MemeMachineGo!

I can only but hope that the forthcoming novel Don’t Look Down is as funny as the story of its creation.

One evening in Maui, Jenny Crusie was watching the sun set over the Pacific when Bob Mayer sat down beside her and said, “What do you write?” Jenny said, “Well, basically, in my books, people have sex and get married.” Bob said, “In my books, people have sex and die.”

Naturally they decided to collaborate. Nine months later, Don’t Look Down was done.

It was pretty simple, really. They decided that the Crusie heroine would, as usual, come from the normal world, and the Mayer hero would, as usual, come from the covert ops world, and that they’d meet because the Crusie heroine would be working for a normal-world boss who was really a Bad Guy that the Mayer hero would have to take out of the picture.

Jenny: “I want to write about a woman who runs a B&B or a woman who’s a film director.”
Bob: “How many people can I kill in a B&B?”
Jenny: “I’ll do the film director.”

They began with only one rule: they each had final say on their point of view characters, Jenny on Lucy and Bob on Wilder. Bob said, “I don’t do that Yucky Emotional Crap,” so they agreed that Jenny would do YEC, and Bob would be violent. They hammered out a rough plot line using different plotting styles: When the action lagged, Jenny would put in a turning point and Bob would shoot somebody.

Jenny: “You can’t keep killing characters. My readers get attached to them.”
Bob: “Then why do you keep giving them names?”

As Jed notes, it sounds almost like a novel-length version of the Net classic tandem writing assignment.