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Hey Literary Land,
So co-writing a book. It’s an odd quest. Especially for fiction. And it doesn’t happen that often unless you’re a rubbish writer and need someone to ‘write’ it with you (i.e. they write the whole thing and you just inspire the story!!!). So when I approached Tristan to join me in a fun writing exercise, neither of us really thought what we’d end up with would ever be a book. We certainly didn’t write the way you would normally write a book. It was just a fun game of back and forth between two characters and we never knew what they would do or say until that very moment. Nothing was pre-planned. But in the editing, that is where things became tricky. Luckily for T and I, we had a brilliant editor, Sarah Hazelton, whom both of us loved. But when one writer re-wrote a segment, that would often directly affect the other writer’s work. So we would have to take turns editing the whole manuscript back and forth which took a very long time. It could be quite painful, especially if you suddenly wanted to change a big chunk of your work. You didn’t have the luxury of changing things willy nilly like you do when you are writing solo. But at the same time, that’s what made it fun. It became a labyrinth that we had to duck and weave our way though. Right now I’m writing for TV and there is so much ducking and weaving that I often forget what it is that I’m writing about. And with any professional piece of writing that becomes collaborative, that is the challenge. To re-write and compromise your initial concept so many times without losing the heart of the story. Because without the heart, there’s no magic. And books are all about the magic. Those moments that make the reader take a gasp of air … or perhaps even stop breathing! When a moment is so true and authentic it hits the reader and makes them realize that they are not alone on this odd place we call earth. Ahhh books. I love them!
But co-writing with Tristan? A dream and so, so fun. Writing can be very lonely and getting to navigate through a story with another writer was so exhilerating and exciting. I hope we can do IT’S YR LIFE 2 soon!
Hey Random Readers,
Tempany Deckert here. I’m the co-author of IT’S YR LIFE, the new young adult novel that Random Australia have just published. I’m an Aussie living in the United States and I’ve written a bunch of tween and young adult novels, as well as acting up a storm on TV shows, plays and films.
In fact, that’s where I met the co-author of IT’S YR LIFE, Tristan Bancks. We were both teen actors on Home and Away many moons ago.
Living in Los Angeles is very weird….! I try to keep Australian by bombarding all my Aussie friends back home with copious emails. That’s in fact how IT’S YR LIFE came about. I was emailing Tristan and we decided to do a writing exercise back and forth over the web. He wrote a character from his home in Byron Bay and I wrote my character from Hollywood, Los Angeles.
That’s what is interesting about being a writer. You can pretend to be any character, anywhere in the world. Writing from the perspective of a bratty Hollywood teenager took me through a whole mindshift. And it made me see Los Angeles from a very different perspective.
Tristan’s character was a freegan. Know what that is? I wonder, has Tristan ever been a freegan? Tristan? Please enlighten us!!
The Random Blog 