Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Prologue: Signs of the Times: Five Snapshots of Contemporary Authorship

Prologue Signs of the Times: Five Snapshots of Contemporary Authorship Snapshot 1 “In the modern era it isn’t enough to write,” comments Tony Kushner, author of the highly successful play Angels in America. “[Y]ou must also be a Writer. . . . You become a character in a metadrama into which your own dramatizing has pitched you. The rewards can be fantastic, the punishment dismal; it’s a zero-sum game, and its . . . marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity. It’s a very popular myth.”1 Elsewhere Kushner describes drama as an inherently collaborative form: “It’s not like writing a novel; you’re not stuck in a room with your brain.” Yet he nevertheless emphasizes that a playwright should do his own dramaturgy . “You have absolute responsibility for it. It is your work.”2 Snapshot 2 “It’s a film that Tom Stoppard wrote. It’s really amazing,” Gwyneth Paltrow said on live satellite TV a year before Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture and she won Best Actress at the 1999 Oscars. Citing her comment, movie critic Peter Howell noted that one of the titles considered for the film was How Should I Love Thee?—thus revealing the influence of one of history’s most famous literary couples. According to xi Howell, Shakespeare became the “hottest guy in tights” based on the film’s success. But the same could not be said for Marc Norman, one of the coauthors of its screenplay. Norman’s American script was turned over to well-known playwright Tom Stoppard to give it a “proper English flavor,” but the collaboration led “many to wrongly assume that Stoppard did the lion’s share of the work,” when he merely “added some secondary characters and dialogue and made the script better,” as Norman acknowledged. Among other things, Stoppard suggested adding Marlowe, Shakespeare’s rival, as a character.3 The screenplay for the film implies that to some degree Shakespeare himself owed his titles and subjects to others: Romeo and Juliet to Marlowe and Twelfth Night to his fictional ladylove Viola, played by Paltrow. Snapshot 3 : Collaboration is an idea that makes many writers who emphasize individual creativity uneasy. You two work together. Would you describe your collaborative process? : It’s not very mysterious. : We’ll start talking about something a long time in advance of it—the germ of a plot, or a story that has occurred to us, or an observation that we’ve seen. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water started out with the title. . . . After we talk, one of us, whoever thought of it probably, will write a draft. It might be a paragraph; it might be ten pages; it might be something in between. We then share that draft with the other person. Shortly thereafter they will sit down with a pencil and make comments about what works and what doesn’t work, what needs expanding, and what might be overwritten . Then they give that draft with their suggestions back to the person who wrote it, who has the option of taking or leaving them, but almost always taking them. Then that person does a new draft, gives it back to the other, and goes through the same process again. This exchange takes place five or six times.”4 Snapshot 4 “Literary Ex-Lovers Heading to Court,” reads the July 1, 1998, headline describing the legal struggle between Evelyn Lau, author of Runaway: xii Prologue Diary of a Street Kid, based on her experience as a prostitute, and W. P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe, the novel upon which the 1989 Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams was based.5 Lau (in her twenties) and Kinsella (in his sixties) had a written agreement allowing either to use their relationship in fiction, but Lau had published not a fictional story but a memoir—her version of the relationship—entitled “W. P. and Me” in a Vancouver magazine in 1997. Kinsella charged that Lau had invaded his privacy by revealing intimate details (such as his sexual performance ), although he had also written about their relationship in a story entitled “Lonesome Polecat in Love,” which concerned “an old guy in love with a young Asian woman.” The trial date in March 1999 coincided with the publisher’s release of Lau’s seventh book, Choose Me, which recounted the...