SHE WROTE: Frosty

So collaborating, not for kids. Bob and I have worked out a sort of a Porcupine Partnership: We collaborate very carefully. We're back at work with a new character: Abigail, the Underage Nun, a stripper that Palmer's boneheaded best man, Downer, has hired for his bachelor party. And only you guys will know where she came from. One of the bonuses of reading the blog. Probably the only bonus besides talking to each other in the comments.

BCB quoted my favorite Frost--actually not a Frost fan here because he was such a son of a bitch, especially to his wife--the poem I'm going to stencil onto my office wall if I ever finish cleaning it up--because it really nails why anybody goes through the hell of being a writer, let alone collaborating.

The poem, as BCB said, is Two Tramps At Mudtime, and the narrator is cutting wood and really enjoying it when two tramps come by and offer to do it for him, and it's clear that they truly need the work and the money. The poem is about work and what it means and it ends:


Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right--agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.


It's that last bit. You wonder why Bob and I do this when we fight so bitterly. Sometimes so do we. But we love what we do. We'd do it if we didn't get paid for it and we have, both as a team and solo, writing without contracts, praying that somebody would be along to pay for it later. We've written when it was fun and when it wasn't because we need to write. Bob said once that what we each really needed, separately, was a couple of weeks off, no work. I said, "How?" If I end up someplace and I don't have a notebook and a pen, I start to hyperventilate. I have dialogue written on the back of my checkbook, in the margins of magazines I've swiped from doctors' offices, in the backs of all my Sudoku books. I overhear people's conversations in airports and I write them down on the sleeve of my boarding pass. I see pictures in magazines in waiting rooms and I tear them out because that's what Crash's house in Tuscany looks like (yeah, like I'd buy an Architectural Digest). I miss exits on the interstate because I've got people talking in my head. Put me on a beach, I'm going to write dialoge in the sand. I don't write because I want to be rich or famous or go on book tours (ARRRRRGH) or see my name in bookstores or any of that stuff that people think they want to be published for--I like money as much at the next person but it doesn't really seem to be connected to the writing in any way, it's not like I type so many words and somebody puts a check on the desk--I write because I write, it's sort of like breathing, I type because I am. And Bob's the same way. We tripped over each other and found out that we write well together, so that was lucky, and yes, we annoy the hell out of each other and frequently we become seriously angry with each other and think about never opening each other's e-mails again--my e-mail blocker calls his name pretty often--and then we go back to the book because we both love to write and need to write and we make each other better writers, and that's really all there is to it.

Only where love and need are one and the work is play for mortal stakes. That's us. We love to write and we need to write and we're playing for mortal stakes both together and on our own. And sometimes we get frosty because we really weren't designed to play well with others, particularly with each other. It's the ox and the dachshund thing. But it's what we were born to do. Mortal stakes.

And now Bob will come in and disagree. Because the other thing we were born to do is fight. Sigh.