How did we come to write a novel with such an outrageous title? Why did we write it together? And how in the world did we end up with a hero named Pinky DeVroom?
Well then, let’s share our origin story.
Rick writes:
“A few years back in the depths of a rough winter, my college friend Susan Whittier PhD, a brilliant microbiologist, posted this photo online:”
“Sue described this splendid icicle as ‘swirled all the way to the shrub.’ And that was it for me–my first thought was, ‘That’s a book title!'”
So Rick, obsessed with using that title for something worthwhile, emails Tom and says, “Tom, this phrase is too great to let go. Let’s write a short story!” Now, we can reasonably assert that many writers prefer to work alone. Letting someone else into the writing process is a huge leap. But that title! It must have been a powerful thing, because Tom said yes. Further, Tom had a notion of the setting. He’d always had a hankering to write about Boston, and suggested either the 1930s or the 1950s. Harking back to all the relatives and dental patients who were influenced, molded, forged even in the remorseless crucible that was the Great Depression, Rick said, let’s go with the 1930s, and we’ll start the action a week before The Crash.
So now we had a setting, and we had at least one element of the plot: the inconceivable pressure of an economic collapse that was sudden and affected everyone. Everyone in the nation was traumatized by the stock market crash and the resultant financial misery; no one escaped its hold. Outside of war, this is a rare phenomenon in modern human life; usually, specific strata of society or geographic areas are more severely affected than the general population when terrible events occur.
But now, what was this thing the Shrub to be? How would we take such a random and perhaps vaguely silly word and make something meaningful to a story’s plot out of it?
Tom continues:
Rick, who has a talent and penchant for vivid—if not preposterous—character names, supplied some starters, one of which seemed to scream for the page: Pinky DeVroom. Tom, being me, approached the idea with his usual gung-ho pessimism. (Think of your favorite negatives, like, “That will never fly,” “It’s probably going to rain,” “I think I’m getting a toothache” and others. Welcome to my mind.)
But Rick, having one of those wretchedly sunny dispositions, convinced me. I’d edited his tidy 240,000-word valor-and-shame WWII epic a bit before, so I knew he had solid writing chops. We decided to try alternating chapters and devroomed from there.
The Shrub, just to keep you from dying of suspense, became the Prohibition-era speakeasy that Pinky, a Boston society-column newspaperman frequents. The era is essential, because the story starts just short of the Crash of ’29, which torques Pinky’s world, along with most of the rest of the world.
Taking Pinky from Shorts to Long Pants
We rounded the corner on the thing, though at more of a trot than a gallop. It didn’t proceed briskly, because each of us had to mull the other’s additions, considering them in light of story tone, character development and the arc of the tale, and how best to move the narrative so it was both coherent and compelling. (And because of certain sluggardly tendencies on the Tom part of the equation.) And also massaging it so it didn’t seem like was written by committee, which is tricky, and which I’ll discuss below.
We ended up pushing poor Pinky around so he ended up almost at wit’s end—but we could do that: he’s just a character, not a collaborator. With your collaborators, you have to be much more subtle in your manipulations. Shrub-as-story came in at 13,000+ words (some of them good ones), and I was happy with the outcome.
But not Rick. Rick thought Shrub had all the basis of a novel. I quickly rushed out my standard equivocations (see above), though I didn’t use toothache, because in his business hours, Rick is a dentist. The man finally drilled through my defenses and we were off. Well, not exactly off, but we at least had good starting points: Our Shrub short already had some colorful secondary characters (that could be fleshed into two solid subplots), some prickly-protagonist personality issues worthy of expansion, and nascent conflicts and tensions that could hit your head like the sour moonshine served in The Shrub.
Shrub as a short took six months. Shrub as a novel took two years. Shrub as an editable project and then a published thing took at least another.
