“A CONVERSATION ABOUT COLLABORATING”

In the excerpt below, we reflect on the process of collaboration and how it shaped our writing. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

MT:

My first question to you, now that the book is finished, would be: what ways of collaborating would you have been interested in pursuing further? My own answer is that I really enjoyed working together on the last story in the book, which is what most people would think of when they imagine collaborative writing. And I would have liked to do more of that, probably. As far as working models go, it was fairly utopian: we had a Google Doc open, we were butting in on each other’s sentences, we gave each other free reign to delete each other’s work or whatever else needed to happen in order to – 

GM: 

And the result was sometimes extremely funny.

MT:

It was. Even just adding a word or twisting something that someone had said.

GM:

Yeah, it almost became, like – you think of improv comics who are always trying to elevate the level of danger or bizarreness. Or responding to each other’s bits. I remember you had the sentence “You open your eyes half expecting to see phantoms.” And my response was something like “To your intense dismay, you do.” Matching each other. And then we started talking about an outbuilding, like an outhouse. The natural next step for you was to interpret it as a literal bathroom and that was really funny. 

Though it was like we were doing a slow-motion version of that in all the earlier parts, where you might write something that ended with a certain word and I would take that word and use it as a jumping-off point. Or I would write a story about somebody called Edward and then you would write a story about somebody called Edward. 

MT:

Right. Do you think that this way of working together inevitably pushes the writing towards absurdity, or do you think that’s just us?

GM:

It’s definitely us, I think, but…

MT:

Because the obvious comparison is the exquisite corpse.

GM:

Maybe it is somewhat inevitable, but it might also depend on how you handle absurdity. Again, maybe it comes back to the idea of having a strong preconceived notion. If at every step you see absurdity coming, and you’re radically trying to prune the story like a hedge in response, just trying to make sure that the plant goes in the shape you sort of hoped and imagined it would go, then, I mean…

MT:
Because what if we approached a more straightforward story like Red Rocks this way? You know? I think we talked about this as one possibility for a future collaboration. To do something in a quasi-realist mode.

GM:

Like something in a genre, a mystery. I think a mystery would maybe be better than a picaresque. Because if you felt like you could do almost anything, then you might just run out of steam, whereas if there’s a little bit of a goalpost, that might prevent some of the worst “exquisitenesses.”

MT:

[laughs]

GM:

Another thing which we did later, not for the book – we worked with other friends on renga-like poems. That was also very enjoyable. As is the atmosphere of sitting with other people simultaneously writing their own things.

I went to a house party once where we were all encouraged to do that. This was at a time when I hadn’t been writing much and was mostly doing academic work, so it was really nice to be in that environment. The host would play a specific piece of music – a 1920s jazz piece, say – and when we observed the results afterwards we’d see that people had written very staccato poems. She would say, “Ah, yep, that was the music!” You could tell she had done this enough that she could predict the results to a degree and I really liked that. So there is a sense in which you can stage manage or trip-sit your collaborative spontaneity.  

MT:
“Stage manage” is a good metaphor because there’s something very performative about that kind of writing when you’re put on the spot. One thing that comes to mind, speaking of performativity, is this desire I’ve always had to observe writers’ processes more comprehensively, like a “dashcam” version of the writing process. I’d love to see, for example, some kind of YouTube channel where you could watch a 40-hour screencap of Alice Munro typing up a short story from scratch. I would find this much more instructive than the MasterClass format where you just get a bunch of platitudes like “writing is editing.” If that’s true, then wouldn’t it be so interesting to see someone’s choices in granular detail? Surely this has something to do with collaboration, because writing together with you – whether in person or online – was a very small peek into that, where you get to see some of that live-action decision making. 

GM:

Which is easier to dramatize in the context of music or something. The biopic where you show Brian Wilson honking the horn in Pet Sounds and saying “Yes, I like that.” 

It is really interesting, deletions. Joyce is a good example of someone whose drafts we actually do have, and there’s a whole kind of criticism of just looking at his drafts. 

MT:
And yet drafts are still complete, in some sense. They’re finalized documents, you know?

GM:
Right, they don’t have the quantum superposition of deleted and non-deleted. 

