And so Sandy begins: "We grew up not far from each other in Scarborough, ON and attended the same high school, but we actually met at our part-time job at the public library where we worked as pages. She was 14, and I was 16."
Books by Yvonne Collins and Sandy Rideout.
Visit Yvonne and Sandy's website at www.collinsrideout.com
Sandy Rideout & Yvonne Collins
Profile by Dave Jenkinson.
To this point, all of CM's "Profiles" have been of single authors, but Toronto's Sandy Rideout and Yvonne Collins, who are in their 40's, collaborate on their writing. At the time of the interview, only Sandy was available, and she spoke for the duo on the understanding that Yvonne would get the final edit and could then, via parentheses, correct the truth according to Sandy.
"We hit it off right away and were always joking around in the stacks, and it wasn't long before the head librarian (the person we were usually joking about!) started assigning us to different shifts. So we wrote notes and limericks to each other and put them up on the staff bulletin board. They were funny to us, but maybe not to everyone else as they were frequently taken down. Apart from the kibitzing, we were both good employees."
"After Yvonne got her license, we'd borrow her mother's Oldsmobile and hit the Scarborough ‘hot spots,' like the Bluffs or the Beaches, and especially the McDonald's drive-through. (Yvonne: This had less to do with Quarter Pounders than with my crush on the guy serving them). Later, we both went to the University of Toronto where I studied English and Yvonne studied Criminology. We became roommates and lived in a couple of different places, but at this point in our lives, the thought of writing together never occurred to us. It wasn't until we were in our thirties that Yvonne suggested we write a book together, which became Totally Me.
"I would say we both had happy childhoods. However, I spent many years holed up in my room reading, whereas Yvonne was more interested in art. (Yvonne: And the guy at McDonalds, who was an artist, coincidentally). While I was reading Lucy Maud Montgomery's Emily of New Moon, I decided that writing was what I wanted to do. I read every one of Montgomery's books and later, her journals. She's the author who inspired me the most."
Sandy followed her English literature studies with a degree in Journalism from Ryerson. However, she admits she dallied with the idea of going to the University of Guelph and becoming a vet. "I loved James Herriot, and so did Yvonne. Then I realized I was more interested in his writing than in veterinary medicine. Besides, I didn't exactly dazzle anyone with my science marks."
Sandy says she wasn't a natural reporter, either. "I was too shy to pick up the phone and ask the difficult questions, although I loved writing up the stories once the calls were done. Ultimately, I disappointed the Chair of the Journalism Department by taking a government communications job. Still, I learned a lot from the Journalism program. Most important, I learned to rewrite. I used to be a one-draft girl. I also learned that I loved feature writing. I did quite well at it, and it was the most positive reinforcement that I'd ever had for writing. I still have moments of regret for not following through on my journalism ambitions."
"I spent the next 10 years or so working in government, mainly in the area of ‘issues management.' I wrote a lot of fact sheets and briefing notes about contentious issues. I still enjoy that, even though I left the payroll to freelance four years ago. I had just finished a successful stint on a major technology project, and I was ready to make a break. By that point, Yvonne and I had published Totally Me and had written and sold Speechless, our first adult novel, and intended to do more. I wanted to try juggling writing and freelancing."
"Meanwhile Yvonne finished her Criminology degree and tried a few different jobs. She dabbled in public relations among other things and ended up working in the film business. She found she preferred the technical side of things, particularly in the camera department, where she worked her way up the ranks from a trainee to a focus puller position, which is officially called the first camera assistant. She works on a lot of high profile films when they shoot in Toronto, such as Chicago. (Yvonne: Plus a fair number of not-so-high profile zombie/action/bad romantic comedy movies!) Her work's freelance to an extent as well. A film comes in, and she works on it for three months or so, and then she's done."
"I won't say our ‘freelancing' hasn't been a struggle when it comes to writing because it has been. Either we have too little work, or too much. The deadlines never seem to fit. You don't want to turn the work down when you get it, but you've committed to getting books done at certain intervals. It can get a little tense."
The genesis of Totally Me, the pair's nonfiction book, was Yvonne's niece. Sandy explains, "Michelle was about 15 when her father moved in with a woman who had three teenage daughters of her own. With four teenage girls in one bungalow, there was a whole lot of estrogen floating around. Yvonne was very close to Michelle, and Michelle kept calling and asking her for advice. I guess Yvonne's advice must have been good because the other three girls also started calling for advice, too. That's when Yvonne called me. I was working as a government speechwriter at the time and remember the day well. Yvonne said she'd been looking for a book to answer the girls' questions and couldn't find one. She suggested we write one together."
"And I said, ‘OK.' I don't think either one of us thought we'd pursue it, but I checked the bookstores and found Yvonne was right. There wasn't much that fit the bill. So we wrote a sample chapter and a proposal and sent a query letter to a few agents. There was a lot of interest, and it sold pretty quickly to Adams Media. Because of that, I kind of got the impression that this writing business wasn't that hard. But the hard part came later!"