But how collaborations progress is what I want to talk about, because I’d never partnered on something of this scope before. The work did suffer from a fair amount of arrhythmia, because I lurch about in my writing in general, often working—or avoiding working—on several things at once, and Rick had his daily teethings to tangle with. But here’s what we did:
Psst! Trading Notes and Historic Notions
As mentioned, we alternated chapters, though we both had hands in any extended scenes. We didn’t write an actual outline at first, but a few chapters in, we did, one that usually had merely several sentences suggesting oncoming chapter plot beats and developments, and those abridged outlines only a few chapters out. We wrote several of those sketchy outlines as the novel progressed. But those were fundamentally just billboards with broad strokes: “Pinky in Elfred’s office, blunders in book discussion, distrust between two.” [Note: yeah, “Elfred”—it just fits.]
But those signposts became hand-painted works in our email exchanges, of which we had eleventy and eleven. Things like this:
When are you envisioning this scene taking place? Not long after Elfred told Pinky that Shakespeare was going to publish? My first thought would be that a new redeeming episode for Pinky/Elfred would happen after he’d gotten her letter, answered it in the paper, and then realized it was her, and then they have one of the trysts (all of them you suggested are good). But of course it could work earlier too, though he must have some kind of mini-redemption post-Stuvesant’s as well.
And this:
So, we have Unctual walking back to the banana caboose and perhaps discovering the break-in? Could Unctual actually be sleeping with them in the car, if it’s really cold? Would it be better if he were in an adjacent car, and hears the noise, or what? I kind of wanted them to break in, with a gun in U’s direction, saying “give us everything” and then they find out everything is bananas, literally and figuratively.
And this:
Ah, and I am currently obsessing over my use of handkerchiefs, when it is pocket squares we should be inserting into our characters’ suits. And not inserting—if Pinky is indeed a somewhat careless, non-natty dresser, he may often leave them out. I shall do a search on the document for the word ‘handkerchief.’ I’ll change references to ‘pocket square.’ For, as the Irish assert, “Always carry a pocket square to show, and a handkerchief to blow.”
The above is Rick, a history enthusiast, who told me he could research something for sighing-with-delight hours that might end up becoming a single sentence in the book. Thus, the Crash, 1930s Prohibition Boston, Telechron clocks, bartending advice manuals, United Fruit company, industrial lead poisoning, Shakespeare and Company’s publishing enterprise and yes, pocket squares (and so much more) all fell to the full attention of Rick’s research.
Oh—Rick designed a seating chart for a critical scene as well. And, I relied on him for the Yiddish too—I’m only good for an Oy vey now and then when I try to fix the plumbing.
Now that I think about it, I’m not sure what I did. Wait—I did pitch in: I helped in the spirits research by drinking good whiskey and pretending it was Prohibition rotgut.
Scene Splicings and Mushrooming Motifs
For some of the lengthy chapters, which might have multiple scenes, we split the scenes. And we’d leave questions for the other writer—highlighted in Word red—in scene areas that were dicey, or unclear, or better suited to the hand of the other. Because I wanted to believe I was important, I held the master document—the current chapter we were working on was emailed back and forth, and when we were happy with it, I added it to the softly glowing master.
Some of our palaverings were in working out timings and logistics, because we wanted fundamental historical accuracy (with occasional artistic license unlicensed, for spice), and there are a number of actual figures in the mix, so we tried to conform some events and people to the historical record, which occasionally squeezed how we wanted emotional vicissitudes to do their vicissituding. Speaking of emotional vicissitudes, my own marinations in winter depression (I am a SAD sack) seasonally slowed the process, but we kept the light on.
One of the greatest pleasures was when in the writing one of us discovered a motif that both of us were delighted by—there are multiple instances where Pinky’s hat is assaulted by the forces of fate, and that trope developed as chapters progressed. But there was much work in between bouts of delight.
[Note to self: next time, collaborate with James Patterson, get the half-million advance, and send my keyboard on tour while I go to the Bahamas.]
On This We Don’t Disagree
We only had the mildest of disagreements—“Not sure about the Cackles reference though—that might be too literary for the moment; seems too manufactured to me.”—so much so that they could hardly be called disagreements.
Collaborating on a fictional work has been fun, instructive, challenging and rewarding. When Rick presented a scene that shone, my competitive demon shrieked—“He’s outwriting you, dunderhead. Get busy!” And that pushed me to make my scenes all the better. Know this: Poor Pinky, we pushed that lamentable fellow to the brink. As for his hat, you’ll just have to read the dang book.