Writers' Room and Recording Booth: The Headspace of Collaboration

(Edgar wrote an excellent piece on the cowriting process here.)

In many ways Perdition’s Teeth belongs to me — but I don’t consider any of those ways important, and everyone who took part in the process owns a vital piece of it. I would never have it any other way, and it is all of ours.

I’ve mentioned many times that it all started with a misheard lyric in the shower, but before it became a podcast, I ran it as a tabletop game. Edgar was one of my players, and regular guest star Erik Pitcock was another. From the very beginning, it was a collaborative story.

When we shifted over to making it into a podcast, Edgar became my cowriter, and we all agreed that they should be the director. I was playing the narrator, and I did not feel that I could write, act, and direct effectively. That’s more hats than I care to wear.

And all through the process, Alex was asking questions. Key, important questions, about what makes an audio drama an audio drama, about how it should function and come into the world, and while I was immovable on some things, being forced to answer the question of why things were being done the way they were was key.

From the beginning, Edgar and I were firm in the idea that everyone have a voice in the direction. We talked over each of the characters with each of our actors, we gave them our ideas, our outlines, and we took their feedback to make it work. This, I feel, is the lifeblood of collaboration.

When I was in graduate school — down in New Mexico, with the groundwork for this project being welded into my mind — I made a point to read widely, on a number of subjects. Two of the books I read that had a profound and lasting effect were from the 33 & 1/3 books on Slint’s Spiderland and Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones. Both of these books deal heavily with cowriting and collaboration, and both depict radically different ends of the spectrum.

Slint, famously, recorded the album Spiderland in two weekends. The first weekend was recording, the second was editing. Everything was a single take. To prepare for this, the members of that band devoted everything to preparing. They slept. They worked. They practiced. That was essentially it. They had long and involved discussions of the minutiae of each song. The book even noted that they spent hours debating the benefits and drawbacks of stroking upward on the guitar as opposed to downward.

Tom Waits, on the other hand, would get studio musicians to come in and would just begin describing what he wanted, playing what he had written thus far, improvising the rest, and allow the studio musicians and collaborators to slot themselves in as they wanted. It was a loose, improvisational style that lent itself to mutation and generated difference.

And so, between these two poles, you have almost the entire universe of collaboration.

My struggle, as a collaborator and, in a very real sense, as the creator, was trying to figure out how to work with other people productively. My struggle is that, while I dearly love Tom Waits, Spiderland is light years beyond Swordfishtrombones.

In the end, though, I couldn’t go with Slint’s approach. While Spiderland really is transcendantly good, the fact of the matter is that there’s only ever been one Spiderland. Slint broke up immediately after the record was released; one member committed himself. On the other hand, Swordfishtrombones was a trailhead, a new direction in an already-long career that has covered more territory than I can even dream of.

If Perdition’s Teeth serves the same role for us, I would be happy. I cannot abide it being unique: I want to follow it with other works.