"We wrote Totally Me in about three months and were pretty surprised we managed it. It came out in 2000 and has sold quite steadily. In 2004, Adams Media reissued it with a new cover."
"We both enjoyed writing the comic scenarios to illustrate the points WE were trying to make in Totally Me. That gave us the idea to give fiction a try. We went on to write Speechless, an adult ‘chick lit' novel. It's about a speechwriter for a crazy politician at Queen's Park. Obviously, it's based on my experience, whereas our next adult novel, What I Really Want to Do is Direct, also ‘chick lit,' is based on Yvonne's experience."
While Sandy acknowledges that their two adult books obey the writer's adage, "Write what you know," she adds, "Speechless was certainly inspired by my life in government, but I never worked in a political office. I definitely had some bad bosses who could see themselves in the book if they looked hard enough. But it's a send up. And Yvonne's experiences with film divas figure in there as well."
"In terms of What I Really Want to Do is Direct,Yvonne has never wanted to direct. Our editor wasn't that interested in the camera focus of our outline, so we had to reshape it to something more general that readers would understand. Yvonne did toy with the idea of becoming a cinematographer in real life, but I guess the publisher didn't feel it translated that well to chick lit. We've had a few reviews of What I Really Want to Do is Direct where people have said, ‘There's a lot of technical stuff in there, but I found that very interesting.' Similarly, with Speechless, there were comments by American reviewers that said things like, ‘It's about the Canadian political system, but I found that interesting.'"
"As we were writing Speechless, I read that Harlequin was launching a ‘chick lit' label called Red Dress Ink. We hadn't yet found an agent, and Red Dress welcomed direct submissions, so I sent it in and they accepted it."
The pair's moving over to the young adult area came about "because we had had a gap between the adult books. I had time on my hands, as is often the case with freelancing. Yvonne was away in Calgary working on a film, and I don't think she was really thrilled when I suggested we write something to fill in the gap when she had no gap. I was harassing her long distance, and finally she succumbed."
Introducing Vivien Leigh Reid: Daughter of the Diva came from those calls. We set it in the film world again because it's something we both find fascinating. The book is about a 15-year-old girl named Leigh who gets sent to Ireland to spend the summer with the actress mother she barely knows. Over the summer, Leigh discovers that she enjoys acting, too, and it brings them closer together."
"One of the agents we approached told us we'd need to write the whole book before selling it, even though we'd already sold a novel. So we wrote Diva One (as I now call it) in its entirety. Now, we can sell novels based on a couple of chapters and an outline, which is a relief because it's quite an investment to write the whole thing without knowing whether anyone's going to pick it up."
"A Canadian agent suggested we try American agents because the type of books we write are ‘too commercial' for the Canadian market. We appreciated the advice because we got a much better response from New York agents. Still, we had plenty of rejections for Diva One. I have one letter where the agent said, ‘I don't believe any editor will find this interesting.' But ultimately six or seven editors bid on it, so it goes to show you can't be easily discouraged. I think our experience of finding an agent was pretty typical, but it seemed long and painful at the time. I got The Writer's Market and looked for agents who liked the sort of thing we write and sent query letters. We're lucky to have an agent who reps both young adult and adult fiction."
"When we sold Diva One to St. Martin's, we got a two book deal. We hadn't planned on writing a sequel, but our editor at St. Martin's really wanted us to, and we were fine with that. We didn't plan to write Diva Three either, but they asked us to do it and we enjoyed it. We're kind of attached to the character now."
"Leigh Reid was originally supposed to be a Toronto girl, but our editor asked us to give her an American home town. The story is actually set in Ireland, though. Yvonne had shot a film in Ireland so she was able to provide details. In the sequel, Leigh joins her mother for the summer in L.A. and lands a role on a soap opera, and her success goes to her head. We asked Susan Juby to give us a quote for the cover of the sequel Now Starring Vivien Leigh: Diva in Training aka Diva Two because we love her books. " (Yvonne: Setting Diva Two in Los Angeles gave us an excuse to head to California to do some research. We had a lot of fun meeting my film friends who gave us tours of their city and sets. We had the opportunity to hobnob with a few stars—plus a film editor who had known the real Vivien Leigh! At the time, we joked about our "research" being little more than a thinly veiled vacation, but later an L.A.-based film agent said we'd nailed it, which was great).
"The third book in the series is called The New Improved Vivien Leigh Reid: Diva in Control, and we tried to allow both Leigh and her mother, Annika, to ‘mature.' Leigh is 16 in this book, and we give her a chance to redeem herself after her diva episode in Diva Two. We also wanted to see Annika shine this time around."
"When we wrote Diva One, we were really lucky that we didn't close ourselves off. With Diva Two, we were more aware that there could possibly be a third book, and so we did keep in mind, ‘What will she do next?' If we get asked to do a ‘Diva Four,' we're thinking perhaps Broadway, a frontier not yet conquered." (Yvonne: A project that would require extensive "research" in NYC!)
