. Okay. That they were able to use repurposed for this show I'd written. And I watched all these people and all these artists and all these workers, and it hit me for the first time how big this was and how important it was. It was stunning. Just. It's big business.

It's a big business. It takes a village. It takes a whole camp. So we're so new and of course, nothing ever came of it. Okay. But what happened in between those two things, between that disastrous call with Samuel Goldwyn to I love that I have this, was Steve and I having our very first argument. We pretty much had an idyllic courtship. Well, that's because I lived in Miami and he lived in Washington State, and it was all letters and email and phone. So there's only so much trouble you'll get into. But now that we were married and we're in close quarters and we're trying to play together on the creative realm for the very first time, we ran into issues. Some of it was like communication style stuff. At one point, I called Steve a bad name that I have never called him ever since. It was like, why are you being this. And we had our first. Actually, I think maybe it was before we were married because we had our first marriage counseling session before we got married. And I brought it up to her and we talked about why we don't speak to each other this way and all this kind of thing. But it really just spoke to how unprepared I was emotionally to be challenged in an emotion, in a creative space. And I would imagine that some of Steve's sessions with Larry and Jerry were making their way into our conversation. Probably all the guys have where they're talking to each other. That was a little bit different for me, maybe.

I think that one thing that women sometimes misunderstand and call it mansplaining, that guys are conversationally aggressive with each other, they talk over each other, they beat the hell out of each other in conversation. That's. That's just what they do. And to a certain degree, it's enjoyed as a verbal contact sport. And I, I think that it's possible that I brought some of or too much of that into our work.

Right.

Because I was simply used to confrontation.

Yeah. Butting heads. And I was like, so anyway, that was our first round, I'll call it. And, and, and since that time, although I primarily write my novels solo, and we both write solo short stories, we collaborated on our first short story which was called Danger Word. It was a zombie short story about a grandfather trying to help his granddaughter survive the zombie apocalypse. Which is actually.

It was a little. It was a little boy.

Oh, that's right. In the original story, it was a little boy. We adapted it. Speaking of adaptation, we adapted it to a short film and we aged up the character change the gender from an 8 year old boy to a 13 year old girl.

Right.

And that is it stars Frankie Faison and Saoirse Scott. And you can actually watch that on YouTube@www.dangerword.com. that was our first collaboration. And since that time we have written four novels in conjunction with actor Blair Underwood, who basically was, if a book had an executive producer, someone who kind of uses like you're using their name and their face and they have some input in the story, but they're not a writing partner. So we wrote four novels in the Tennyson Hardwick series, which is erotic thrillers. And we wrote two teen zombie novels that were based on The World of Danger Word. We expanded that short story into two novels, and we've also done screenplays together. And, you know, we've had to learn some. Some really important lessons along the way. Should I. Should I go into the keeper story?

I think you should go wherever it is that your little mind tells you to go.

Because again, I'm really, really thrilled to collaborate with Steve now. We are in a very good place. I think we're collaborating better than ever, I would say. Would you agree?

Yeah, I think that we both. It's both more peaceful process. And you're not as afraid to fight, right?

Because I don't have a confrontational personality. And as in a creative space, you can't just say, oh, okay, okay, you win. We'll do it your way. Because someone else is more comfortable arguing, right? It's like, no, because the story might suffer. I actually have a responsibility to speak up. And even though we may not ultimately see eye to eye, the person who is in the driver's seat, who has that kill switch that Steve mentioned, we've both learned that that person has to exercise grace.

That person actually has to be more flexible because they have the responsibility of being, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. And so when I'm in the driver's seat, I know I listen extra carefully to everything that you're saying, and I really try to consider it so that you don't feel that you're going to be at a disadvantage if I have that power, and also so that you'll be merciful when you have it.

Right. So we were a few years ago working on a screenplay, original screenplays, called the Keeper. And this idea had come to me based on an incident when I was young, spending the night in my great grandmother's room. She had emphysema, was on an oxygen machine, and the machine was like a creature. Scary. I was worried she would die overnight. And Steve has had this experience, too. It's like one of those stories that just came to my mind, like, almost. Almost fully formed. Like, I could see it. Oh, here's a young girl. She's forced to live with her Asian grandmother because that's the only person who's left to take care of her. What if the grandmother dies? Then what? What if the grandmother conjures a creature to take care of her? Then what? I mean, it was just so crystal clear. And because I always collaborate with Steve on screenplays, there's just something about writing screenplays that I think really makes having a collaborator a huge advantage. There's so many things to think of. One of you may be more of a visual thinker in terms of visual symbols. One of you may be better with character development and dialogue. One of you may be better with seeing, like, these huge sets, you know, because it's just there are a lot of different skills involved in it.

