Suffering is Good when its for the Fiction
What life teaches us writers is that every story is a human story. Even if your characters aren’t even from this planet.
The difficulty of co-writing about two thousand words every day and having challenging day-jobs can’t be understated. When I did the #AtoZChallenge a couple of years ago here on Medium (https://medium.com/awriterdarkly), I was doing it alone and that was hard, but this is different.
We work as a team. It’s testy sometimes. We have writer’s block and we talk every day. We each write and edit every day. There’s planning and aligning, and there’s carefully sidestepping continuity issues with the actual manuscript we’re working on.
There’s also a lot of discovery writing. We find all the best new curses and disgusting analogies that way. We write something, and then we argue about whether that wall is on the east or the west.
In the end, we agree. We always do.
We have to. There is only one thing that matters. The project. This was the agreement nearly a year ago when we started building the world with a single question.
What do we want to put into the world? The theme, the message, the characters, and now three full plots are all in service to that one thing. It’s changed me, and I believe my co-writer Andre Fleuette as well.
We’re working for something bigger than either (or both) of us. We have to succeed because that is the only way it can be. The efforts, the late nights and early mornings, the long arguments about how a fantasy world functions, how magic works (spoiler: it’s not called magic in our world). All of it serves the goal.
This is how it works when you’re part of a real team. A collaboration of this sort makes it ours and not his or mine. I push harder because he’s counting on my edits, and I know it is the same on his side.
Two thousand words per day is an insane grind when every word needs that much care and scrutiny. In the end, it’s worth it.
Even the heavy mental fog of exhaustion is worth writing through when there’s something bigger than yourself at stake. After all, there’s a human story under construction and we’re the stewards of that.
#AtoZChallenge
