Interview on Collaboration with Xavier Garcia and Caleb Bethea
Sometimes the hardest part of collaborating is getting started. Here are some tips from creators that have collaborated — sometimes with an absolute stranger — and made something wonderful!
Did you know your partner in collaboration beforehand? Explain how you got together.
C: Much like Batman and Robin, we met on Twitter. Xavier published a pharmacy heist horror story in Cold Signal and I’ve been a huge fan of his writing since. Now we’re homies!
X: Caleb is just so prolific. It took me a long time to hop on lit twitter, but when I did, Caleb kept popping up on my feed. They were consistently getting pieces in places that I was a fan of. I was like I have to talk to this person because either we’re going to become fast friends or we’ll end up killing each other in some duel at dawn.
How did you collaborate? What was your process?
C: We wrote in a google doc but the collaboration really happened in our DMs. We started with lobbing concepts back and forth and once Xavier had the Yu-Gi-Oh idea we found our direction.
Xavier is a smart as fuck in story structure and I have a thing for writing cartoonish amounts of gore so we traded scenes based on our strengths.
X: Honestly, at times it felt like this story’s real writing happened all in the DMs. There was so much back and forth and conversation that made splitting up the work really easy.
And sometimes this looked like nothing else but laughing at each other’s lines, letting each other know we’re going in the right direction. Caleb had a line about Dorito dust that killed me. I feel like even talking about that line in our DMs helped us push the tone further into that space.
What were some challenges you faced during the collaborative process, and what did you learn?
C: Like 98% of writers, we live busy lives day-jobbing and carving out time for fiction when we can. It honestly got down to the wire but we yeeted it with a few hours to spare.
I learned it’s easier to hit that deadline when you’re not doing it alone, especially for anything longer than flash. You’re less likely to give up on it, and it’s just more fun to be in on the stress with someone so you just keep on going.
X: Caleb and I’s collaborative process was actually pretty seamless. It was definitely the deadline that turned out to be our biggest obstacle. But we’re both pretty understanding and flexible, so we worked when we could and even pivoted plans when we had to.
Any final words of advice for future collaborators?
C: Giving up control is likely what prevents most people from collaborating. But, that’s honestly the part. You’re not sure where it’ll take you, or it it’ll work, but (for once) it’s not just you at the shell and that’s pretty fucking cool.
X: Writers spend years (whole careers) working to find their voice. So, the idea of changing it, making alterations, or throwing it away completely may be difficult. But do it! Be flexible! Part of writing a cohesive story with someone else means matching their voice or creating a brand new one from scratch like the various limbs of Voltron coming together to become something bigger. This rules! It’s fun and it’ll teach you so much about what you thought your voice had to sound like.
Read Xavier Garcia & Caleb Bethea’s piece, “The Last Game of Yu-Gi-Oh Ever Played”
Xavier Garcia is a writer/editor from Toronto, Canada. His short fiction work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies published by Fugitives & Futurists, Cold Signal, hex, Apocalypse Confidential, Cursed Morsels, Filthy Loot, and others. You can find him walking the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh, or at twitter.com/xavier_agarcia.
Caleb Bethea is a writer from the Southeast. They earned an MFA at UofSC and now spend the best of their time with their wife and three goblins by the ocean. You can read their work in HAD, Tenebrous, Maudlin House, hex, Twin Pies, autofocus, and elsewhere. They tweet at @caleb_bethea_
