INTRODUCTION II: COLLABORATING
GARDNER DOZOIS
We started writing these collaborative stories at a time when I had been in a creative slump for a couple of years, and, looking at them from the narrowest and most selfish perspective possible, they were invaluable to me because they helped to jump-start my creativity, shake me out of a dry spell, and launch me into a high-production period in which I completed, in addition to these collaborations, quite a few stories of my own.
Of course, they were valuable for a lot more than that. For one thing, they made us all a fair amount of money, and got us, as authors, some worthwhile exposure in prestige markets where we had previously been little known. For another thing, we ended up with a bunch of stories that none of us would ever have written on our own, and most of them were, at the least, worth the writing. (I know that I am leaving us wide-open to some sneering hostile criticism here, but I do think that the collaborative stories were worth writing, and, for what it’s worth, the public response to them has been pretty good as well—many of them have been reprinted and anthologized, a few have shown up on award ballots, some have been picked up by Best of the Year anthologies, and so forth. My mother liked them, or no doubt would have said so anyway if she’d ever read any of them. So there.)
For yet another thing, I think that doing them taught us all quite a bit about the craft of writing, about our own strengths and weaknesses as writers, and, ideally, how to combine those strengths to create a synergistic effect that sometimes enabled us to accomplish things beyond the ability of any one of us alone.
For me, these collaborations are inextricably bound up with workshopping, and in a sense arose out of the workshopping process itself. Workshop bashing is a popular sport, with some curmudgeon always willing to pop up and blame the decline and moral decay of science fiction as a genre on the advent of workshopping—and it is true that the big formalized teaching workshops like Clarion have their drawbacks (they also have their good points, however, something the curmudgeons are never willing to admit) . . . Nevertheless, working SF writers have been getting together to analyze and critique each other’s work—take each other’s stories apart to see why they’re not working right—since before there was such a thing as SF as a formalized genre. Lovecraft and Bloch and Leiber did it—by mail—in the ‘30s; the Futurians—Kornbluth, Pohl, Knight, Blish, etc.—did it in the ‘50s; and writers have been doing it ever since. I suspect that they will keep on workshopping, too, despite the curmudgeons, since if you can find some people who really know how to workshop—a big “if,” admittedly—and who are temperamentally suited to survive the process with their egos reasonably intact, and if those workshoppers are willing to stick to practical nuts-and-bolts criticism rather than spouting ideological party lines or wandering away into the airy realms of obtuse aesthetic theorizing (the two biggest workshop-killers), then workshopping can be a highly valuable tool, not only for fixing flaws in specific stories, but also for learning something about writing as a craft.
I had belonged to one such workshop—the Guilford Workshop—in the early ‘70s. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was after that workshop had dissolved, and I no longer had any outside inputs on my work, that I slowly drifted into a long dry spell. I’m sure that it was not at all coincidental that my creative juices started to flow again after I got into the habit of having frequent informal workshop sessions with Jack Dann and Michael Swanwick, and, later, after she herself had started to write, with Susan Casper.
These sessions started sometime in 1977, and increased in frequency throughout 1978 and 1979. I was not producing much fiction myself at that point, but Jack was working on a novel he wanted advice on, and Michael was working on the early stories with which he would soon launch his writing career and wanted advice on them . . . and so, even though I had nothing of my own to place upon the sacrificial altar (which is considered bad form, usually), we began workshopping; at first, I worked with them individually, and then, after one memorable drunken evening, we all started workshopping together. And at some point in late 1979 or early 1980, we slid from these workshopping sessions to the idea of working on stories together, a transition so natural, gradual, and imperceptible that we almost didn’t notice it. Before we quite realized what was happening, we were actually writing collaborative stories, in various combinations, and then we started selling them.
And so, we kept on doing it.
Perhaps because the collaborations evolved organically from the workshopping experience, we instinctively stumbled upon what I consider to be one of the secrets of successful collaboration, especially of three-way collaborations, which are as rare as hen’s teeth: somebody must do a final unifying and homogenizing draft of the story, smoothing out differences in style, and that somebody must have the authority to decide what goes into the finished draft and what must come out, especially if there are alternate versions or drafts of the same section by different hands. With most of these stories, the person who did that final draft was me, perhaps because of my long experience as a story doctor, perhaps because Jack and Michael had already become inured in the workshop to having me inflict such advice upon them and the habit had been formed. At any rate, nobody ever complained about it, nor was it something that was ever discussed or questioned or formalized—it just worked out that way, an unspoken assumption. Perhaps because the collaborations grew out of workshopping sessions, where we were all used to commenting upon each other’s work, regarding a bit of prose as something to be reshaped and changed in the crucible, mutable, improve-uponable, “in progress,” we never had any major ego clashes over these stories—although many another collaborative team has foundered on the shoals of Injured Vanity—and those minor ego problems and clashes of creative vision we did have were fleeting and easily worked out.
We just wrote the stories, without intellectualizing the collaborative process much, each writer contributing what they could, one set of hands picking up what another set had put down, all of us concentrating on ways to get the story down on paper however we could, by hook or crook, whatever worked, changing things around, discarding what didn’t work, working things out . . . and it wasn’t until much later when editors began to marvel that three such different writers could possibly work well-enough together to produce a viable three-way collaboration without murdering each other, that it even occurred to us that we might be doing something unusual.
A word on marketing is perhaps in order, before we get to the stories themselves. These collaborations were all strange stuff, pretty offbeat, occasionally bizarre, and were all pretty much beyond the pale as far as the traditional digest SF-magazine world of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was concerned. Instead—again, without conscious design or even thinking about it much—we ended up selling most of them outside the strict genre boundaries of the time. Kathy Green at Penthouse bought several of them, as did Ellen Datlow at Omni, and Alice K. Turner at Playboy. One of them appeared in Oui, another appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine, and yet another appeared in, of all places, High Times. Later, we sold one to Amazing and then one to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine—under Shawna McCarthy at this point, when the magazine had started loosening up—and later still a few of these stories were reprinted in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, but their initial acceptance was with the so-called “slick magazine” market; only retroactively did they penetrate the genre market. The funny thing about all this is that there were only a handful of SF writers in those days who were appearing with any regularity in all of the “Big Three” slick markets (Playboy, Penthouse, and Omni): Robert Silverberg, Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison, and us. There were writers working in the genre market who had far bigger reputations than Jack or Michael or I, but somehow we were selling to those markets—the top-paying fiction markets in the country—and they weren’t; I suspect that’s at least partially because they weren’t bothering to submit to those markets, something that doesn’t seem to have changed much subsequently.
Once again, we’d done something right—mostly by accident, as usual.
(From here on in, my comments will appear after the stories, since I intend to give too much away in them about some of the stories for them to function well as headnotes. Somewhere in this book, scattered throughout at the whim of the publisher, you’ll also find general comments by Jack, Michael, Susan, and Jay Haldeman.)