Luke Rolfes: It’s a treat to talk with both Kim Magowan and Michelle Ross, who have a collaborative book of short fiction coming out from East Over Press called Don’t Take This the Wrong Way. We at Laurel Review are fans of both these writers, and we are excited to see them team up! Congrats, Michelle and Kim on your collaborative collection!
LR: Let me start broadly as I usually do. Tell us how Don’t Take This the Wrong Way came to be. When did you two decide to write a collaborative book? And whose idea was it to collaborate?
Michelle Ross: Thank you so much, Luke!
We didn’t set out to write a book together, not in the beginning. The collaboration began with a single flash fiction story, “War,” which we wrote in the summer of 2017 and then soon after published in Monkeybicycle. As I recall, I’m the one who suggested we collaborate. I had been intrigued by the collaborative efforts of other writers I admire, in particular Dana Diehl and Melissa Goodrich (their book story collection, The Classroom, is so good!), and was more curious than anything. There really wasn’t any question of who I would want to collaborate with, given Kim had been my first reader and a good friend for a few years by then. I trust her instincts so much. I was intrigued by what would happen when we combined our voices and styles and obsessions. I was intrigued by the idea of not having to bear sole responsibility for a story. We soon discovered that writing together is way faster than writing solo. It’s also a good pressure valve release when my own work-in-progress is frustrating me. At some point, we had accumulated so many stories that we decided, why not put many of them together into a book?
Kim Magowan: Yes, thanks Luke!
Around the same time we wrote “War,” which is a flash story, we began a much longer story, “How Things Work in Your Home.” So I remember realizing very early on with our collaborations that we had a lot of range– we could write a very tight story from a kid’s perspective or a much more meandering and desultory story. Merging our voices felt natural and easy. And as Michelle says, it was FAST– so much quicker than my own plodding, pokey solo drafts. We wrote “War” in a day, if I remember right. I love writing, but I often find writing pretty painful; the collaborations were fun. They felt like playing more than working.
LR: Collaboration is something I’ve never tried, but I have always been intrigued by. To my knowledge, you all don’t live close to each other, so surely this had to be done remotely rather than in-person. Can you describe your process of collaboration? Was it organic or planned out?
MR: One of us begins by writing a few sentences or paragraphs. Then we send it on to the other. We don’t have any rules. We don’t tend to talk about the writing either outside of calling out lines we love or that make us laugh. We just keep adding on, sending it back and forth, until one of us says that it feels like it’s done or almost done. Then we edit. The drafting is incredibly fluid and fast. Even the editing part is usually fast. That rarely happens with stories I write solo. I’m often slow. I set unfinished pieces aside for weeks and months and years.
Usually, we don’t have much of an idea when we begin of how long a story will be, either. We just follow it to where it goes. Only here and there have we deliberately planned for a story to be long or very short.
KM: Actually, only once did we specifically set out to write a long story–”Twenty-three Safety Manuals.” which came out in Colorado Review, and which is a little over 8000 words. Michelle said “let’s try something long,” so I knew at the get-go to slow down the pace. With everything else, we really have no idea where the story is going or how long it will take to get there. There’s one other story. “Oh-Oh-It’s-Cruel,” where we decided at the outset that Michelle would write the sections narrated by the sister (Carrie) and I would write the sections narrated by the brother (Shane), and that the story would keep alternating between those two perspectives. But aside from those two examples, I don’t remember ever doing any advance planning for a story. It’s just jump in and swim. I sometimes think I know where a story is going, and Michelle will throw some curveball (instead of seducing his date, he shows her a surreally boring movie). I’ve learned to suspend all my expectations.
LR: What are the payoffs and pitfalls of collaborative writing?
MR: One pitfall that comes to mind is more just a matter of good sense than a pitfall: Don’t collaborate on something you have preconceived ideas about. If I write a paragraph and immediately know exactly where I think it wants to go next, that’s not a paragraph I’m going to send to Kim. In fact, quite a few of the story openings I’ve sent to her have been openings that I didn’t necessarily intend to be collaborations. I started writing something, liked it, but didn’t have any strong investment in what direction the piece went and so sent it to her to see where she’d take it.
I can imagine collaboration could be quite tricky and even contemptuous. So, I guess, be careful who you collaborate with? I’d say choose someone whose writing you admire and whose instincts you trust. Also, someone you’re comfortable enough with to challenge when needed.
Payoffs: Collaboration is a great way to breathe some life back into your own writing practice if you’re in a rut. I feel like it trains me to be less indecisive and less precious, to say, “Yes and…” to my own writing.
