A Chat with Eric Flint - Page 2

CO: When you are ready to work in a new world or even on a new story in a familiar one what are the steps you go through before you hand it over to the publisher?

EF: No different than any novel, really. Keep in mind that I did not write this novel “on spec,” as writers call it. (That means you write the story first and then try to sell it.) I had a contract for it ahead of time, and part of the contract involved the publisher accepting the plot outline I submitted. Thereafter, the editor handled the final manuscript the same way any manuscript would be handled.

CO: You’ve collaborated with several of the biggest names in science fiction and fantasy in David Drake, Mercedes Lackey, and David Weber. How was writing with each of them different?

EF: Every collaboration is different. In the case of the three you refer to above, the differences are these:

Dave Drake and I work together pretty much exactly the way an opera gets written. He does the libretto and I set it to music, you might say. Dave develops a full plot outline and then I all do the actual writing.

Dave Weber and I divide up the chapters and we each write some of them. Then we’ll swap the chapters back and forth for some further input, rewriting, whatever.

With Misty Lackey, it works somewhat the same way, except those are three-way collaborations with Dave Freer. Once we’ve jointly worked out the plot outline, Dave writes the first draft except for those chapters we’ve agreed ahead of time that either Misty or I will write. The first draft then goes to Misty, who writes the second draft, filling in all of her material. Then it comes to me for the final draft.

CO: You’ve also written with a few people who are currently less well known like Ryk Spoor, Andrew Dennis, and Dave Freer. How does your role in the collaboration differ from when writing with someone a bit more well known and more set in their own way of doing things?

EF: Well, first of all, those are three different writers and I work differently with all three. Dave Freer is a much more experienced writer than either Andrew or Ryk. That said, the process is basically the same. We agree on a setting and plot outline, and then my collaborator writes the first draft. (In theory, at least. In the case of Andrew Dennis, the publisher changed the publication schedule for 1634: The Galileo Affair so I wound up writing about half of the first draft because of the time pressure.) Once the first draft is done, it comes to me and I do the rewrite. That’s the same way I work with all my “junior” collaborators, such as Kathy Wentworth, Sarah Hoyt, and Virginia DeMarce. The extent of the rewriting involved varies a lot from one book to another. Most of the actual prose will remain that of my co-author, with a fair amount of polishing and tweaking by me. My main contribution is what you might call a cross between rewriting and macro-editing. There’s a lot more to making a story work as a story than simply the sentence-by-sentence exposition. I might, for instance – I have, actually – moved chapters around to make the pace work better, cut chapters, added chapters of my own, rewritten various scenes, etc etc. By the time it’s all done, I’d be very hard-pressed to tell you which parts of the book were “mine” and which were my partner’s. So would they. And neither of us cares. A book has its own life, as it were.

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