Mark Edwards's Blog, page 14

Mark writes: When Louise and I make public appearances, or talk to anyone about our writing, the first question we always get asked, without fail, is How does co-writing work? There are a fair number of writing teams out there, but most of them use one name: Nicci French, Tania Carver, Scott Mariani, Lars Kepler, PJ Tracy, plus there is James Patterson and his legions of co-writers… I can’t answer for those duos, but here is a glimpse into what it’s like writing with a partner, using our forthcoming novel All Fall Down as a case study.

With all of our books, we start with the germ of an idea. Killing Cupid and Catch Your Death came from conversations, but All Fall Down came from an email. In the summer of 2011, when Catch Your Death was doing well on Amazon, I had an idea for a sequel while packed on to a commuter train. Standing up, squeezed between two sweaty commuters, I pulled out my iPhone and started tapping a rough idea for this new novel into the Notes app: a virus breaks out in California and Kate Maddox is asked by MI6 to go and work in a secret lab to find the cure… By the end of the journey I’d thumbed in about 300 words, which I emailed to Louise. She replied with more ideas, and we filed the email away in our inboxes.

A few weeks later, our agent asked us for a synopsis for our next novel. Most writers will tell you that writing a synopsis is harder than writing a novel, but luckily we had our notes from the email, which we quickly expanded into a two-page outline. Now, we had a beginning, a middle and a vague idea of an ending. But about 70% of the details were shadowy and would need to be filled in as we went along.

The next step was typical of how we write all our books, with the exception of Killing Cupid, which we pretty much made up as we went along. We plotted out the first quarter of the book. We knew we had to get Kate to the secret lab, and we needed to give her partner, Paul, something useful to do. Then we needed to work out the motivation of the ‘baddies’. This is important because it tells you what the good guys have to contend with. Once we’d worked that out, we started writing.

We used Dropbox, an online file-sharing service, to save our work. We created a Master document – leading to lots of texts telling the other person we were ‘in the master’, which we found endlessly amusing. Each individual chapter was written in a separate document. So, I would write a chapter, then send it to Louise for editing. She would edit straight away. Rather than rewrite each other’s work, we tend to write comments – ‘Do you really think she would wear black leather?’; ‘I think you’re giving this away too early.’ It’s vital to be completely honest and not worry about hurting the other person’s feelings. That’s why we are able to work together so well. We don’t take offence.

Sometimes we will edit the prose directly, removing semi-colons and pointing out if the other person has made fifteen references to eyes in one chapter (as I did, shortly after having an eye operation). Louise tends to edit out a lot of my swearing. I will suggest she cuts some of the descriptions of countryside and wellies. My instinct is to write spare, stripped-down prose and Louise is more poetic. But we have learned to write as a third person, Voss Edwards, and these days we often find it hard to tell who has written which part. We write in a unified voice, though Louise will still often embellish my prose and I will cut her more flowery passages.

When you start a novel, it’s a little like having a blank map which you need to fill in. Perhaps surprisingly, we don’t write the novel in order. I might work on chapter 25 while Louise is working on Chapter 10, while all the chapters in between remain unwritten. We fill in the blank chapters as we go along, gradually moving the story forward. Partly, this is because we tend to take on different characters. We always write from multiple points of view, which might be because we are a partnership. In All Fall Down, I wrote Paul’s chapters and most of the baddies, while Louise wrote most of Kate and her son, Jack. But we also swapped around, so Louise would write one of the ‘Sisters’, as the baddies are known, and I would write Kate.

We have preferences for the kind of scenes we prefer. I write most of the action sequences and Louise writes the emotional scenes. We take it in turns to write the sex scenes! I also got the job of writing the science scenes, and we were determined to make the science in All Fall Down a lot sturdier than in Catch Your Death. We both went to meet our ‘scientific advisor’, Dr Jenny Rohn, who showed us the best ways to kill someone in a laboratory. The photo above was taken in her lab, and made us chuckle.

We would meet up every month or so, get our laptops out and discuss where the story was going and brainstorming the difficult bits – the tricky parts of the plot, the motivations of the characters, how are going to get from A to C via B? If anyone listened in to our conversations they would wonder how we ever get anything done as we switch from topic to topic at a ridiculous rate and both have terrible memories. We have to write everything down in our plan.

