How to co-write a book 3,000 miles apart: In Dialogue with Dickens [long read]

RB lives outside Boston in the United States, PD across the Mersey from Liverpool, England. We have never met in person. We had found each other’s previous writings and ways of thinking sympathetic, in particular concerning the relation of writers and their autobiographical selves in the act of writing fiction. RB began publishing on Dickens in 1979, her book Knowing Dickens appearing in 2007. David Copperfield was part of PD’s Memory and Writing (1983), and Dickens figured largely in his volume on The Victorians for the Oxford English Literary History series in 2002. But we first encountered each other by exchanging drafts of the volumes we separately wrote for Oxford University Press’s series My Reading during 2020: one Samuel Beckett, the other William James.

What made it a real meeting during lockdown was that in each case whoever acted as reader found time and again what the writer had privately felt was his or her best or newest or most exciting place in the manuscript; the reader pointing through track changes and marginal comments to moments of sudden potential that needed or called for ‘more’, for further development. There was a wavelength. We decided to take this affinity and try to recreate it within a fuller collaboration. Our editor at OUP had already suggested a book on Dickens. But we knew that if wanted to recapture in a different form what we had been able to do for each other in the My Reading projects, it would not be by writing separate chapters in such a book, jointly authored. What we had valued in the right-hand marginal notes provided by track changes was a form of excited interruption, adding an extra dimension to the otherwise continuous unfolding of one person’s thought process in the main body of the text. We were not simply looking for each other’s cosy approval, any more than we prized merely opinionated disagreement, but what was most radically powerful in the process was when the reader picked up the thought of the writer, stopped it, felt and received its impact, and then gave it back again with added personal weight and a renewed sense of its living value. Often the comments were relatively raw and muted, pointing to something vital, saying wow, thinking of a related or contrasting example elsewhere, or noting that it made a difference somehow that it was this phrase or this situation and not another. This seemed to us more literary, or at least more like what literary thinking came out of, than offering immediate conceptual explanation. It was also more like speaking, another voice, an informal accompaniment. We felt we could only try to reproduce this sense of a jointly generated spark through dialogue: that spark was what thinking felt like at its best—electric, sudden, visceral, shared across poles—and this was what Dickens himself was like.

Looking to create something other than interpretation from a single position, we wanted to open out the conventional form of the scholarly monograph: to include the rough beginnings of thoughts coming into being, to follow more than one line of argument at a time, and to register the after-meaning of the work as well as its immediacy. We hoped to let in the spirit of the inarticulately unknown or the personally hidden, felt, and imagined in author and readers alike, and to show unabashedly what matters to us, in both small detail and large concern, and in the relation between them. We communicated across the distance between America and England via books, via Dickens, trying to use our different lives in the same common purpose: in dialogue with Dickens.

It was at first a hesitant process. After some email discussion and drafting, we submitted a sketchy proposal and rough sample to OUP in October 2021 which went out for readers’ reports, and we were offered a formal contract in April 2022. In the meantime we resolved to go ahead anyway. We had decided, with qualms, to start with Dombey and Son and began to read it separately, at around the same pace, stopping to send each other emails on initial thoughts, however simple, with reading still in progress. We tried not to be too worried about either impressing or annoying each another, or to be quite conscious that we might be testing each other and the possibility of our working relationship. It began to go well when we noticed the same details, were moved by the same painful places, or discovered together in a shared area of feeling something new or latent that we could not have got to separately or more formally.

This graduated to writing up the emails into the beginnings of a script. Best of all, one of us might say something like:

You go on from this good point you’ve made here, and develop it however you like for a couple of pages. We won’t bother initially with who is writing the most or whether either of us is going on too long and forgetting the other. As long as we are just concentrating on Dickens, instead of ourselves, that’s all we need to share. Then I will just take your two or three pages and if I want to, interrupt them with something they have made me want to say, inserting that in the midst if needs be, like the marginal comment in our previous partnership. And then you can respond and readjust in light of what I’ve said. Then we can keep asking: what is the next thought, what passage in Dickens will help us here?

It helped then to begin to have weekly meetings by Zoom from April 2022. What did this sentence mean in your last draft? Why should this thought or this situation matter so much to you personally? Or: Where should we go next? How can we keep this as close as possible to thinking in real time, without being sloppy? And are we only talking to ourselves? Or again: how can we best share this with an audience, without explaining too much, too sedately, in the aftermath of actually doing the thinking between us? Then one of us might ask, anxiously: are we agreeing too much? Does it look chummy or false, like (yuck!): What a wonderful point you have made there, PD/RB!

But really what we were doing mainly was trying to help each other, or rather help the thought between each other: not argue or agree, so much as develop, extend, push each other harder to get somewhere—in the chapter, into Dickens. We set ourselves homework before our next meeting, exchanged parts of Dickens’s manuscripts in PDF format, divvied up tasks, discussed different forms and shapes and divisions for the best presentation of our thinking, made notes and exchanged records of our discussions, sent pages back and forth, alternately, day after day—and in short and in truth, began to feel cheered and stimulated by each other.

Over the many decades of our separate commitments to thinking about Dickens, both of us have read widely in the rich store of Dickens scholarship. But we decided early on that we would not, for the most part, stop to put ourselves in direct agreement or contention with specific critical arguments. Previous work on Dickens had become an implicit part of our thinking, such that we have not always known exactly how and when we absorbed it. We didn’t want in writing and rewriting to lose that human sense of a first experience, a sudden realization coming from somewhere prior to professionalization. In relation to ourselves, to the Dickens manuscripts, and to the use Dickens made of his life in his fiction, our aim was to show what goes on behind the scenes of a finished, published work, as still part of its meaning.

When it came to revising, we therefore needed to resist the temptation to smooth it all down, to create neat chronologies and lines of argument when rhythmically it hadn’t been like that in the first place. Naturally we cut what we thought were the boring bits, the undue repetitions, the moments when we had lost the originating spark. One thing we hardly ever cut or changed were those moments when one of us might say, ‘It is almost as though… almost as if…’ on the threshold of language; or would interject ‘I love the way that…’ on the basis of owned relish.

So we have sought neither to tame and tidy our thinking nor to be too obtrusively personal or wildly obscure. But when we have veered one way or another, we have tried to keep in our attempted correction of the course en route. That is why we found ourselves writing sections or even chapters that were like inserted ‘time-out’, sites of explicit revision, visible rethinking, placed in between one stage of the novel and another, or after our account of a novel had seemingly ended. We then went through the whole manuscript with the same principles and caveats, needing to stay quick in order not to forget its spirit, and completing it, for better or worse, a year ahead of schedule.

That’s our story.

This blog post has been adapted from the Preface to In Dialogue with Dickens: The Mind of the Heart by the authors.

_{Featured image: Dickens giving the last reading of his Works. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/t2fy7db2}