MT:
Exactly. I’d like to see someone substituting “said” for “exclaimed” and then “exclaimed” for “announced” and then going back to “said” in the end. Obviously this would be less interesting with authors who freewrite and more interesting with people who tinker away.

GM:

Yeah. This is a question that I do not know the answer to, but I’m interested in how you feel about it. The tinkering impulse, and the collaborative impulse in music, which I know you also make: I’m curious where those connections are with writing – if they’re totally separate, or if they seem like totally different parts of the brain, or?

MT:
In either case, I think people can tinker collaboratively. I have sent audio files back and forth with friends, micro-editing each other’s work. It is always more fun to be in a room together, though, letting things arise spontaneously. There’s also the question of one’s collaboration with the instrument, which doesn’t really exist with writing — or not in the same way. When making music, you’re in a kind of responsive feedback loop with the instrument. The sound you want to make isn’t always the sound that comes out, and as a result there are many happy accidents. I’m reminded of Mark Snow, who composed the music for The X-Files. Apparently he was having trouble coming up with the theme song, and then one day he accidentally leaned on his synthesizer’s delay button, and the melody wrote itself after that. A blank page, on the other hand, has never been quite so generous.

GM:

So maybe – maybe this is a bad analogy – but maybe writing is more like building an instrument like a synthesizer or assembling a violin and hoping that the overall effect when it’s finished will be good, but knowing that in the meantime you have to temper the strings or continue hollowing out a piece of wood.

MT:

I like that.

GM:

Another weird thing is Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, which were obviously conceived as a means for him to get over creative blocks in music, but which have, for me, totally translated immediately to writing. It could just be that he’s already doing the work of a writer in that he’s metaphorizing his process as a musician, so it’s just natural that it should work. But even when he talks about loops or audio tape it doesn’t seem that far removed. I can find an analogue somehow to what I’m doing when I’m writing. 

MT:
Yes, and it helps that those strategies are vague enough to generalize to different art forms, like “Honor thy error as a hidden intention.” Which could easily be the subtitle of our book.

I wanted to turn to the question of attribution. Already a number of friends and family members have the book and they’re sending me text messages asking questions about who wrote what. Which, you know – we knew those kinds of questions were coming, but I want to resist the temptation to answer them because I think the not-knowing keeps something alive in the work that might die otherwise.

GM:

Yeah, I really like your impulse to resist that. And I was always heartened by people that read early drafts and said they couldn’t tell who did what. And we even make this a little bit explicit in the book with the chapter about The Owl’s Almanac, right? Which was by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, but scholars have no idea who wrote which parts of it. And it also has a lovely and very funny preface that’s attributed to an owl, but was actually written by the publisher, Laurence L’Isle. 

MT:
We also play with the idea of intermingled biographies like E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr. 

GM:

Yeah, exactly.

MT:
So, along those lines: now that the book is a product and not a process, I wonder what feels collaborative about it to you, in the sense that you can point to a passage and go “that reads like collaboration.” A lot of the work of collaborating was just getting together and having conversations. But the writing itself doesn’t necessarily register this kind of atmospheric work in a direct way. To pull back the curtain somewhat, the majority of our process involved writing a thing, sending it, getting feedback, maybe adjusting it, and then using the other person’s work as fodder for subsequent contributions. To an outside eye, this could seem like nothing more than a monological dialogue. But I think this sense of mutual responsiveness was at the heart of everything.

GM:

Exactly. I think each little excerpt is kind of like a train car. It connects to the next one in the train, and you can obviously tell that you’re going into a new space, but there will always be something that reminds you of the previous one in the next one. “The past inside the present,” as that creepy Boards of Canada sample put it. And I think it’s that turn or recognition of something carrying forward that seems so integral to our project, and which I don’t think you could do in the same way if you were one person. Because I could try to write something in which each entry follows naturally from the next, but my idea of what follows naturally is not the same as your idea of what follows naturally. And I think that’s the energy of it. Your pieces would take a subsequent direction that I never would have anticipated. For me, that’s what made it so fun.

MT:

Likewise.