KM: What she said! You have to choose your collaboration partner wisely. It needs to be someone whose work you love and whose writing style harmonizes enough with your own that a story you make together won’t be like a flap book I had as a kid. The pages were divided into thirds (head/ torso/ legs), and you could flip the thirds to make these weird hybrid bodies, astronaut helmet with ballerina tutu with clown legs and shoes. Michelle and I have different styles, but we can blend them pretty seamlessly. Pick someone whose skills you can lean on; pick someone who won’t be all proprietary and weird about what the story is “about,” so you can build this thing together. Honestly, I don’t know if I could collaborate easily with anyone other than Michelle! We have some writer friends who collaborate with a few different people, and it feels very sister-wives to me. 🙂
Payoffs: it’s so fun and fast! I love that we could bang out an 8000 word story in less than 3 weeks–writing a story that length solo would take me months. And I agree with Michelle: the creative energy from our collaborations spills into my own work. I find myself having more energy for solo projects when Michelle and I are on a collaboration roll. I also will start importing some adjacent themes and settings. Like I never seem to write workplace stories on my own, but after Michelle and I write a story together, I find these dysfunctional offices and crappy bosses (or sick animals, or absurd arguments with spouses, or film references) popping up in my solo stories. There’s a cross-pollination.
MR: Sister-wives! But same.
LR: How did you tackle revision?
MR: We usually take turns revising, too. I move stuff around, cut and add. Then Kim does the same. Or actually, Kim is less likely to move stuff around the way that I do. But she cuts and adds and tightens. Occasionally, one of us will say, “Wait, where did ___ go?” and bring something back that the other cut, but that’s pretty rare. Often, revision takes only a few days, maybe a week. Occasionally, and this is usually me more than Kim, we’ll put something aside for a while and come back to it.
KM: Yeah, I’m the impatient one! I’m the one saying “This is done already, let’s send it somewhere!” and Michelle is “Hold your horses,, missy!” (Not sure why I have Michelle sounding like the cast of Oklahoma). That’s also pretty in character, for us as writers. I tend to jump the gun more in pronouncing that stories are done, because I’m tired of looking at them. But having someone to share that revision burden with makes the process much more painless, and Michelle’s caution is a good curb on my impulsivity.
LR: How do you “norm” or “match the other writer’s tone” when you write collaboratively?
MR: This is something we’ve talked a lot about. We feel that our writing styles are fairly different, yet it does seem like they meld together in a mysterious way that feels at times like a third voice. I don’t know how this happens exactly. I mean, we have been each other’s first readers for about ten years now, so we know each other’s tendencies and quirks quite well, but I don’t know that we’re intentionally mirroring each other. Possibly part of this is a result of editing? We do edit each other’s sentences so that, in effect, some of the writing is a collaboration at the sentence level.
KM: In fact, looking at our book, there are a number of sentences where I really can’t remember if I wrote them or Michelle wrote them. It’s uncanny. The only story where I know for a fact who wrote every single word is “Oh-Oh-It’s-Cruel,” because we each took a character–but even that one, we both edited both voices. What surprises me most about that “norming” process is how natural it was. A couple of people who know both our writing really well–like Mike Czyzniejewski, who published both of our first books, or my daughter Nora–claim they can tell who wrote what, But I bet they would both make mistakes.
LR: Many of these pieces involve two primary characters. Do you think that is an offshoot of writing collaboratively? Do you both naturally gravitate toward one of the two characters?
KM: That’s such an interesting question! I hadn’t noticed that, so it definitely wasn’t a deliberate choice (whereas I HAVE noticed that a lot of our stories are about friends, which seems again not a conscious choice, but a predictable offshoot of writing with a good friend). Except for the Carrie/ Shane division of labor in “Oh-Oh-It’s-Cruel,” though, there’s been no example of one of us taking charge of a particular character. Michelle might remember some case? One funny thing we’ve noticed in interviews, and also in the editing process of this book, is Michelle and I both seem to share certain perspectives (like people should not chat with the cashier in grocery lines; doing so is obnoxious and against common courtesy rules). And when editors remark “Your character is so pathological and misanthropic!” we both nervously laugh because we still (at bottom) believe that chatty people in grocery lines are obnoxious, and resenting them is rational. So maybe Michelle and I have some similar perspectives, which make us align with similar characters and see other characters as antagonistic (like relentlessly cheery people who use rainbow fonts).
MR: We do align in a lot of ways, as Kim describes. Although sometimes Kim will leave me a comment on something I write insinuating that the character is bizarro, and I’m like huh, well, seems perfectly reasonable to me. 🙂
LR: I’m curious: Does one of the collaborators, in the end, have to “take the lead” in a piece---basically have the final say? Like somebody says “this is the right note to end the story on” or “we don’t need to revise anymore.”
