Sutherland Douglass and Brooke Nelson on the Unlikely Origins of "Now Pronounce You"
by Fringe Magazine • 02.13.2012The authors of this month’s fiction explain how passing notes in class turned into a literary collaboration.
We were sitting miserably in a summer class during our graduate program, wildly uninterested in the course content and frustrated that we had to attend. So, one of us started writing a story and passed it to the other, prompting the collaborative process. Neither of us had any idea of the story or where it would lead, but we each wrote some and passed it. The other read and added. There were no rules, except that we only wrote during that class.
It seemed important not to discuss much. It seemed important to try to directly engage with each other’s style: having some familiarity with the other person’s work helped each of us in our attempts to ape it, fake it, spin it into something we wouldn’t otherwise try. (For the longest time, we simply called it our “Tag-Team Story.”) Much later on, when we were revising, it became harder and harder to remember who had written what. This seemed like some sort of accomplishment, even as the revision process became a bit of a drag.When revising a piece of such haphazard construction, we tried playing with just about every aspect of the thing. We weren’t sure what we wanted the story to mean since we didn’t have a plan when we started. However, after editing and un-editing and re-editing, much through email since we are both in separate cities, we found a happy medium with the “finished” (is it?) product. A nice aspect of collaborative work such as this and with a person you trust, artistically, is the lack of closure. Since both of us have separate notions of how something should be, there is a sense that this piece will be open to toying with, as long as we both are willing.
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