GM:

And to speak to a more meta sense of collaboration, a sort of general ambience or atmosphere – you directed me towards a lot of books I wouldn’t have read otherwise, or authors I hadn’t heard of previously. And I think that was also hugely productive and inspiring for me. I loved the way you put it one time: “you work in the same factory as me.” I loved that because I think there is a wider and somewhat mystical shared head space whereas, again, if either of us attempted something like this alone it wouldn’t have the same character. So yeah. I think both of those things – call it the train cars and the factory – are where collaboration exists for me.

MT:

Yes, for sure. There’s the social aspect, where we met up many times in the name of the book. But we were also friends all the while, and we weren’t always discussing the work. Besides the camaraderie factor, I also find that collaboration makes writing feel far more enjoyable – so much so, perhaps, that I’m not sure if I can even go back to working the old solitary way.

Collaborating is incredibly momentum-building for me. I remember, for example, the giddy feeling of getting one of your stories in my inbox and how much this exchange sparked my enthusiasm. The idea that my writing was a “response” to yours rather than a call into the void – and just knowing that I had an enthusiastic reader waiting for my next thing – was such a huge productivity booster. The cliché about knowing your audience was also immensely helpful, too, in retrospect, given that 99% of the time I was writing solely for Geoffrey Morrison, which meant that I could take bigger risks.

GM:

Yeah, there’s something really validating about that. And I think in my case I observed myself, over the course of this project, writing things that I hadn’t anticipated that I would be able to do at the beginning of the process. The stories got longer and their interrelations grew more complicated. Especially coming out of poetry and having pretty limited experience writing prose at all before this, it was a really empowering way to learn, for all the reasons you just mentioned. And it felt very safe, and that’s another great thing about it – that you are kind of seeing, I mean [laughs] – definitely for me, you’re seeing a person learning how to write over the course of the book.

MT:

[laughs]

GM:

I mean, I think we maybe try to fake that out structurally, by rearranging the order of things in the book. But that learning process was one of the delightful things about it, too. I remember asking you a question early on about structure, something like, “How do you structure things so well?” And you said “Well, it’s just like callbacks – like a comedian would do.”

MT:
...I doubt I gave such a definitive answer as “well, it’s just –” [laughs]

GM:

No, no, it wasn’t definitive, but it was helpful. The metaphor was helpful. And I think that is such a wonderful way to do it. I think I said to your partner once that this was really my version of an MFA.

MT:
Likewise, yeah. And it’s now hard for me to imagine, having done this project, doing something else remotely similar to it — which I guess is the general feeling upon finishing a book. But it was so much fun to work on something so uninhibited with another person, and I’m sure it would be just as rewarding to work on a historical novel or something, but the open-endedness and playfulness were important to me, and I don’t think any of these stories would have survived a creative writing program. For me, it was mostly about the element of humour, though our subject matter is often quite serious. I have always romanticized the idea of co-writing screenplays, sitting with a few of your funniest friends around a big table, brainstorming.

GM:

Yeah, when people are making each other laugh and there’s that trust and openness. But you hear about times when it’s really tough and miserable, too – when everyone laughs at something and then you do your thing and everyone’s like – silence.

MT:

[silence]

GM:

So, should we recommend collaboration to people, as a general rule?

MT:

[laughs] I was about to champion interdisciplinarity, but I also think that our particular dynamic benefited from us having a minimum of competing impulses. Like, the fact that we were both committed to a straightforwardly literary project and just trying to negotiate this terrain in a new way. It’s great to see collaborations between singers and dancers, or poets and visual artists, and I also love highly idiosyncratic collaborations between, say, architects and chiropractors. (On that note, my cousin recently got a loom, and I have been thinking that it would be cool to find some middle ground between her as a weaver and me as a musician.) But it can sometimes feel like collaborators with totally divergent practices and disciplinary backgrounds just end up working “alone together.”

GM:

But they might still be “building the factory,” you know what I mean? To go back to our old metaphor. That shared headspace where they feel like they’re both working.

MT:

That’s a good description of movie sets. Everyone running around, sometimes inside a literal factory, trying to do their part to make it all cohere. I suppose it depends on the extent to which a headspace is actually being shared. In my experience, or looking at other experiences, there tends to be far less negotiation when you pair up with people who are experts in their own domain. When you don’t speak the same artistic language, the negotiation can look like constant deferral, like “I trust whatever your impulses are.” Which is nice, and leads to work getting done, but this isn’t always rewarding from the perspective of artmaking as an exchange of ideas. There’s always going to be some cross-pollination, where the weaver can say “Can your saxophone sound more like a basketweave?” But, yeah.