MR: We tend to agree when a story is done and when it isn’t. Occasionally, one of us will be less sure it’s done–usually that’s me–and so I guess I will kind of take the lead insofar as I will say that I need a little distance on the story or that, hey, I want to play around with this or that and see what happens. But in the end, if I move stuff around or whatever, that has to pass Kim’s sniff test, too. I honestly can’t remember us ever really disagreeing, though, outside of Kim maybe getting a little impatient with me when I need more distance.
KM: LOL. This is why collaborating with Michelle is really good for me. I’m too trigger-happy about wanting to get the WIP off my desk and out into the world. I also feel like I depend on Michelle to move the plot along more than I should–I’m a little too “plot, schmot!” But we both tend to agree that this sentence is the ending, even if sometimes (often) we need to fill in more material before to make that last line land gracefully. Since we revise as we go, our drafts are pretty polished. So we move from finished draft to ready-to-submit within a few days, unless Michelle is being unusually obstinate (I say with love!). :)
LR: I love flawed characters. One of the things I like about both of your fiction is it presents characters without worrying how they will be judged. An interesting flash occurs early in the book called “War,” in which two military kids who live on base play “war” by torturing bugs and worms. This piece is one of my favorites in the collection. I’m curious: Is there a “sweet spot” you are looking for when generating characters? They almost all seem flawed yet redeemable. Perhaps more to the point: How flawed is too flawed for a character? Is there such a thing as too flawed?
KM: That’s another fascinating question that I have a million opinions about. It makes me think of this great interview with Claire Messud. Messud got really annoyed when the interviewer asked her some question about why her protagonist wasn’t likable, and basically said “I don’t care about likable! I want my characters to be interesting!” I feel the same way. My favorite character in my novel The Light Source was extremely flawed (Heather), and the most fun narrator to write, even more so (Porter, a real piece of work). As a reader, I tend to like the complicated, messy, warts-and-all characters (for example, by favorite Jane Austen heroine is Emma, whom Austen described as a character who nobody but herself would much like). To me, there’s no such thing as “too flawed,” as long as the character is interesting. I teach some real monsters (Humbert Humbert, Victor Frankenstein). But ha, Luke, you’re making me remember something: Keith Lesmeister, our editor and publisher, had a few notes for us on “Oh-Oh-It’s-Cruel” about toning down Shane, whom Keith clearly found to be offputtingly obnoxious. Since I was the one who had written all the Shane parts, I felt a little wounded. I remember asking Michelle “IS Shane too much of an asshole?” And Michelle was like, “No, Keith is just incredibly nice.”
MR: I love flawed characters, too. You mention “War,” specifically, Luke. Those characters are good examples of my favorite kind of characters–people who do awful things without quite fully seeing the awfulness. Or it’s not that they don’t see it, but the world they live in is so thick with violence that they’re a little numb to it. Also, they’re kids. Kids, as we all know, can be terribly cruel, and it’s, you know, just normal life.
LR: There are undercurrents of sexual tension and physical desire in many of these stories. Characters often feel unsatisfied with who they are with, or they long for someone else (“The Present Moment,” “Counterbalances,” “It was Stapled to the Chicken,” to name a few). As well, many of the characters are divorced, or breaking up, or in some sort of unhappy relationship. Why do so many of these collaborative stories revolve around ideas of wanting what a person doesn’t have?
KM: Well, that’s my sweet spot–all my books are in various ways about wanting something or someone you can’t have, or shouldn’t have. I wrote a novel and many, many stories about all three points of the triangle–the cheater, the cheated upon, the third party. I’ve written about divorce since I was a kid, and had a front-row seat to my parents’ break-up. And if you read Michelle’s books, again, desire, the difficulty of sating it, the crazy things it makes you do, comes up a lot. I guess it goes back to Tolstoy? “All happy families are the same, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Fiction is about conflict, and wanting someone you can’t have (and orienting to or resisting or giving into that desire) is one of the most intimate and painful generators of conflict.
MR: I write less often about people wanting someone they can’t have than Kim, but I do write often about people wanting something they can’t have. Whatever form that something takes–recognition, respect, prestige, fairness, love–unrequited or forbidden desire is, I think, the conflict that is most central to being human.
LR: “Place” in collaborative fiction is fascinating to me. When I write/read, place is something I see quite vividly, and I often associate the settings of a story with places I have been and can recognize. Does your sense of place change when writing collaboratively versus when writing solo?
