Collaborating: the Art of Three
Mystery writers obviously have better dreams than the rest of us, because Mr. Zubro, instead of shrugging it off, e-mailed his two pals Barbara and Jeanne, and a project was born. It ultimately took six years to complete, despite D’Amato’s optimistic initial estimate. As she put it: "It takes me a year to eighteen months to write a book. I thought with three of us working on it, how hard could it be? Ten months, maybe?"
All three writers are in a reading group together, which means they get together every couple of weeks and read out loud to each other. Mr. Zubro came up with the idea in December of 2003, and by February of 2004 they had agreed on writing guidelines for the book.
D’Amato points out there have been plenty of other famous collaborations—Ellery Queen, Emma Lathen, and Charles Todd, to name a few. All three agreed that if writing the book interfered with their friendship, they would scrap the project immediately. While the project proved to be difficult, this never happened.
Dams acknowledges that it was "much harder" than working on a solo book, but "that said, every solo book I’ve written for many years has, of course, been through the D’Amato-Zubro filter... So I trust them implicitly." Cuts were made "with no hard feelings."
Mr. Zubro says the words to describe their working methods are "methodical, logical and professional." By April of 2004, D’Amato had proposed an opening; by May, the characters had started to develop, and e-mails were flying between all three, with all offering character refinements and changes.
Still, with all this energy, what took so long? D’Amato puts it this way: "the challenge of melding different ideas, diverging plot lines, presenting and abandoning characters. Call it negotiation. We would each, separately, come up with scenes. Then we’d get together, use some, enlarge some, delete some entirely."
Through it all their reader’s group method of reading out loud persisted. The entire manuscript was read aloud by one collaborator or another, and the final polishing, which Zubro describes as "verb-by-verb" was the result of five eight to twelve hour days. And as Ms. D’Amato points out, all three were experienced enough to know "not every phrase is gold and nobody should edit us." Ms. Dams has written fifteen books, Mr. Zubro twenty-one, and Ms. D’Amato, nineteen.
Some silliness was part of the process. As they got together, usually in Barbara’s living room with their pages, "Sooner or later we’d come upon such a funny mishmash of words or inadvertent double entendre that we’d start shrieking with laughter and my husband would come rushing in from his office saying, ‘What’s wrong?’" And all this came from Mr. Zubro’s dissatisfaction over a recent presidential election. The result is a seamless thriller that’s both entertaining and scary. It’s impossible to tell three minds were at work on it, and as you read it, you probably won’t care.
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