Collaboration 101: How We Do It, Second Riff
Saturday, August 29th, 2009 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rolanniIt's funny how living in the country means that it's hard to take walks. When I lived in the Big, Bad City, I walked everywhere. When Steve and I first moved in together, we lived out in the 'burbs, though I thought it was the country (the difference between the 'burbs and the country is sidewalks),and we walked miles of an evening. When we lived in Waterville, we used to make the police nervous, because we would walk late at night, after the paper went to bed at midnight, and I'd walked home through the night-time downtown.
Out here in the True Country (no sidewalks for six miles in one direction -- no sidewalks 'til Bangor in another...) -- it's hard to walk. The shoulder is soft and stony, and the road traffic is cars that are driving too fast, and log trucks, ditto. In several seasons of the year, there are people of dubious good sense and/or sobriety, who are nevertheless armed, trekking in the woods and taking sound shots into the trees, toward and road or not makes no matter to them.
What does this have to do with collaboration, you ask?
Well, see, the reason Steve and I used to walk all those miles is because we were talking out what's known between us, and I may add, elegantly -- "Story Stuff."
"Story Stuff" is the measure of our household. Everything stops for "Story Stuff." We can be standing in the grocery store, studying on the virtues of spaghetti sauce, and if one of us says "Story Stuff," the shopping goes on hold until the scene/bit of dialog/forward plotting has been brought out and discussed. Our neighbors are used to it by now, and just shop around us. Summer people tend to keep their distance, even sending store employees down to fetch out what they want from the aisle we've taken over, rather than venture too near, themselves.
Now, what makes "Story Stuff" especially interesting is that -- we role-play. Mildly! No knife-fights in the breakfast food aisle. But certainly one or both of us have been known to adopt a Belligerent Stance from time to time in puruit of a plot point. Also? We talk about our characters as if they were, well, real. Because, to us, they are real. This can lead to some...fascinating assumptions on the part of those on the periphery of a "Story Stuff" conversation.
Like the time we were in -- was it Nashville? No, I'm wrong. We were in Louisville, for the NASFiC, back in Aught-Seventy-Nine. Steve and I are from Maryland, originally, and while my accent passed for "southern" up here before it got all scrambled around with Mainer and became, "Where did you say you were from?", in Louisville, they speak Southern.
So, picture this: Two ragged mid-coasters just in from a long drive, catching a cheap lunch at the HoJos before getting over to the con, and we're talking, in our fast, clipped, city accent, about a story. In fact, we're discussing a scene that some years later appeared in Agent of Change. What we're talking about, very earnestly, is the philosophy of weaponry and what sort of person would prefer a gun, and what sort a knife, in a given situation, and what might cause a person whose weapon of first choice is a blade to go instead for his gun, and --
We notice that our waitress is, well...hovering, within earshot. It's a funny hour, there aren't that many people in the HoJo's but we think maybe she's going off-shift and needs us to settle up before she can, or that the table needs to be made ready for the dinner setting, or --
Anyhow, we ask her if she needs the table.
"Oh, no!" she says, in that wonderful slow thing they've got going in the Real South. "No...It's just -- Y'all have such an interestin' family!"
Here ends the Second Riff.
Out here in the True Country (no sidewalks for six miles in one direction -- no sidewalks 'til Bangor in another...) -- it's hard to walk. The shoulder is soft and stony, and the road traffic is cars that are driving too fast, and log trucks, ditto. In several seasons of the year, there are people of dubious good sense and/or sobriety, who are nevertheless armed, trekking in the woods and taking sound shots into the trees, toward and road or not makes no matter to them.
What does this have to do with collaboration, you ask?
Well, see, the reason Steve and I used to walk all those miles is because we were talking out what's known between us, and I may add, elegantly -- "Story Stuff."
"Story Stuff" is the measure of our household. Everything stops for "Story Stuff." We can be standing in the grocery store, studying on the virtues of spaghetti sauce, and if one of us says "Story Stuff," the shopping goes on hold until the scene/bit of dialog/forward plotting has been brought out and discussed. Our neighbors are used to it by now, and just shop around us. Summer people tend to keep their distance, even sending store employees down to fetch out what they want from the aisle we've taken over, rather than venture too near, themselves.
