The Origins of Our Writing Partnership: How SWHW Really Came to Be
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009This past Monday Claire and I were asked to present a story about our writing partnership at a salon, in particular about SWHW. Below is what I read out loud:
There was a Hawaiian sun setting in the background when we first worked on She Wrote, He Wrote: Claire and I, armed with our laptops, stumbled into a coffee shop on Broadway and Clark called Maui Wowi, and it was with the shop’s wall-length photograph of the Pacific Ocean at sunset to our left – a picture we couldn’t stop looking at because we were both amused with and impressed by its size – Claire explained to me her idea of starting a writing project together. About writing a joint blog.
“I don’t know if I want to write a blog,” I said. “You’re the blogger.”
For as much writing as I try to get published, I attempt to remain somewhat impersonal with it. I’d rather write pop culture-induced anecdotes that reflect on how ridiculous everyone else is, instead how ridiculous I am. Blogging, it seemed to me at the time, appeared to be too similar to journal writing, and no one wants to hear what I dreamt about last night. No one wants to read about what I was going to be up to on a Tuesday afternoon. No one wants to hear my daily thoughts and nightly rants.
“No,” Claire said. “It’s not going to be like that at all because we’re going to have a focus, which is the most important thing about blogging, and we’re going to write about a determined experience. Together, but separate.”
Claire talked more about her idea, explaining how we’d both write about the same event without reading each other’s work, how we’d post them side-by-side in a he-said-she-said slant and how it would work because our writing styles are so different. And so it was then that our blog She Wrote, He Wrote was conceived right there under a two-dimensional Hawaiian sun.
I only said yes to this whole idea because I felt confident in Claire not only as a life partner, but as a writing partner. She has an amazing control of language – both orally and in the written form – and she uses it responsibly to not only insightfully wax on the world through her own five-year-old blog, but she’s out there getting published in major magazines and freelancing for some pretty respectable publications. I placed one foot, and then another, on her coattails. I got into a wobbly surfer stance. I’ll ride Claire’s wave, I said.
After all, it was because of Claire that I started writing for The Huffington Post. I sent them a pitch to be a columnist and never heard back; Claire sent in a better pitch and they gave her a profile and free reign, and she then recommended me to her editor. It was because of Claire’s writing and submitting knowledge that I got a piece accepted at Chicago Public Radio, and it was because of her gigs as a travel writer I was able to travel to Boulder, Costa Rica and Jamaica last year almost for free. And it was directly because of her I landed an entire page book review in the Chicago Reader after a certain Time Out editor continued to ignore me. In Claire, I trust.
She is my editor, my proofreader, my first reaction-er. I respect her opinion so much that it sometimes pains me to not take her advice on a title, the certain use of a picture, or if the phrase “ass-faced dicknose” has two hyphens or one. And sometimes she might not totally get something I’ve written, like the Transformers piece I did for Cracked Magazine or the AC/DC parody list I wrote for Yankee Potroast entitled “Dirty Deeds Done Not So Dirt Cheap.” No matter what, though, I go to her first.
My partnership with Claire is more than a writing one, we’re in love and she’s pregnant and we’re on the same Lost episode. It’s amazing to share all this with my wife, but I do want to point out four other memorable partnerships I’ve had in my life:
1. Fifth grade. With classmate Brian. We put together a totally cool 3-D Icarus diorama that involved a lot of bendy straws and red magic marker.
2. In high school, my tennis doubles partner for a year was my good friend and troublemaker, Will. We made the #1 doubles finals at a Catholic schools tournament and we not only lost the match, but we also lost our tempers. When we refused to shake our opponents hands up at the net, the mother of one of them yelled out “Real nice. They won’t even shake their hands.” In response, Will shouted in front of a hundred people who were watching, “Shut up, bitch!”
3. In grad school I collaborated with two friends on a sitcom pilot and two episodes that revolved around a vampire columnist living in Minneapolis who has lots of flashbacks and a bumbling doctor friend that we saw being very George Costanza-y. Somehow, our show has yet to be picked up by Showtime.
