Literary Scene | The Power of Two: Local Writers Partner on Writing Sci-Fi, Fantasy, & Horror for Dummies

By Ryan G. Van Cleave | May 2022

If you’ve been reading my Sarasota Scene articles over the past decade or so, you’ve surely noticed that I bring myself into the story more often than most of the magazine’s writers. While I resist that urge in the Literary Scene column, my editor said to go for it regarding my latest published book…so long as I didn’t speak overly long about dark elves and bumbling robots.

“Easily done!” I told her while suddenly wishing I COULD write a lengthy treatise on the merits of dark elves and the wonders of bumbling robots. With a writing partner like mine, however, it didn’t take long to bring our conversation around to useful things beyond those two ideas. See for yourself.

Ryan: Before we talk about our book, let’s talk about collaboration in general. 

Rick:Listening is at the heart of cooperation, right? You’ve got to be able to listen to each other’s thoughts and ideas. Then there’s some element of give and take. And I think one of the things that collaboration really excels at is letting people both reexamine their ideas and strengthen them based on feedback as they work through a problem together. On a project like ours, collaboration was great because we were grappling with a lot of big picture stuff. How does science fiction work? How does horror work? How does writing work? But there were the little things, too. How do you talk about monsters? Ghosts? Magic? It was useful to be able to bounce those back and forth. 

This is nonfiction, though. I’m honestly less sure how it would work with fiction. Have you done that before? 

Ryan: I’ve ghosted novels before, which counts in my mind. I’ve even done one project where my partner and I sat at a computer together and wrote the entire book by talking through each sentence as we typed it.  

Rick:That sounds tedious.

Ryan: It was a unique experience. Now, let’s talk about our book. It’s a writing how-to, after all, so what’s the most important thing that people should know or understand about writing genre stories?

Rick: Don’t get swept up in the details of the cool scientific puzzle that you’re doing or that you’re fascinated by, such as the weird, wild magic system you’ve come up with, or the 1000-year history of your vampire. Those things can be cool and can add some specific genre flavors. Just remember that it’s got to be a story first for anyone to care about all that other interesting stuff. The flip side of that is that with genre writing, your audience is coming for those things. They want to engage with interesting ideas about the future and science fiction or imagining other possible impossible worlds with fantasy or just coming in to be scared in horror, right? Don’t just put the trappings of those things into your story without engaging with what makes those genres really tick and be interesting.

Ryan: What surprised you most about our collaboration?

Rick: I don’t have a good answer to this because it kind of went according to our plan. 

Ryan: So people know what the plan was, I’ll dish. You’ve been teaching genre-writing classes a lot at Ringling College, so you wrote the first draft of the genre-specific chapters so you could include classroom-tested tips and ideas, whereas I’ve been writing a lot of general articles for The Writer and Writer’s Digest, so it just made sense for me to tackle the chapters on character, plot, revision, and publishing. 

Here’s what was surprising for me—even though I’ve written about all these topics before in various ways, when I sat down to tackle them for this book, it was almost like doing it again from scratch. I had to reinvent answers that worked for me in that moment instead of parroting those I’ve read somewhere or that I used in a class five years ago. 

Rick: Good point.

Ryan: I’ll add this, too. What made things work was that we both left our egos at the door. If we argued over whose name had to go first on the cover, or who got to take the first crack at writing the introduction, we’d have been sunk from the start. It helped that we had talked through as many potential challenges as we could think of BEFORE we encountered them. 

Rick: An ounce of prevention versus a pound of cure.

Ryan: Exactly. Now, do you care to share what we’re collaborating on next?

Rick: We’re revising Writing Fiction for Dummies¸ which is a very different type of project because we have two collaborators who aren’t collaborating with us, which is to say we’re revising and updating the work of the two original authors. In some parts of the book, it just needs updating since the material is a decade old, but in other parts, we just don’t agree with how things are presented. It’s an interesting new challenge that I’m really excited about, even if it’s likely that in another 10 years, some other writer—or writers!—will come along to create the third edition and undo or change all of our work.

Ryan: That’s a problem for Future Rick and Future Ryan, I suppose. Now, for Today Rick, I have one final question. What should we do differently this time around in terms of collaborating with this next For Dummies book?

Rick: I think we’ll be able to work more efficiently with the editorial staff at Wiley. We have a far better sense about their own specific ways of doing things, so the whole process will likely be a lot smoother, whereas last time, we were kind of guessing about what they needed and wanted. Sometimes we were right and sometimes we were very wrong. 

Ryan: But we learned a lot with the “very wrong” pathway.

Rick: And we figured it out in the end, which is maybe the only thing that matters. 

Ryan: Stephen King says that “the scariest moment is always just before you start.” I think the second scariest is in the moments right after you finish. That’s when the second-guessing can start. But with a great collaborator like you, I had faith that we nailed it. And from the early reviews and feedback, it seems like the book is as useful as we hoped it would be.