By Peta Murray

There are some issues greatest finished alone. Singing within the bathe. Making an attempt on swimsuits in a division retailer changeroom. Dancing in a kitchen after too many martinis. These are higher skilled unobserved, within the privateness of 1’s singular personhood. Many writers would add writing to this listing of solitary pleasures, however what if a possibility arises to work in collaboration?

David Carlin and I launched into an experiment of this type seven years in the past. David (primarily based in Melbourne) had been working with Nicole Walker (primarily based in Arizona) on a guide of flash-essays, The After Regular: Transient, Alphabetical Essays on a Altering Planet, which was hitting the cabinets. Their guide, developed via a long-distance dialogue between the 2 authors, is a witty-yet-serious send-up of a survival information. I used to be a recovering playwright, testing my voice in longer type prose. David was a good friend, now colleague and mentor with whom I shared an workplace at RMIT, an Australian college.

Someday he requested if there was one thing that we too, would possibly work on collectively.

“Sure”, I mentioned. “I’ve a title! The right way to Gown for Outdated Age.”

And thus, with a title and a weekly invitation, we launched into what would flip right into a long-haul undertaking. I might ship David a query about his apparel or the contents of his wardrobe or he would ship one to me. On weekends we’d write temporary essayistic prospers and swap them with one another. We had been then allowed brief, reflective paragraphs in reply. This was ritual-assisted low stakes writing. Sometimes a chunk would spark additional questions. You point out you like sneakers, please inform me extra.

Our writing “collectively” was a call-and-response course of.

Individuals who got down to co-write a guide are suggested to make agreements about methods to proceed. The prudent would possibly determine upfront who could have the ultimate phrase. We did none of this. We blundered ahead, playfully, exchanging texts, e mail by e mail, permitting belief and understanding to develop together with our phrase counts.

One afternoon in David’s yard studio, we printed up every part we had and minimize it into chunks. Laying it out on a protracted desk, we moved fragments round to make totally different shapes. We had been turning issues inside out. Our preliminary focus, clothes, had develop into a portal to writing about our experiences in midlife, in ageing, and in caring for our surviving mother and father, David’s mom Joan, and my father, Frank.

With new function, we invited editor Nadine Davidoff to hitch us as our improvement coach. She requested for dots to be joined, threads to be related. This revealed different moments in want of enlargement or elaboration. We had been beginning to perceive what our undertaking was actually about.

What had begun aside and on-line, through e mail, (and completely timed for serial Melbourne COVID lockdowns) gave strategy to an ease in working collectively. Now that the pandemic had waned, there was nothing nicer than sitting in a room with David speaking about what we had been making.  We took turns, paragraph by paragraph, studying aloud. We had been even in a position to write in one another’s presence with out discovering it awkward or confronting. We’d set one another duties, patching narrative holes, and smoothing uncooked and unpolished sections. Later we learn the guide out loud yet one more time to hassle the language asking ourselves:  Is that this the fitting phrase, is that this phrase doing sufficient heavy lifting?

One Sunday in late summer time of 2024, we met on the iconic Victoria Market in Melbourne’s metropolis centre. Over espresso, we pulled collectively a pitch for the unbiased Australian writer Upswell. Terri-ann White, founding father of the publishing home, opens their submission queue to unsolicited manuscripts for simply three hours, someday annually. We wished our guide in that pile. We labored at velocity in a single Google doc, writing, enhancing on the similar time.

Two hours later we hit Submit!

Our manuscript was accepted, and as I write this, we’re a few months away from publication and a collection of launches and appearances that may usher our guide into the world. Co-writing has given us a degree of distinction in a really aggressive market.

So what has collaborative writing made attainable that solitary writing couldn’t?

Working on this method has been a beautiful antidote to the loneliness of the solo author, as is having the moment gratification of a prepared reader.  In David, I’ve a assured sounding board and, due to his experience, a mini-masterclass, month-by-month. This has been emboldening for me, particularly within the unfamiliar terrain that’s memoir. I’m discovering it simpler to open my life as much as readers when my buddy beside me is doing the identical. It’s also a uncommon alternative to look carefully on the mysterious, even secret matter that’s one other author’s tics and methods, strategies and strategies.

Should you strategy collaboration with curiosity and openness, you too might discover and refine a tandem or parallel praxis. It doesn’t imply you’ll lose, or mix or merge your voices. Quite, like singers in a duet, you’ll sense one thing attention-grabbing is occurring as you discover new methods to precise yourselves in counterpoint.
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Peta Murray is a Senior Lecturer in Inventive Writing at RMIT College. She is co-author, with David Carlin, of The right way to Gown for Outdated Age (Upswell, forthcoming February 2026). Finest recognized for performs Wallflowering and Salt, Peta’s brief fiction has been printed in New Australian Tales and her essays in Sydney Overview of Books and The Mekong Overview. Peta is a faux-Scot with quite a few alter egos and too many hobbies.

Tagged: collaborative writing, Nicole Walker