4. A long time ago I was basically attached at the hip with my friend Lennie, who was this huge oafish guy. We worked side-by-side on a ranch, and while I was trying to make enough money so that I could buy a piece of land for myself to settle down on, Lennie really only cared about one thing: rabbits. The problem was that just when we were making enough money to move, Lennie… kinda killed the ranch owner’s wife while just trying to stroke her hair. Broke her neck, actually. And our partnership ended tragically when I decided it was better to shoot Lennie in the back of the head instead of letting him get lynched by the mob that was after him.
The pregnancy has put She Wrote, He Wrote in limbo at the moment. We’re spending a lot more time on the couch than out reviewing the newest restaurant. But I know that if this little writing project were to end, that it’s for the best so that we can finally start working on that screenplay we’re supposed to be writing together.
This past Monday Greg and I were asked to present a story about our writing partnership at a salon, in particular about SWHW. Below is what I read out loud:
In the beginning, all we did was write. I was living in Los Angeles, in a sunny little apartment by the beach. I’d quit my job to work on a book and each morning when I got up I’d make coffee and then sit down at my computer, where there was always an email from Greg waiting for me. He was living in Chicago, working some job that I never quite understood the details of, in a tall building in the Loop — something I was unable to picture since I’d never been to Chicago. I’d never met Greg either but nonetheless, his emails quickly made my day feel incomplete in their rare absence.
Both of us being writers, we’d become acquainted with each other through a website we both wrote for. It was a community of writers, this website, and so this guy, Greg Boose in Chicago, who wrote surprisingly funny vignettes about odd situations he found himself in, seemed safe. We wrote to each other about our lives in big cities, about the people we went on dates with and about nights we returned home alone. We wrote a lot about writing, about our ambitions and the ways in which words filled us up like nothing else could. These letters back and forth were addictive, each one more carefully composed than the next and each one just a bit more revealing than the last.
Truthfully, I never thought anything would come of it. I certainly didn’t think that a year and a half after beginning those emails I’d be here before you, pregnant and married to Greg Boose from Chicago who still works that same mysterious job in the Loop. But, to everyone’s amazement, including our own, something in those letters and emails took hold, perhaps proving that words are sometimes stronger than they seem.
It’s a funny thing to partner with someone. Sometimes it happens before you know it. Our partnership has almost always taken shape in the form of writing. It became automatic, before we’d even met in person, to send each other drafts of what we were working on, to use each other as editors. I would send excerpts of the book I was working on and he would send irreverent humor pieces that made laugh out loud, startling the sleeping cat in my lap.
Greg and I are different writers. His words smack of sarcasm and a sharply twisted humor. I tend towards the more introspective and reflective. Rather than make up stories, which we rarely do, both of us tend to draw observations, commenting or immersing ourselves in some situation or experience past. It was easy to read his work — easy to comment and criticize since it was so remarkably different than my own. And I suspect he felt the same way about me. Had we both been writing thoughtful essays about the shadows of our lives or absurd lists of “Yo Mama” jokes, it might have been different. There might have been a competitiveness there, or a sharper nit-pickiness that neither of us has ever displayed.
Eventually Greg and I met in person, a few months after we’d sent those first emails back and forth. The meeting took place near an empty baggage claim carousel at O’Hare airport, and I suppose that it was then and there, in a simple way, that our partnership truly began. I was fresh off a flight from Boston, having decided at the very last minute to stop in Chicago on my way home from a trip to the East Coast. Greg had been pacing the airport for over an hour and had already changed his shirt once in attempt to conceal how sweaty the whole ordeal was making him. And ever since that warm May afternoon, when I finally got to know both Greg and Chicago in person, we’ve been working together on love and life and writing…and all the other things that fall somewhere between the three of those.
Six months after I moved here I convinced Greg to start a writing project with me called She Wrote, He Wrote — a website in which we would review restaurants and events and situations from a dual perspective. I figured that given our different writing styles and varied backgrounds, something interesting might emerge. And from fancy cocktails to running mixes to surf lessons in Costa Rica, Greg and I have proven over and over, to ourselves and to our readers, exactly how two people can have the same experience yet be in two completely different places. And it’s proven to me over and over the exact strength of our partnership — that as merged as we are, as combined as our days and hours and lives seem to be, we each still live in our own world, albeit one enhanced and enriched by the other.