One of the differences that I see that I mentioned earlier today is that you seem to write, and I think to a certain degree, horror writers and fantasy writers, right? By looking at the symmetry and connection of different images. How does it feel? How does this succession of images feel? The logic to it is not as important as the emotional truth of it. Now, that works fine for your work because you have an extreme amount of structure at the level of unconscious competence. It's very clear that you were properly educated in terms of literary structures and how to bring this to being. But collaborating with you can be difficult if I don't understand what that structure is, what are you seeing? What's the core of the universe? So I need to ask questions about what? If you have a creature, you're going to be able to have that creature do a series of things, and they'll all make some sense because it's all coming from someplace inside you. But if I'm going to try to help you design that creature or execute scenes with that creature, I need to understand that creature. What does it want? What does it eat? How does it live? What are the physics of its reality? If I don't understand that, I can't build a model of that creature that enables me to write about it organically. It's your baby, but, yeah, I've never seen a baby before. I want to cut that baby open and take a look and see what. How does the baby work?

Not cut my baby, but anyway. Yes, but that was right. And I had raced. I had raced ahead, like, into like a 20 page, probably outline. And you, and you. We have. Steve has a very specific structure going from one and a half pages to three pages to then maybe between five and ten pages, but just to understand, like, what is the entirety of this story. And I will admit, very often I have to write longer in order to scale back. I have to get into the scenes, I have to walk with the characters a bit, and they scale. So I was like feeling like, well, I don't want to go back and write three pages. And I was really, for the first time in all these years we've been collaborating, thinking, I don't know if I. I need to collaborate anymore. This is a lot of trouble having to, like, write this kind of treatment this way and explain things this way, and I should just do it on my own.

I'm thinking to myself, well, if she doesn't want to let me in there, that's fine. I've got other things I can do.

Right.

I'm not going to constantly be feeling like I'm. You know, it's like, for God's sake, this is your idea. I'm trying to help you with your idea, and I'm getting the hell beat out of me, right? So for doing this, you know, just either let me in or let me go, you know?

Yeah.

Perfectly happy not doing this.

We were having some very contentious meetings, and I don't know if there's one specific moment of breakthrough, like with Judd Hirsch and Ordinary People or whatever. Old reference. But. But we. We came through the other side of it. And what I can tell you is that I could honestly see that the question Steve had been asking about the genesis of the creature, where did it come from? Some of that history of the creature really did make it a better story. I mean, probably I was admitting it somewhat grudgingly at first, but it was enough for me to say, you know, what if instead of not collaborating anymore, we just learned how to collaborate better? Right, Better. Without as many arguments. So we came up with some tools. You know, we're talking about how you can collaborate without killing each other. People ask me all the time, oh, my God, how do you collaborate with your husband? Well, we're going to tell you how. One of those rules Steve mentioned is that someone has to have the kill switch.

And that kill switch varies depending on what the project is. The person who knows the most about the story or has the greatest passion for the story or has the time to be writing it. Yeah, that person will get the kill switch. What doesn't happen is one person is writing the first draft while the other person has the kill switch. Unless, you know, that's not entirely true at this point, I would work on a project with Tananari with her having the kill switch. And I am still doing the first draft because I trust her enough. I don't feel like I'm going to get beat up. If I make a mistake, I go in the wrong direction.

And when we say kill switch, I just want to say we mean final word. If we're arguing about whether she should be wearing a red shirt or a blue shirt, the person who has a kill switch gets the final say.

Yeah, that's right. That person has the ultimate leverage so that's one of the rules. Another one of the rules that we set up very early was that the relationship itself could never be on the table. It could never be at risk. We. I knew that in order for this to work, we'd have to be able to fight. I mean, I knew that. That an artist working by themselves will argue. Argue internally about what I should. Should I do this? Should I do this? Should I do this? Should I do this? So it was glaringly obvious from both my experience and common sense that we were going to argue and that if we both had strongly held opinions, those arguments could become brisk. You know, they could be vivid and intense. So what it could never be is, well, I'm leaving, or, oh, no, if you don't agree with me, it's, you know, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna hug you. I mean, I'm not gonna kiss you. I'm, you know, whatever that is. You know, that kind of thing damages not only the collaboration, but the relationship itself. So as far as I was concerned, the relationship much more important than the.