KM: Well, I remember feeling really nervous when Michelle sent me the first couple of paragraphs of the story that became “Twenty-three Safety Manuals,” because it was obvious place would be important in the story, and I did not know the Gulf Coast of Texas at all. But Michelle immediately smacked down my fears by pointing out that I’d made her write quite a few San Francisco stories. Plus, my partner is from Louisiana, so I calmed myself down by reminding myself I actually DO know this temperature, humidity, the way it feels to breathe that air. Many of our stories are not set in a very specific location, but even the ones that aren’t, the place matters: this story has a setting where the backyard is full of caterpillar turds. When Michelle wrote a line about those turds “ridged like tiny grenades,” my mind’s eye could SEE that backyard, and the people who lived there.
MR: This is an interesting question because perhaps more than any other aspect of fiction writing, setting is so particular that it’s kind of like its own language or maybe a dialect. Even if you’re collaborating with someone who lives in the same city or region as you do, the particulars of that place are going to be at least a little bit different for the two of you. But when you live in very different places altogether, well, it’s hard to fake knowing a place. I’ve visited San Francisco several times, but I’ve never lived there and never spent more than a week there at a time. So when we’re writing a story set in San Francisco, that element of the story kind of belongs to Kim. I follow her lead. That is, I think that when we write stories set in very particular places–San Francisco, Galveston, the view of that backyard in “Picking”--one of us tends to own that element of the story more than the other.
LR: Another story that struck me was “Spores.” The narrator has lost her best friend---a woman named Helene---and she wanders through life looking for remnants of that relationship that might make her feel alive again. What can you tell us about this story’s construction and inspiration?
KM: I’m glad you brought up “Spores,” because that’s one of my favorite stories in the book–maybe even my very favorite. I know Michelle started that one, so she introduced the gym setting (the WIP name was “EQ: Gym”), the awareness of a potentially simpatico person at the gym (versus all of the alienating, put-together gym bunnies), and the husband who is worried about his wife’s isolation. Those were all Michelle contributions. I remember this story hit me on a deep level. I was writing a lot of stories about grief and death in that time period. My father was very sick (we started this story in May 2018, he died in January 2019). So right from the beginning, I had a strong emotional response to the narrator’s mourning of her dead best friend. I love the husband in this story too: he’s impatient with his wife’s shyness and social awkwardness, but he really has her back. This is one of our few stories about (I think) a really strong marriage. It feels to me like the heart of our book.
MR: I have a terrible memory–Kim, I’m assuming you looked up when we began this story, that May 2018 didn’t just pop into your head, even with what you were going through with your father–but I think that for whatever reason I was thinking at the time about how devastating the loss of a close friend would be, just as terrible, if not more so, than losing one’s partner or child. As the protagonist in the story says, making new friends as an adult is hard. It takes so long for a friendship to grow, to acquire a shared history that gives it depth.
LR: The last piece in this collection is called “To be Generous.” It involves a suburban family, a toilet-papered yard, and an eighth-grade dance. This piece is, to my ear, perhaps the most optimistic story in the collection---especially in its summation. What made you all want to end the book on this particular note?
MR: That’s one of Kim’s favorites of ours. I’m fond of it, too–and, in particular, fond of the optimistic ending. As much as I love flawed characters airing all their dirt, I also love moments of happiness and optimism in fiction. Relationships are so complicated–and so interesting because of that complication. The stories we tell ourselves have crazy power over us. I’m interested in how people shape their lives–for the better and for the worse–through story. In this story’s ending, Amy recalls her earlier narrative about how seeing Russ through the lens of their early days together is “like looking at a half-eaten and browning apple… and seeing it whole and ripe again.” She seems to reject this story now. Instead, she chooses to flirt with him as though they were teenagers again. In flirting, she’s telling a different story. In his playing along, the story becomes real.
KM: Luke, you’re picking out my favorites! I love this one too. My daughter Nora calls it our “slice of life” story– it’s her favorite in the book. And yes, it IS an optimistic ending, but not an easily earned one. The MC Amy goes through much of the story aggrieved and pissed off–at her husband, and at this fellow mom she barely knows, who called her daughter a bully. My favorite scene in the story is when Amy figures out how to resolve her battle with the other mom. I’m always telling my first-year writing students that the first thing you need to do when you’re addressing a hostile or skeptical audience is to find common ground. I love the “aha!” moment when Amy realizes the source of the misunderstanding that has fueled the conflict between their daughters, and thus the conflict between her and the other mother, and processes how to mend it. It’s a story about overcoming your pettiness and paranoia and sense of grievance, to see someone else’s side. Come to think of it, it’s a little analogous to writing. And that new good will carries over to the last scene in the story with Amy’s husband, their little role-play. I love Michelle’s point about “in his playing along, the story becomes real.” They’re collaborating. 🙂
LR: Thanks for talking to us, Kim and Michelle. Best of luck with this new book!
KM and MR: Thank you, Luke!