No Tokens: How did you arrive at the idea to collaborate initially? Was Ruben your first piece?

Shelly Oria : Ha, this is a funny question coming from you, considering No Tokens gets 100% credit for the inception of our collaborative process! Yes, Ruben was the first story we ever wrote together. The way I remember it—and I think Nelly and I have slightly different memories on this part—I ran into Kira at a party, and it came up that both Nelly and I were slated to contribute pieces to the next issue, and Kira said Hey, maybe you could do something together. Then we just had so much fun working on Ruben, that we both knew we had to keep going. There’s that lesbian couple at the end the story—I originally wrote the part where Lonny mentions them, then Nelly brought them on scene, and later we both felt that they deserved their own separate story…. So that was the next one we took on, and we continued in that way, always pulling a character or plot line to use as a new starting point.

Nelly Reifler: Shelly is right, we have very slightly different memories—subjectivity is an inherent part of collaboration—but I, too, credit No Tokens!

NT: Who do you look to for guidance regarding collaborative work? Do you have inspirations for the method?

NR: My father, Samuel Reifler, is a writer, and my first collaborations were ones I did with him when I was a kid. He lived in a house in the woods with a lot of open space and several lofts. We had a few different methods, but I most enjoyed it when Dad’s electric typewriter just sat on its little table in the middle of the common space near the stairs. Each time one of us happened to pass by the typewriter—on the way to the bathroom or to get a snack, for instance—we’d type a line or a few lines. We wouldn’t discuss what we were writing; that was the unwritten rule. And we wouldn’t read it until it was done. From there I grew to love collaborative surrealist writing games like the Exquisite Corpse. I’ve always collaborated with friends and romantic partners. The Australian playwright Hillary Bell is an old friend of mine; when we were about eighteen, we wrote a play together called “The One-Legged Ass-kicker” that nobody has ever read but that made us laugh our asses off. Which brings me to Shelly: the friendship is for me inseparable from the process of writing these stories together. We have threads of texts and emails that nobody but us would understand; we have several imaginary appendices; we laugh our asses off.

SO: I’m at work on a number of collaborative projects, and one of those—a novella I wrote with Alice Sola Kim called CLEAN—is already out (or up, really—on the website of the company that commissioned it along with McSweeney’s, WeTransfer). But in most of my other collaborations, the process is very different—each writer has full control over certain parts. With Alice, for instance, each of us wrote five of the novella’s ten chapters. In a book of letters I recently finished writing with Hannah Assadi, each of us wrote her letters to the others, of course. Whereas the way Nelly and I work is a whole other level of collaboration—we write each story together. There aren’t many people in the world (if any) that I could write that way with, and I think we rely on our similar aesthetics and weirdness—for lack of a better word—on the page to make it work, as well as on our friendship.

NT: We’re interested in the nuts and bolts of writing fiction together—do you often work in person? Or do you only exchange electronically? How often do you exchange?

SO: We exchange electronically, about 400 words at a time, and usually once a week, though we’ve had to adjust that rhythm at times—slower when other projects or life get in the way, faster when we’re revising. We usually check in at about 3 quarters of the way in—when it feels like we’re getting to the last stretch. That seems to be the point where checking in to make sure we’re on the same page or brainstorming the ending seems to be helpful and save time later on. Once we have a full draft, we usually ask for feedback from one or two readers, and we then get together with their and our notes and start the revision process.

NR: We are, however, open to other methods—for instance, at one point we needed a story that was 1,000 words. We tried doing this our usual way, and it grew into a story that we both love, “Before I Was Born”… but it is way longer than that limit. So we tried a version of an assignment I sometimes give my students: writing a life story, death to birth, in ten sections. We decided that each section would have exactly 100 words. And then we set aside a chunk of time on a single day when we volleyed back and forth in real time. Shelly would write 100 words, email them back to me and text me to tell me she was done. As soon as I got the text, I’d stop what I was doing, open the document and write my 100 words. This became our story “A New Life was Beginning” (which is now just a tiny bit longer than 1,000 words and recently came out on Electric Literature.)

NT: To what extent do you brainstorm mutually or independently before the writing process begins?

NR: We usually have an idea about a character from a previous story that we’d like to get to know better. Sometimes we decide to focus on that character together. Sometimes whoever is up to begin the next story will just jump in—and it’s such a delightful surprise. Shelly, for instance, picked up the character of a therapist that I’d introduced in our longest story—and gave her a story and an amazing second-person voice. (That story, “Trigger,” is in the current issue of Bomb.) One time so far—though I imagine it will happen again—there has been a character that one of us is dying to write about; I asked Shelly if I could begin the story about a murderer who’d been a side character before, and she generously let me have him. But we don’t discuss who these people are very much. Thinking about it now, it seems to me that this really comes down to fun. Whenever I get a new opening of a story from Shelly, it’s like opening a birthday present.