After about six months, we had written the first draft – almost 140,000 words. The next step was to do our own edit, which we did quickly, both reading through and making comments in the Master document, discussing any issues that had come up and making changes. When we write, we often get stuck over a particular detail – for example, how is X going to escape from Y – and we will leave a big note in the manuscript saying ‘Fix this later’. At the end, we have to go back and fix it. There is no point in sitting inactive for days – it’s better to press on, knowing you can always change something later on.

We then sent the manuscript to a couple of readers, including Dr Jenny, who sent back pages and pages of notes, pointing out all the mistakes we’d made with the science and the way scientists behave. We put those to one side, along with the comments from our other reader, who was mostly checking for errors with our American vocabulary and geography, then sent the first draft to our editor at HarperCollins.

A couple of weeks later we met her for dinner and she diplomatically pointed out all the bits she didn’t like or that didn’t work. This was followed up by a very long email with full details of everything we needed to change – things which necessitated some quite major character and plot changes. This is one of the great things about having an editor – it results in a better book – but at the time it makes you feel like hiding under a duvet and thinking that you might be happier driving a bus.

The second draft is where co-writing really pays off.  Most of it involves making decisions and finding creative solutions to problems – much easier with two people. So we met regularly, spending many evenings at Louise’s kitchen table thrashing out the details, often wanting to drink wine and forget about this bloody book, but making each other keep working until we had figured out exactly what to change. We then divided up the work and set to work on the manuscript. This took another two or three months. Then it went back to our editor and the copy-editor.

Finally, the copy edit came back, along with more notes from our editor. We were given a few weeks to go through many more notes and write several more key scenes, including an extra sex scene and some more sadism (the copy editor had written ‘Opportunity for more sadism here’ and we were happy to oblige). Halfway through this, I suffered a detached retina and could only see out of one eye for two weeks, which made writing a challenge to say the least. Louise had to take on the bulk of the work, but I did what I could and actually wrote my favourite scene in the whole book with one eye closed. It’s not a technique I recommend though.

Sending off that final version of manuscript is a wonderful feeling. Most writers are utterly sick of their book by the time it’s finished. You read and re-read the same chapters so many times you begin to lose all your critical faculties. It can get very confusing too, trying to keep track of the plot, especially when there are two of you making changes. But somehow, we kept it together and delivered what we both think is our best novel. It’s like Catch Your Death turned up to eleven. And we hope people enjoy reading it. It will certainly be a hell of a lot easier to read than it was to write – but hopefully just as much fun.

Pre-order All Fall Down now on Amazon

Here it is, hot off the press (well, an email from our editor) – the jacket of All Fall Down, including the back cover, the spine and the front cover. If you click it, it grows.

The woman on the front has not collapsed at a gala dinner after having too many glasses of wine. Neither is she having a bit of a lie down. No, she is dead! But did the virus get her, or the terrifying female villains who will stop at nothing to spread the virus?

All Fall Down is the second Kate Maddox novel, following Catch Your Death, and is our first original book to be published by HarperCollins, making it the first brand new book we’ve published since May 2011. It’s out on 14th Feb 2013, a special Valentine’s gift for people whose idea of a romantic night in involves a torture chamber and a head in a jar of formaldehyde.

You can now pre-order it on Amazon here.

We’re very excited to be able to reveal details of our next novel, All Fall Down, the sequel to Catch Your Death. It will be published by HarperCollins in the UK on February 14th 2013. Yes, a Valentine’s gift for our readers!

There will be lots more revealed over the coming weeks and months, but here – to whet your appetite – is the copy from the back of the book.

Two years on from uncovering a terrifying conspiracy of rogue scientists, all Kate Maddox wants is to lead a normal life with her partner Paul and son Jack. But then a face from the past turns up, bringing chilling news.

A devastating new strain of the virus that killed Kate’s parents is loose in L.A. – and when a bomb rips through a hotel killing many top scientists, it becomes clear someone will do anything to stop a cure being found.

While Paul goes on the hunt for answers, Kate finds herself in a secret laboratory in the heart of California, desperately seeking a way to stop the contagion. But time is running out and soon it will be too late to save their loved ones, themselves, and the world…

You can pre-order All Fall Down on Amazon now.