If we dropped a penny in a jar every time someone asks us, “How on earth do you manage to write together?” we’d have enough to book that next roundtrip flight to Istanbul to see our granddaughter. Sometimes, we give them the short answer, to others the long answer, and a few get the in-between answer. And we don’t really mind the question.
Then comes the next one: “How did you start?”
Our collaboration started on a snowy day on a snowy weekend during a snowy winter. We were living in Pennsylvania, and our boys were small.
Nikoo: Jim had decided to submit a short story to a national writing contest posted in Writer’s Digest magazine. He was looking for publication credits he could add to his tenure portfolio at the college where he was teaching. The story was pure adventure and featured a guy trying to save his small sailboat in the middle of Newport harbor during a hurricane. I remembered him writing it in grad school.
Jim: Nikoo has always been a brutally honest person, and she has strong opinions. That’s just two of the many things I love about her. But I can get a little defensive about my writing. She was working as an engineer, but she was always a closet writer. I, on the other hand, pursued my writing openly. And for all our years prior to that snowy winter, she was my first reader. Anyway, before sending the story off, I asked her to read it again.
Nikoo: So I read it. Now honestly, who cares about a guy trying to save a catboat while scores of people are losing their homes and… I don’t remember what I said exactly.
Jim: She said, “Don’t bother.” Maybe she worded it in a gentler way, but that was the bottom line.
Nikoo: He turns around and asks me, “Could you do better?”
Jim: And she says, “WE could do better.”
An entire snowy weekend passed while the two of us sat side-by-side and a new story emerged.
The ‘man saves his catboat’ story turned into ‘a woman contemplating suicide boards her catboat in the middle of a hurricane’. Her past plays itself out in the course of battling this storm. Old and painful conflict with her father. Guilt that haunts her about the death of her brother. Failed relationships.
We both physically wrote portions of that story and contributed when we weren’t actually pounding the keyboard. Agreements and disagreements. Pizza. Kids swinging from the chandeliers in the background.
We loved it.
We sent the story off, knowing we’d done something special. That short story went on to win a national prize. But by the time we heard the results, we’d already started a novel. It was our first, The Thistle and the Rose. The first of many.
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