13 March 2008
Co-writerly communication
Posted by Denise Kendrick under: Uncategorized .
I pulled out much-loved, long-unfinished story for a read today. It’s probably 1/3 done at 25K words. As I read it, I thought to myself, “Character A is clearly ill, or on the verge of becoming ill. Maybe you forgot about that and that’s why you got stuck with the plot?”
So I wrote a note for RD. It said, “Character A is ill. It could be fun to have Character C sub for Character A, mayhem could ensue.”
And then I realized I’d abbreviated substitute to sub (because my brain was having a flash back its perv-free glory days) and strongly suspected that RD would read that as “to be submissive for”. But surely she would know that Character A and Character C are not supposed to have sex in this story (though Character C is dead sexy–and bald!), and certainly if Character A is ill then sex wouldn’t be on the agenda at all, so surely RD would eventually reason out that I meant “substitute for” not, you know, “sub for”.
Yeah, I wasn’t so sure. And knowing that communication and trust are keys to co-writing, I corrected myself and put in the the full word to avoid potential mixup.
And then I compiled a nice list of “tasks” for my co-writer to perform with regard to much-loved, long-unfinished story. 
Because along with communication and trust, slave-driving is equally important to the co-writing venture, yay!
5 Comments so far...
rdsolange Says:
13 March 2008 at 2:18 am.
ahahaahah… you are awesomecakes.
Denise Kendrick Says:
15 March 2008 at 8:23 pm.
Can I help it if RD is just so damn good at taking direction? 
Calvin Says:
17 March 2008 at 4:23 pm.
Gotta admit, I thought ’sub’ in the pervy sense as well! eheheh!