And I would imagine that my feelings, you know, in the early stages of writing, the Keeper might have been so we could preserve peace in the relationship. Because we can say there's a rule that it won't have an impact on the relationship. But, you know, sometimes after a heated session, there could be some silences, you know, while we're watching TV together.

And, yes, I mean, I've had arguments where it took me a couple days to find my way through. Through it. To be able to understand your position well enough to not feel like this was going to be a disaster, you know, that this was going to cause us problems. Other times, it was realizing we'd had a miscommunication. It took me a couple days to figure out how to communicate with you so you could understand what it is that I meant.

I'm so glad you brought up communication because that's. That leads us to our next point in terms of how we collaborate without killing each other is we have a safe word, which, ironically, is the same safe word we use for audio editing. So this will be interesting. But if we feel like we're not hearing each other right, there are two things we use to address this. I'll talk about the safe word. You can talk about the next thing. But if we're not hearing each other, or maybe our tones are rising so that they don't sound friendly or whatever's happening. Whatever's happening. Our safe word is rosebud. Okay, so Rosebud means, okay, let's stop, let's take a breath. Let's be very conscious of how we're comporting ourselves with each other, how we're speaking to each other, and are we being understood. And to make sure we're being understood is the next thing.

Okay, so the next thing is a practice. It's called the talking stick. And I learned this from a gentleman that I studied shamanic issues with Becky many years ago. A talking stick is, can be any kind of object, but I think, you know, a nice stick works really well. And basically. So let's say two people are having a conversation and you feel that there are miscommunications. The first person call them A will hold the talking stick. They will then express themselves. They will say the thing that is on their mind at that point, B. When A is finished, B will, the person who's been listening will then repeat back to A what they believe A said. And they have to keep doing that until A agrees. Yes, that is the, the essence of what I was trying to communicate. After A is convinced that B has told them, has, has repeated it back to them sufficiently accurately, then A passes them the stick and, and B begins to talk. And B talks until they have expressed their point, at which point A has to, it has to repeat back to them what they said until B is convinced or is convinced that A has it. At which point, you know, B says, you know, oh, okay, that, that is in essence what it was that I, that I wanted. At which point B then gives a the talking stick and the process repeats itself. The person with the stick talks, the person without the stick rephrases what the first the person with the stick said until the person with the stick agrees that the communication has been made right, you can have an incredible conversation about very difficult topics. And one of the things you'll find out is how difficult it is to actually hear what the other person has said.

That is so key because notice we're not even talking about agreeing with each other. We're still at the point where we're trying to understand what the other person is saying. You can't have agreement without communication or.

You know, an honest disagreement. Quite often I will say to ten hundred, I don't expect you to agree with me. I just want to be sure you understand what I'm saying, you understand my position. Then if you disagree, you disagree. You're a grown ass woman, you can disagree with me, but I want to be sure. And when you try to repeat back something and I See, errors that change the meaning of what I'm saying. Or if I repeat back something to you and you spot that. No, no, no, it wasn't that. It was this over here. If both people understand each other's positions, then you can begin to negotiate from there. The person who has the kill switch might very well say, well, ultimately, I can make this anything that I want it to be because I've got the kill switch. But if they're smart, you know, one of Larry Niven's rules is don't collaborate on anything. You could write alone.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh, that's so true.

Don't collaborate on something unless you know that the other person will make. Help make it better.

Yes.

You know, why else are you doing that? So if you're working with them, you presumably, you believe that they have skills, they have talent. There's a reason why you're working with them. And so all that comes together.

Well, I would have to say after 23 years of collaborating in fiction, I am very, very happy, Darlene, to have you as a collaborator. We sometimes can't tell who contributed what when we're watching something on tv, like our Twilight Zone episode or horror noir, or if we're reading passages from our zombie series, our teen zombie series, by.

The way, you can tell who had the kill switch, their name comes first on the project. So on the Tennyson Hardwick books, Tananari's name comes first. On the Devil's Wake, my name comes first on the Lake. On Howard Noir, her name comes first. On Fugue State, my name comes first.

Right. That's how you tell. And I'm just. You know, I feel so, so blessed that we have that opportunity to meet and that we saw that potential in each other holding hands in that airport. And that's something that we want to help share with people. Beyond collaborating on creative works, just collaborating on your lives together. And that's something that we're working on. You want to talk about it, honey?

We're looking at your life as a creative work.

Right.