GM:

Well there was that amazing piece we saw at the Vines Festival, with the improvisational jazz musicians, the beekeeper, and the dancer. That was amazing. And part of the reason why that worked is that there was some node of contact for each member – so the bees are miked up, and the musicians can improvise with the bees, make sounds together. The beekeeper has provided the bees, but he’s also being interviewed by the dancer, who’s hiding in a tree for the first section. She’s wearing a uniform provided by the beekeeper. And the beekeeper and the dancer are both speaking in a deeply poetic way. There was something truly beautiful about that. Not every interdisciplinary collaboration is quite on that level, but that seemed to be one of the better negotiations of that kind of thing. Like, they gave everyone something to do that was both in their wheelhouse and slightly out. 

MT:
Definitely. And, of course, even though we’re both writing, you’re still doing things in this book that aren’t remotely in my wheelhouse.

GM:

Maybe I shouldn’t even say the name of the story, because it would reveal who wrote it.

MT:

I’ll figure it out if you talk about it indirectly [laughs]

GM:

Well there’s a story that involves a relationship and it’s one of my favourites.

MT:

I already know the one you’re talking about.

GM:

Okay, so the overall idea never would have occurred to me, and the specific dynamics of the people involved probably wouldn’t have occured to me in that way, and the metaphors, the places you go with them – I think some of my favourite metaphors in the book are in that story. They’re just not ones I ever would have thought of. Maybe I would have come up with something in that direction, but not in those specific, very Matthew ways where you’re just sort of like “oh, that.”

MT:

I think if people knew how much we enjoy each other’s writing it would disgust them in the way that, like, PDA disgusts people. 

GM:

[laughs]

MT:

You know? I’ve said at numerous points during this process that some of your stories are among my all-time favourites. And maybe on some subconscious level that has something to do with the fact that they are bound together with mine in this book. But obviously this is also integral to the success of a collaboration – just being each other’s fans, while also helping each other develop things and figure out what’s not working. And, just speaking about you as a person: you’re also someone who’s very easy to hear feedback from, even if it completely dismantled something I thought was working, I trust you completely. And this is something that’s just generally hard to come by in collaborations, it seems. So there’s a bit of serendipity involved.

GM:

I read once that Donald Barthelme, as a teacher of writing, never tried to get any of his students to change the content or central idea of a story. Just the language, which he worked on with them meticulously. All he was really interested in was helping them execute the story in the best and most effective way he could. And the person who reported this – it might have been Michael Silverblatt – summed it up like this: he never really doubted his students’ fundamental sense of truth as it applied to their fiction. 

This approach obviously doesn’t work in every setting or context. And I suspect that as a matter of fact you actually do need to be on the same page about some fundamental things in order for it to work. But there’s something admirable about it in the context of a collaborative writing relationship, because I think we’ve all known people whose reactions to a work of art are something like “I don’t like this because you didn’t do it the way I would have done it.” And I never felt like you were ever that kind of reader, trying to tunnel under the logic of something and saying “Oh, that’s wrong.”

MT:

Since you brought up Barthelme, I just remembered one of his collaborative efforts. There was a New York Times competition that had to do with finishing an unfinished story of his, called “Manfred.” [Googles the article.] “There were 3,125 other eligible entries...entries came from 9‐year‐olds, 79‐year‐olds...there was a one‐sentence entry from Manhattan, Kans., that said, ‘Then Manfred fell off a cliff’...”

GM:

[laughs] That’s the one Barthelme would have chosen.

MT:

[laughs] “...there was even a reader who submitted the beginning to his own short story and challenged Donald Barthelme to complete it...also the entrant who wrote: If my story never gets published in The Times, I will have at least created a work of art for myself, and whoever else might choose to share in it. For this, I thank you.” 

GM:

That’s wonderful. That almost seems like a good place to end, because we’ve reached absurdity.

MT:
Agreed.