Book Day--STRANGER, book one of THE CHANGE
Stranger
This is the book that went through such a kerfuffle three years ago, but I don't want to talk about that. (It gets dealt with over here at Diversity in YA) I want to talk about the book itself.
Rachel was working in Hollywood when she first got the idea.
She’s always loved the images and story elements of Westerns- the stranger who comes to town and shakes things up, the desperate chase through the desert, the man with no name, the tough sheriff, the saloon where everyone in town comes to gossip. But she wanted one where the characters were more like her, and more like the people who live in the west now.
The real California of the Gold Rush was much more diverse than it’s usually portrayed: Jews were there, and free black people, and Chinese people; "Indians" from various tribes, and people from Mexico, Chile, and Peru. Not to mention a whole lot of incredibly tough women. It was by no means a multicultural paradise. But it also wasn’t a place where everyone was white and women existed only as saloon girls, loyal wives, and prizes to be won by the male hero.
She imagined a future west: a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles where technology had reverted back to Gold Rush levels, but which was still as diverse as the real city we lived in. An image came to mind, of a teenage boy desperately fleeing through the desert, without food or water but carrying something precious in his battered pack. A bounty hunter was relentlessly tracking him, and the desert was full of mutated bloodsucking plants. Could he reach the refuge of a small frontier town before he succumbed to thirst, or deadly wildlife, or a bullet?
She could see that boy in her mind’s eye. He didn’t look like the typical tall, light-skinned, blue-eyed hero of a western. He looked like the young men she saw every day in Los Angeles, the young men who had really lived in the California of the Old West. His skin was brown and his hair was black; he wasn’t tall or burly, but he was stronger than he looked. She wondered what it was that he had in his pack, that he was so desperate to protect…
When we met to collaborate on a TV show for Henson, she told me about that idea. By then the young man had a name: Ross Juarez.
I loved it! She asked if I wanted to collaborate, and we talked back and forth, scribbling down our favorite ideas: mysterious ruins and super powers, and taking familiar tropes and turning them inside out. The brainy mechanic sidekick, who’s always a guy, would be a girl who has trouble getting outside of her own head. And she wouldn’t be a sidekick, but the heroine. The tough sheriff would be a woman- a super-strong woman, with half her face beautiful and half a skull! The town was guarded not only by adult men, but by all the townspeople-including teenagers. Some with powers, some not! And if a love triangle developed, we’d take it in a completely new direction.
We first wrote the story as a TV series, and at the same time we began developing it as a book project. For a time it looked as if it would sell as both, but Hollywood being Hollywood, the executive interested jumped ship and since we had not signed the contract giving them book rights, we were free to concentrate on the book, taking advantage of all the things you can do in a novel that you can’t afford to do-or are not allowed to do-on TV.
In listing all our favorite tropes (super-powers! Bad-ass teens! Weird flora and fauna! Interesting food from many cultures!), we discovered that we were also on the same wavelength concerning diversity.
It seemed natural to map our future Los Angeles over the actual demographics of LA. White people are already a minority; 50% of the city is Hispanic/Latino. Today many people face prejudice based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion. After an apocalypse, we thought that many old prejudices would die out, once the power structure that sustained them was gone. But humans being humans, new ones have replaced them, specifically a bias against the mutated “Changed” folk.
The way we work is unusual in the book world, but more common in television, where writers will sit together in a room and create first the story of a script in discussion, then write it by speaking the dialogue. We sit down and discuss the plot of the entire story, taking notes.
Before we write a chapter, we discuss what will happen in more detail. Then we sit side by side at a computer and write the chapter, usually with me typing but either of us providing text. The result is a book where any given sentence was probably written by both of us together. When we have a first draft, we pass it back and forth for rewrites and polishes and additions.
I have done several collaborations, and enjoyed them all, though each is very different. The fun part of writing with Rachel is that we never get writer’s block, because as soon as one of us runs out of ideas, whether on a single sentence or in a scene, the other either picks up with it and zooms ahead, or we can talk it out. Sometimes act it out!
You can read the first chapter for free, at io9.