How Cowriting Helped Us Defeat Author Self-Doubtby Mae Marvel (cowriters Ruthie Knox & Annie Mare) For writers, the words of self-doubt and uncertainty tend to come much more fluently and readily than the words of the story we’re trying to get on the page. We would never tell someone we loved, or a stranger, or someone we’re not the biggest fan of, even one of the things we tell ourselves multiple times a day. But what if, as a writer, you invite someone else into the house? A fellow writer. A friend. Even a beloved. The day we opened a shared Google doc and started writing a story together was the day we ended utterly high—high on what it felt like to write and write and write without hurt. Without self-doubt. With interest, a critical eye, and attention that wasn’t embroidered with barbs. We didn’t begin with the idea that we would work as writers together. We did it for fun. It was a Sapphic office-romance short story, and it made us laugh, and it was a break between Ruthie’s contracted solo projects and the end of Annie’s contracts. It was a natural extension of a practice we’d done before to make the other feel good, which was to write little fan fictions of the other’s work and pass them back and forth like notes so that we could see what it was about our own work that really captured a reader’s attention. Writing together, by extension, was fan fiction of our creativity. We had to let go of perfectionism—first, because it stalled the fun, and, second, because perfectionism felt too much like an unreasonable and unkind expectation of the other. And without perfectionism blocking the light, we could see what aspects of our jointly written drafts were genuinely working and not working in real time, from a standpoint that existed outside of comparison. There wasn’t anything that was safe to tear down without hurting someone too much to keep going. So we kept going. When one of us got stuck, she passed the baton to the other. We left notes for each other—describe this, make this clearer, add feelings. Everything we already liked about writing got better, and everything we didn’t like got easier. Editing and revision, in particular, started to make sense in a new way. Rather than respond to our work as censors offering theoretical criticism, we began to respond as partners seeing potential changes that would let us convey our shared story, with its shared values, even better than we already had. When the work felt overwhelming, we made a plan to tackle it together. When we’d taken something apart and were adrift in the choppy middle of the process of putting it back together, we encouraged each other and persisted. She tried to make me laugh. I tried to impress her. We both succeeded. As writers, when we hurt ourselves with the scripts of self-doubt, using distorted ideas of laziness, production, didacticism, white supremacy, or hierarchies of good/bad/best/worst, we’re perpetuating inequity in an art that we all love. Writing together has made it so much easier to check ourselves, to check our ability to do harm to ourselves and others, and instead to focus on the love. Make it for you, or make it for your friends, or an audience, or a new audience. Make it to try something, or risk something. Walk away from the hierarchical, limited, ableist perspective that you have to justify yourself to the world to be allowed to speak to it. You’re here. You’re a writer no matter how you’re doing it. Your readers are waiting for you—for your first book, for your next one. |
THE BREAK-UP PACT
Houston City Book spotlighted 
- WE COULD BE SO GOOD author Cat Sebastian's STAR SHIPPED, about two feuding actors on a long-running sci fi series who must fake a friendship for damage control, again to Tessa Woodward at Avon in a good two-book deal, by Deidre Knight 
