#pre-split horsemen are really fun to draw

[hub-pub-bub]

Whether you like to read fiction, non fiction, magazines, airplane magazines, posters, user manuals or just signs, you should read Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter.

Here are three reasons why:

It’s a comedy about the birth of the son of Satan and the coming of the End of Times that stars a demon, an angel (also a rare book dealer), a witch, the Four Horsemen, the Antichrist (a nice 11 year old boy) and his dog.

It’s been nominated for a World Fantasy Award and has been adapted into a soon-to-be-released tv series starring the incredible David Tennant and Michael Sheen (This way, you can impress your friends and wow your acquaintances by talking about how it differs from the book)

It’s one of the greatest feats of literary collaboration in a pre-Internet, pre-Google Docs era which showcases what seamless collaboration can do to literary projects.

The first two reasons alone should be interesting enough to pick the book up but if you are curious about the third, you’ve come to the right place.

Good Omens was authored by two people, Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett. It was Neil Gaiman’s first novel – he went on to author some bestsellers that you may or may not have read/watched like American Gods, Neverwhere, Stardust and The Ocean At the End of The Lane. It was not Sir Terry Pratchett’s first novel but it is one of his few works outside his remarkable 41 book fantasy series, Discworld.

Types of literary collaborations

Typically when books are co-authored, the arrangement is dreamed up by the publisher. Publishers bring authors together to create and draw from their combined pool of influence. After all, a co-author might reach an audience that the author hasn’t influenced yet.

The collaboration can also proceed along many routes as there are many different types of writing partnerships – James Patterson, for instance, hires a writer, usually someone with some published credits, and gives them a lengthy, detailed treatment (somewhere in the 60-80 page range) of the book. After that, the writer… writes the book and Patterson rewrites or just gives feedback. Mark Sullivan, who co-wrote several of Patterson’s Private series as well as Cross Justice, described weekly phone calls, blunt criticism and a pursuit of the intelligent thrill ride. The novels are Patterson’s ideas, his characters, so it naturally involves a lot of input from him.

Then, there’s the style that John Green and David Levithan used when they co-wrote Will Grayson, Will Grayson together. The authors split it evenly by half – John Green wrote all the odd numbered chapters from the perspective of capitalized Will Grayson while David Levithan wrote the even-numbered chapters from the perspective of lower case will grayson. They’d decided on the plot outline – how their characters would meet – and shared outlines and feedback with each other but it was largely a solitary process.  

Collaborating via the Royal Mail and Floppy Discs

Good Omens, on the other hand, was a truly collaborative novel. For one thing, it wasn’t facilitated by a publisher but by the authors themselves. Neil Gaiman got the ball rolling by writing the first 5,000 words about a demonic baby swap and sent it out to his friends for feedback. It amused Terry Pratchett so much that he picked it up and wrote the next 5,000 words, borrowing attributes about Neil Gaiman that amused him and giving it to a main character.

The first draft of Good Omens was written in nine weeks – over phone calls. They’d plot and read each other what they’d written, trying to make the other one laugh. They rewrote each other’s bits, competed to get to the best bits, left footnotes, threw in characters and handed it off when they got stuck. No one kept count but Neil Gaiman reckons that Terry probably wrote around 60,000 “raw” and he wrote 45,000 “raw” words of Good Omens.

Draft 2 was also plotted over long, daily phone calls and involved the duo sending floppy disks to each other (this was 1988). Towards the end of the book, Neil Gaiman went to stay with Terry Pratchett to patch it all together and finish it.

Much has been made of this unusual yet completely-makes-sense creative partnership but I see three major points here:

Technology is your friend. Sometimes, it’s worth taking the time to finding the right tech to make your collaboration work. In an era when writers were still holding fast to their notebooks and typewriters, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman realized they’d be able to collaborate better if they sent each floppy disks with their bits so they could easily edit each other and not spend hours reading their pages to each other (Imagine all that they’d have accomplished with Google Docs!). Finding the right collaboration software for your team can really make all the difference when it comes to efficiency and productivity.

Trust can make or break a relationship. Without mutual respect and trust, a collaborative relationship can break down really quickly (usually at the first sign of criticism). It’s only because they trusted each other to give good feedback and respected each other’s skills that Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett were able to make this collaboration work. Creative conflict is inevitable in a collaboration and they wouldn’t have been able to weather it if they didn’t trust each other.

Remote is great but face-time is also invaluable. Even though they were able to write a bulk of the novel without being together in the same place, there’s a lot to be said for in-person collaboration. Spontaneous interactions can randomly occur in person, something that can’t be facilitated even by the best collaboration software.

Even the title is a collaboration – when the time came for them to find a title, Neil Gaiman liked Good Omens and Terry Pratchett liked The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter so they compromised and picked one as a title and the other as a subtitle.

The two never collaborated on a book again (impossible now) – their paths diverged wildly as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman became an enormous success and Discworld made Terry Pratchett the UK’s best selling author in the 1990s. As Justine Jordan put it, “In retrospect, it seems amazing that two such singular and prolific creative energies could share the writing of a novel: an extraordinary congruence of hard work, good timing and readerly luck.”

As Sir Terry Pratchett put it, “In the end, it was this book done by two guys, who shared the money equally and did it for fun and wouldn’t do it again for a big clock.”

Image credits to Swetha Kanithi. Cheers to Girish Shenoy for feedback.

Aishwarya Hariharan

Content strategist by day, armchair adventurer by night.

[curious-sootball]

Who are you gonna call? Those bastards!

Some poor photographer in the weird west is about to have one hell of a day.

I finally put my Red Hand Gang designs together enough to paint them :D I think I really like the idea of all five of them just roaming around in-between setting things up for the apocalypse for a while before splitting up.