I’m just going to say this, I could never have, I wouldn’t be here in this interview, I would never have been able to write a chapter, let alone 35 novels without Lin. Lin taught me the rules, they still frustrate me. We’re writing in the first person, I want to write in the first and third person.
Simultaneously.
I don’t see why you can’t do that. And we, I’m telling you, it’s a miracle because Lin sits at the computer and has a thought and types and I have a thought and talk and then Lin types, and then sometimes she just types and I wait, and then she reads it back to me and then we argue over every word.
And it works. But it is, like…it had to have been meant to be that we would get along this way.
We work really very much as a team and Henry’s instincts are great. Maybe the word-smithing a little bit, you know the fussing around. But in general we do everything together and we see eye to eye on things and it’s a very important part of our collaboration that we are mutually respectful and seek each other’s opinion.
And are satisfied at the end of the process. We go that’s the book we wanted to write. That’s how we wanted it to sound.
And you see that acted out sometimes when we’re discussing, debating, arguing, whatever verb you want to put it. It’s good natured so it’s not exactly arguing but we’ll hang in there with a discussion about a particular word until, ad nauseum sometimes because that represents what we’re doing together which is we want what’s on the page to be what we created together.