Two into one

Gert Loveday

Picture this:

the time is 10 pm. A woman in Australia sits at her computer laughing as she writes.  She scrolls back, counts her words and hits send.

Now it is 7 am in Singapore.  A woman in a nightdress opens her email, reads and laughs.  She scurries to the kitchen to make tea, runs back to the computer and starts writing. A little while later, still in her nightdress, she looks up at the clock. It is 4 pm.

And so it goes on, day after day for a month, the woman in Australia and the woman in Singapore, each writing a minimum of 1500 words a day, because that is the agreement.  Sometimes, carried away, one of them will write 3000 or more. And the story is writing itself.  They started with no more than a handful of names – Millie Lord, Hubert Crane, Tibbie Clemons – and a dream about pigeons.  They do not plot.  They simply write, one bouncing off the other, never knowing, when they open their email, what situation will confront them.

“See what you can do with that!” one of them says with relish, hitting the send button.

Or, opening the email, “My God, what do I do now?”

At the end of the month they have the first draft of a novel. They have created a world of people as real to them as anyone of flesh and blood.  Sometimes they have flown through their 1500 words with ease and joy, at other times they have slogged through them with despondency and grim duty. Flights of fancy have turned into crucial aspects of the plot.  One woman, indulging the whim of writing a Joycean riff about a cat searching for mice, found that it became a turning point in the story. The other woman, recalling the horrible home-brew her father made, gave Hubert Crane, who had drunk too much bad beer, a life-changing vision of the poet Blake with a pigeon on his head, on which he founded his entire philosophy.

The women are sisters, with a lifetime of shared reading. Neither of them ever thought she could or would write a novel. But now Gert Loveday has come into the world and she has written five books.

NaNoWriMo, a worldwide online exercise in which you commit to writing a novel of at least 50,000 words (1500 a day) in the month of November, was where it all started in 2006. 1500 words a day, just write. No starting and deleting, no self-berating – just write. Doubting they could do it, both sisters started a NaNo, and both finished. The next year, they decided to do a joint NaNo.  From this Crane Mansions – a novel about the redeeming power of cake was born.

The joy of writing with another is in the immense uplift it gives the imagination. From out of nowhere, a fresh wind blows, a window opens on a totally different landscape. And the work of writing with another, the need to turn your hand to whatever situation lands on your desk, is a wonderful way to learn how to be a writer. You have a task to do and you do it, often surprising yourself and often opening up new aspects of the story that had never occurred to you. There is room for the individual ego, each writer indulging herself by doing what she does best, but neither ego can outweigh the other.

The story of so many writers is lonely hard work and a path littered with knockbacks. It is easy to lose the joy of writing and the sense of why we do it. None of Gert’s novels have yet been published but she has brought immense enjoyment into the writers’ lives and the lives of friends and colleagues who have loved her books,

great pride for the two writers who never imagined they could write at this level, and above all an absorbing interest in the craft of writing that will last them all their lives.

Gert Loveday is the pen name of Joan Kerr and Gabrielle Daly.