Okay. It's like you are engaged in an act of creation, looking at your life as a story that you're writing. That's the life writing way. And in terms of our relationship, you know, like, right now, we're in the middle of a. Of a project that is very specifically taxing this. This thing is specifically about relationships. You know, several years ago, we did something called the Soulmate process. It was a course. It was a good course, but I wanted to update it with things that We've, we've, we've learned over the last, over the last years and some additional thinking on the subject. So it's going to be a two hour lecture to a group of ladies this, this Saturday followed, and then that the transcript from that is going to turn into a book and then the book will be the foundation of an online course. And so talking through this, you know, talking through the steps of what we call the soulmate process, which is a, an analysis of the ways that Tananarive and I prepared ourselves to meet each other, which leads to what feel felt like a potentially replicable process. I mean, to put the simplest. Ask the simplest way to put it is, you know, you've heard the thing, you know, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. In this case, it's when the lover is ready, the beloved will appear. So it's the question, how do you get yourself ready to find, you know, that, that sense, that person with whom you, when you meet them, you have that sense of my life could begin. I could see how we could build and create a life together and the other person feels the same way. That's a soulmate, right?

We're not saying there's only one.

By no means there isn't only one. I figure that, you know, within your circle of acquaintances, there's probably a couple of dozen because the average American knows 600 people and 600 times 600 of each of those people know 600 people. That's 360,000 people that you're only one step away from. Wow, that's a lot of people.

Math is not my subject, but I'm going to take your word on that one. Absolutely. You know, but it's someone that you feel you can healthily share your life with.

Yes. You'd be a better person tononarif. Quite frankly, tononari makes me want to be a better man. I want to be a man who she will never ever think, I'm sorry I married him. That, you know, that's, that's my night terror, you know, that she will on some at some level think, oh God, I settled, you know.

Oh, come on. Listen, I, and I, you know, back at you, sweetie. I just, I want to be the best possible partner. I want to, even after all these years of marriage, I still want to be better at hearing you, nurturing you, just as you nurture me and hear me. Anyway, that's, that's one of. That's our next collaboration actually will be this, this course, the lover's journey is.

What It'll be called.

That's.

That's the working title for it.

That's the working title. I like it. So listen, those of you who are, whether you're writers or artists, whether, no matter what it is that you are endeavoring to achieve, ask yourself, would you benefit from a collaborator, someone who is more experienced or someone who's sort of lateral on the same level but just thinks slightly differently, has skills you don't have. It's been a really, really enriching process for me. I've created works I definitely would not have created on my own, while at the same time, I've continued to create my solo works so that we're not swallowed up inside of each other. We each have an identity as solo artists. But I'm very, very comfortable and proud of our collaborations as well.

Absolutely. I, I still collaborate with Larry Niven partially just out of, out of loving the man and loving the play space, but also because he still has things to teach. You know, I love listening to the way he thinks and I love collaborating with Tananarif and feeling that our, that if we could learn to collaborate with each other at the highest levels with the least friction, that we could accomplish anything. And it still is that feeling of, you know, there's an empire to be enriched. We've already started. You know, we've, we've done more than laid the foundations, we've laid the first couple floors, but the tower is still, you know, escalating.

Absolutely. We can build an empire. That's right.

That's right.

You can also start building your empire if you check out our Life Writing Premium course. Life Writing Premium is the sponsor of this podcast.

We collaborated on on that and we're, we're constantly working on. It's a year long course. You know, every week you get, you get additional instruction, videos and audios and lectures and writing prompts, and you get an online community of people who are also following the same path of applying their writing tools to life and their life tools to their writing. And every month we're going to do a hot seat reading of one of our students short stories, analyzing and teaching you how to analyze your stories in the very specific way we call the life writing method. It's our opportunity to build a community of people who will support each other and can work together so that we can all rise at the same time. And you can find out more about that@lifewritingpremium.com lifewritingpremium.com if you want to find out more about the podcast, you can sign up for our mailing list@lifewritingweekly.com so lifewritingpremium.com for our online course lifewritingweekly.com just to be in the podcast community.

Thank you so much, everyone who's been listening this week. We really hope that you've walked away from this podcast with some useful tools that will help you both collaborate better and also collaborate with yourself better. Right?

You know, sometimes it's nice to. To be able to argue with yourself without feeling that there's something wrong with you. You know, we'll talk more about. About different aspects of the writing process, but being at peace with yourself, being able to push yourself without denigrating yourself. Valuable.

Go on out there, everyone, and write for your lives.

Take care.