NT: What does the editing/rewriting process look like? How comfortable or uncomfortable are you revising each other’s lines?

SO: While going back-and-forth to create the first draft, each of us will often mark suggestions for the other—just catching word repetitions, pointing out unclarity, etc. But once we start accepting suggestions, jumping in the other’s section to add a line, etc., there’s no real separate “agency” over sections or lines; it’s all one, jointly written piece.

NR: And then usually there’s a daylong mega-revision session involving coffee and later wine, some negotiating, some epiphanies, some sidetracking chitchat, and quite a lot of laughing our asses off.

NT: Are there any fundamental differences between your writing philosophies that have been difficult to navigate? In what ways do you see certain commonalities or differences as assets or disadvantages to a collaborative pairing?

NR: This is a great question because I wouldn’t have thought about this were I not presented with it this way. I don’t think we have differences in our writing philosophies at all. We have some differences in our ideas about style and craft, but philosophically we are (I think) aligned—and maybe that’s another reason that although we run into bumps here and there this project is so satisfying. My perception of the differences we do have on the rare occasions we have them comes down to this: Shelly is quite amazingly and brilliantly engaged in a process of not only questioning but rejecting of a lot of stuff that is taught in contemporary M.F.A. programs as “craft”—that is, this idea that there’s right writing and wrong writing. Meanwhile, I’m still teaching writing workshops at Sarah Lawrence as I have been for seventeen years and am, in a way, part of the very system of teaching that Shelly is actively releasing herself from as an artist. So, to make it more brass tacks for you: I’ll say something like, “Oh my God, we have three sentences in a row that start with dependent clauses. We have to change that.” And Shelly will say, “Why? It’s the voice of the story? There’s nothing really wrong with dependent clauses.” And she’ll be right.

SO: And then we’ll definitely change at least one of the three.

NT: Is there ever a point at which you cannot discern whose idea or line is whose? Are there moments that remain very unique to each of you in the work?

NR: Yes, and that point when we lose track of who wrote what is always the best moment. Sometimes it happens during revision. Sometimes it happens later on, when I haven’t read the story for a while. But there is always a shift when the story, which has felt like ours all along, truly becomes ours, and I can’t remember which sections were written by whom. There are, however, always a few sentences or moments that I either remember the excitement of writing or the joy of reading when a new installment from Shelly came into my inbox.

NT: How does the collaborative collection, as a whole, compare to your individual bodies of work? Is the product of your collaboration entirely unique to its conditions?

SO: That’s an interesting question, because on the one hand I feel like I could never write these stories on my own, and I don’t think Nelly could—this book-in-progress is, of course, the unique product of our mind-meld experiment—and yet I don’t think I can point out specific ways in which this work is entirely different from New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 or from See Through… Perhaps Nelly can?

NR: I guess that the obvious difference is that this is very much a linked collection—which neither of our individual collections is. I’ve tried to write linked stories of my own before, and the effort always collapses. And as a teacher, I’ve worked on several theses that are linked collections, and they are incredibly complicated undertakings. Here, I’ve found that the fact that there are two of us in conversation about the challenges around timelines and continuity and consistency makes it possible.

NT: Does humor serve as a propeller at all in your process of writing? Do you find it freeing or energizing in the way that humor can activate a conversation?

SO: I think both humor and sadness function as these strange… motivators for me in our process. As in, I’ll write lines to crack Nelly up sometimes, and my favorite moments in reading a new section from her is when I laugh out loud, but the same is true for raw emotion—I’m thinking in particular of the story we’re at work on now, and how I wrote a scene that I just knew would make her tear up, and when she texted me to say she did, I felt very happy that I made my friend cry. (What that says about me is perhaps a separate matter, but to answer your question: yes!)

NT: How has writing together affected the writing you both do apart? Have you gained insight into your own ways of operating?

SO: I hate description, which is a funny thing for a writer to say, but I do… I hate it both as reader and writer, and my brain doesn’t really think or process information that way. Nelly is kind of the same when it comes to characters’ physical description, so in that area I think our collaboration has reinforced or re-legitimized my sense of freedom. But with space description, Nelly is stellar. So with my own stories, my process tends to be that I’ll do very, very little in that realm, and sort of see what I can get away with—I’ll send a draft to my first readers with specific questions on where they might feel confused or ungrounded or whatever because we don’t, say, get a description of the dresser and don’t know how far or close it is to the couch. But with this book, I can’t work that way because I’ll immediately get a note from Nelly in the margins asking to see where the hell we are, or whether the couch has mysteriously evaporated. So our collaboration has sort of trained me to consider and describe the space much earlier.

NR: For me, it’s brought me back to the joy of surprise—the absolute pleasure of seeing how Shelly has taken a story in a completely different direction than I expected it to go, or the introduction of a new character that I’d never have dreamed up. Collaborating with Shelly has been a reminder that I can surprise myself in my own work.