Janie Chang and Kate Quinn.Supplied
If there is one thing that makes the creative partnership between Janie Chang and Kate Quinn work, it is this: They are both, emphatically, not morning people.
That shared dislike served them well on their recent tour promoting The Phoenix Crown, the historical novel they co-wrote that has become a Canadian bestseller since its publication earlier this year. “Every morning, it was a different airport, and it would be like, no conversation, get in the cab, no one says anything,” says Chang. “We get to the airport, and then one of us is like, ‘It’s my turn to watch the luggage, you get the coffee.’ ”
The two women, both successful historical novelists in their own right, knew each other for several years before they decided to write together. They met on a book tour in British Columbia and built a friendship from that shared experience. (It doesn’t hurt that they share a publisher, too.)
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The Globe and Mail spoke to them after their weeks spent on the road promoting the book – a tale of the search for a priceless Chinese jewel, lost in the devastation of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, and two women whose lives the cataclysm irreparably altered.
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Chang was in Vancouver, freshly returned from promoting her latest solo project, The Porcelain Moon, a bouquet of welcome-home flowers from her husband still blooming in the background. Quinn, meanwhile, was in an Evansville, Ind., hotel room, waiting to do an event promoting her latest release, The Briar Club.
Here, they talked about the importance of collaborating in person, how they provide feedback and the stories lost on the editing-room floor.
How important is it for you to spend time together in the same room, breathing the same air, for your creative partnership?
Janie Chang: When we were at the plotting stage, first trying to flesh out the idea for the book, that was important. It was good to have the spontaneity of talking ideas around.
Kate Quinn: When you’re plotting something, it’s the most open-ended thing in the world. We got together a couple of times with nothing else on the agenda but that we’re going to sit in the same room, we’re going to hash this out, and at some point, we’re going to have the book locked. You have no idea what road that’s going to take.
Chang: All we knew was that it would take endless cups of coffee.
Quinn: When it came time to write, I think we met in person four or five times, but at least two of those meetings were just the plotting. Once we had that locked into place, we were able to work more independently, and then things like Zoom, phone calls and e-mails were essential. During editing, we did meet up at the most critical stage, because at that point, we were working off the same document and we didn’t want to be e-mailing it back and forth.
Do edits feel less personal when you’re sharing that authorial burden with someone else?
Chang: One of our biggest priorities, apart from writing a good book, was that we should still be friends. We also knew that the editing and revision process, the back-and-forth commentary, has been where other authors have fallen apart. That’s why we put so much work into plotting at the front end, because we wanted to make sure that it was a story we both wanted to write. That reduced the amount of conflict because we’d already agreed on something. Kate would never redline anything I’d written. She’d just put a comment in the corner, like, “Do you think we could pick up the pace a little here? I think it’s dragging.” Or, I might say, if our characters are in the same scene together, I’d say, “I think my character, given her background, would respond much more strongly. Can you dial up the vitriol?”
Quinn: It does help to commiserate a little when you have to kill your darlings. It was helpful to have that person who was also sighing when we got the feedback that we had to cut down the first 75 pages to more like 15. Like, “Can I just say I’m really sorry we’re going to lose that whole bit with Donaldina Cameron? Because dammit, I really liked her as a character.” When you get two historical-fiction authors writing together, the foremost thing is that we’re history nerds, and we mourn the things that we found in our research that we could not include in our book simply because there wasn’t room.
You’ve both had success individually. Does this shared bestseller mean anything different to you?
Quinn: Publishing can be a cautious business. If you try to do something that’s outside of your lane, if you have a brand that’s working, saying, “Hey, I want to take a couple of years out and do something with a co-author in a period I’ve never done before.” You’re asking people to take a chance. Both your publisher, and also your readers for following you on a different path.
If you had to share one sage word of advice or caution to two friends contemplating something like this, what would you say?
Chang: Compatibility really matters. The fact that we’re both not morning people means there are no unreal expectations about how one person is going to be. We’re also both workaholics.
Quinn: It can be both problematic when people don’t put enough thought into how they want to work together. How comfortable are you with someone redlining your work, or working on your words? Do you want to create a blended voice, or do what we did, and write separate characters so we had our book but there were her chapters and my chapters. We’ve all worked on group projects and felt like there’s that one person who’s coasting and will get the grade without doing any work. And the bottom line is: We were not only already good friends. We were also already both such genuine fans of each other’s work, and there was a tremendous amount of respect going in about how we wanted to do this together.
This interview has been edited and condensed.