Deborah Lawrenson and Robert Rees reveal to Female First what it's like to write a book together when you are also husband and wife.
Death in Avignon
Deborah: ‘I have to confess that what started as a laugh while drinking rosé on the terrace in Provence was not the plain sailing I thought it would be. We have had to learn how to work effectively together in a sphere where I consider myself the professional and Rob the Johnny-come-lately. That means playing to our individual strengths. Rob doesn’t do detail but he is great at inventing characters and can rattle away fast at a story. He’s the coach and horses, and I’m the postilion trying to keep control. Most of our writing rows – and rows there have been - are about his cavalier attitude to names, places and plot, as well as punctuation! It goes without saying that I do the final edit, the copyediting and the proofreading. That said, we have had a lot of fun too, and our relationship has always run on humour. Unbelievably, we will have been married for 30 years this year, after meeting as undergraduates at Cambridge. It would be a dreadful shame to fall out now…’
Rob: ‘We’ve been asked to do various talks about the trials and tribulations of writing together. “How to write a murder mystery together without actually committing murder” was the obvious tag-line. I would love to say that writing together is a bit like cricket – hours of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer hell. Actually the truth is for 90% of the time we bash away happily in tandem, one pausing only to needle the other with a superior word count. The 10% spent finessing the manuscript, however, is a study in how diplomacy always ends up failing. At which point one of us has to walk away to put the kettle on for a calming cup of tea. As Deborah says, I enjoy creating absurd characters and sharp dialogue and she enjoys telling me that I have misspelled a character’s name, again.’
PS The papers have been served…
Deborah: ‘He is joking. (I think.)’
Death in Avignon by Serena Kent is published by Orion.