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Man / Woman Author Team! 10/19/2013 4:17:56 PM
Article that discusses the powerful synergy that happens when a male author (me) asks a female author to fix up a romance thriller! "Delusional" was born. Man / Woman Writing Team – The Making of “Delusional” By Scott Spotson
October 18, 2013
originally posted on Share Eat Sleep Write
At the end of April, I was in a quandary. I’d written what I had thought to be a brilliant 65,000 word story on a paranormal love triangle with detectives thrown in. The manuscript was clean and complete. It was ready to publish. However, something nagged at me – that the story could be much, much better.
For one thing, I sucked at writing the romance part of it. Yet, the romance was key to the story. If I couldn’t entice my readers to believe that the two main characters were in love, then what hope did I have of pulling off the whole story? Emotions and feelings were important, and while I can excel at writing of feelings of apprehension and excitement, I found I needed help with writing of affairs of the heart.
I then decided to have a female writer team up with me. To that effect, I was lucky enough to procure the services of Sue Publicover, herself an accomplished author. She agreed to take on the project with gusto, and I gave her pretty much a free reign to make any changes she wanted, while preserving the basic story. Tracking changes on the document? Forget about it!
The whole endeavour was a learning process for me. When Sue got her hands on the manuscript, she pointed out that readers tend not to take kindly to couples who are seen as sabotaging an existing relationship. In the story, we have the love triangle between Patricia Fowler, the protagonist of the story, who falls in love with Paul Blast, a co-worker who’s already married to Wendy Jewett, a wealthy socialite. Sue advised that while we could have Patricia attract Paul, it would be limited to the prospect that Paul was ready for a divorce, and that Patricia would honorably step aside temporarily while Paul sorted out his feelings. We also threw in a few scenes where the two lovebirds couldn’t resist each other, just brushing aside by each other, but by and large we kept Patricia out of the role of a conniving opportunist. This allowed the reader to emphasize more with Patricia.