Now, what makes "Story Stuff" especially interesting is that -- we role-play. Mildly! No knife-fights in the breakfast food aisle. But certainly one or both of us have been known to adopt a Belligerent Stance from time to time in puruit of a plot point. Also? We talk about our characters as if they were, well, real. Because, to us, they are real. This can lead to some...fascinating assumptions on the part of those on the periphery of a "Story Stuff" conversation.
Like the time we were in -- was it Nashville? No, I'm wrong. We were in Louisville, for the NASFiC, back in Aught-Seventy-Nine. Steve and I are from Maryland, originally, and while my accent passed for "southern" up here before it got all scrambled around with Mainer and became, "Where did you say you were from?", in Louisville, they speak Southern.
So, picture this: Two ragged mid-coasters just in from a long drive, catching a cheap lunch at the HoJos before getting over to the con, and we're talking, in our fast, clipped, city accent, about a story. In fact, we're discussing a scene that some years later appeared in Agent of Change. What we're talking about, very earnestly, is the philosophy of weaponry and what sort of person would prefer a gun, and what sort a knife, in a given situation, and what might cause a person whose weapon of first choice is a blade to go instead for his gun, and --
We notice that our waitress is, well...hovering, within earshot. It's a funny hour, there aren't that many people in the HoJo's but we think maybe she's going off-shift and needs us to settle up before she can, or that the table needs to be made ready for the dinner setting, or --
Anyhow, we ask her if she needs the table.
"Oh, no!" she says, in that wonderful slow thing they've got going in the Real South. "No...It's just -- Y'all have such an interestin' family!"
Here ends the Second Riff.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Y'all have such an interestin' family!"
Date: 2009-08-29 10:31 pm (UTC)Works for me. All of your loyal fans would agree with both statements.
Re: Y'all have such an interestin' family!"
Date: 2009-08-29 10:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-29 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 01:52 am (UTC)They aren't real?
They aren't Family?
I am desolate to hear it.
But so glad you are sharing this with US.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 02:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 08:20 am (UTC)After rather a while of this, the people in line behind us asked, very nervously, "This isn't *real*, is it?"
It was at that point we realized perhaps Disneyland was not the right place to discuss how to kill characters. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-08-31 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-30 09:20 am (UTC)I have to agree with that! In fact that whole "stop and discuss something" is endemic to fans, whether it is characters in a book or possible science or fighting methods, we take it seriously. That doesn't mean that we don't have fun as well, of course we do, but we give every subject the respect that we give to so-called "real world" subjects for the discussion. If in doing so we freak the mundanes, well, that's why the gods gave us mundanes, so we could freak 'em...
"No knife-fights in the breakfast food aisle."
I'm disappointed! Mildly *g*...
Y'all have such an interestin' family!
Date: 2009-08-30 04:52 pm (UTC)I have to quote Val Con, "Ah, Clan is discovered..." :)
Lauretta
@ConstellationBooks
PS I'd rather go Edger's way and sing instead of pulling a gun or knife.
Awesome!
Date: 2009-08-31 04:05 am (UTC)Once upon a time, way too long ago, I used to be a regular at a few cons on the East Coast, and I hadn't yet discovered your books so I have no idea if you guys were at any of those cons. Now that I've fallen in love with the Liaden universe, I can't help but wonder if I'd just gone to the right bit of programming, if I might have come across Liad sooner ... :-)
Thank you so much for sharing this riffs on your collaboration process! I'm hoping there might be more coming, but the first two are just the kind of stuff I'd hoped you would share!
no subject
Date: 2009-08-31 02:51 pm (UTC)Yeah, rude -- but just the sort of thing I can see myself doing.
I remember reading a story/book a long time ago where the character was going off into danger and someone advised him not to carry a gun. If you have a gun you are bold/arrogant. If you carry a knife you are cautious and quiet. That always made sense to me and in my mind it made the knife user more deadly. The character took the gun – I would too.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-31 05:17 pm (UTC)In that situation, puny clawless thin-skinned tool-using animals (humans) need a force equalizer to survive. Other environments, other tools. In that book, one of the students took a vacuum suit, and got flunked, for not paying attention to the details.
Great book - I'll have to go re-read it again.
Murgy
Tunnel in the Sky
Date: 2009-08-31 09:29 pm (UTC)In that book, one of the students took a vacuum suit, and got flunked, for not paying attention to the details.
***
If I remember correctly, another student was flunked for NOT bringing cold weather gear, because the test parameters didn't exclude the possibility of arctic weather. It's all in the details.
Mary