"The Black Sheep, our first hard cover, will be published by Hyperion in May 2007. It's about a New York teenager named Kendra Bishop who is so frustrated by her strict parents that she sends in a letter to a reality television show called ‘The Black Sheep.' When she's accepted, she has to exchange families with another teen for the summer. She ends up going to Monterey, California, to spend the summer with a family of hippies, quite the opposite of her banker parents. What 15-year-old doesn't want to trade families for awhile?"
"The book after that (Yvonne: That's eight if anyone's counting) comes out in 2008. It's tentatively called Word for Word and it's about a girl who agrees to write an anonymous column for her high school newspaper and ends up in a battle of the sexes with the anonymous male columnist."
So, how do two people write books together? Explains Sandy, "We start by sitting down together and brainstorming ideas. Usually we come in with fragments and throw them out there and see what sticks. Sometimes during an ideas session we'll get lucky, and something fresh will come to us that really is fully joined, but, more often than not, one of us has a fragment that we develop together."
"For our second book with Hyperion, we called our editor and said, ‘We have seven ideas. We're going to just run them all by you, and you can rank them.' She put them in the order she liked best, and we went with her first choice. Then we wrote a two to three page proposal fleshing the ideas out and developing the characters and sent that in, and we were good to go."
"Anyway, back to our process. We develop the characters together in those initial planning sessions. We have full day sessions where we spend the majority of the day not working, but saying we are while eating a lot. Yvonne has this enormous ottoman, and we basically spread food all over it, a selection of healthy foods and then usually a large plate of baked goods. When we can avoid it no longer, usually about the time Dave, Yvonne's husband, is about to come home, we get down to work. Dave is the third part of our team, and he puts up with a lot. When we know he's coming home—and the deadline is looming—we suddenly find we can focus."
"I don't really enjoy the day or two we spend outlining the chapters, but fortunately that's Yvonne's strength. I don't really want to know what comes in chapter 18, and so, for me, it's like pulling teeth. Sometimes Yvonne has to chase me around to pin down the details, but you have to do it when there are two of you working on the same story. Things can't ‘just evolve.'"
"That's it for the time we spend working on it together. We go our separate ways, and, if all goes as it should, Yvonne will write the first draft of the chapter and send it me, and then I rewrite it, adding, enhancing and deepening. Then, at the end, I send all the chapters back to her, and she has another look at it and adds lines and fixes continuity, but, by that point, it's usually fairly minor. We don't have a multi-draft stage at all."
"I often have to trim large portions at the end because we tend to exceed our word limit. With the Diva sequel, we were 50,000 words over the limit. I was quite shocked to find we'd run so long. This is the point where I tell Yvonne. ‘Just turn away and don't look.' Hack, hack, hack. Block, cut, block, cut. I actually really enjoy that stage. (Yvonne: She's not kidding. I get rather attached to certain lines, and it's hard for me to see them go. I try to fight for them sometimes, but ultimately I know if they aren't moving the story forward, Sandy will be clear-cutting!) We've gotten better lately though, and our next two books were pretty much on target in terms of length."
"Yvonne and I share a common sense of humor. When we sit down to write, we're coming from the same place, and I think that's partly literal. We both come from Scarborough and grew up in the suburbs in the 70's. We were seeing the same movies, reading the same books, going to the same parties and our senses of humor just seemed to develop in the same way. As well, we lived together as roommates for years, and so we find the same things funny and that does make writing together a lot easier."
"One thing that Yvonne has said that makes me feel good is that I capture what she was trying to say. That's my goal in rewriting. I try to polish what she has presented in a raw form. Her strengths are organization, and she's also very visual. I think Yvonne's work in film has made her see things in scenes, and so she's great at coming up with good ones. As I said, I flesh it out. I like to add a little depth to the characters, and polish and bring the book into sharper focus."
"I won't say we don't have arguments; we do, but one interesting thing is that, as friends, we didn't really argue. I think a lot of women don't argue. They withdraw for a time until the sting wears off, and then they just ignore it and carry on. As co-authors, as business partners, we couldn't do that, and so we've had to have some discussions. It's usually about scheduling. I usually want to take on more projects than she does."
"I can't recall many disagreements about content or what idea to work on, but we do tease each other. For example, right now the idea we're working on for the next Hyperion book was Yvonne's. Of the seven we pitched, our editor picked one that was Yvonne's, and so now when she's struggling with it, I go, ‘Whose idea was it? You're having trouble with your own idea?' Usually the person who came up with the idea finds it a little easier to write, but you find a way to make the story live for you."
"We've had a pretty good experience with editors. I figured most people did until I started reading all those author blogs where people are talking about their huge revision process. Generally our revisions are fairly minor. We trust that the editor knows what she's doing and just do what she asks. I can't think of a time with the young adult books where I've taken issue with anything the editor has asked us to do."
"Lately, we've focused on young adult books because the adult chick lit market isn't doing very well right now. We're also thinking about trying a teen TV show. It seems like that could be fun, too. Variety works for us."
Adult books:
This article is based on an interview conducted in Toronto on August 14, 2006, and revised in April, 2007.
