TheIt’s a cold night in Melbourne and children’s and young adult writer Zana Fraillon is trying to write dialogue for her character. She is stuck. Instead of making more coffee, she’s hitting Twitter for some ideas. It is a moment of the mind.
Fraillon posts asking for help from her writer friends: “My ENTIRE book relies on figuring out the next line.”
Of that night in 2019, Fraillon says, “I was working on a novel and I had a plot problem. I’m not big on social media, but I tweeted a question to all the writers out there, asking if this is the situation, where do I go with this?”
Okey dokey twitter looks. I need your help. Finish this dialog (please?):
‘Don’t you want to know the truth?’
“The truth about what?”
‘…………………………………………’(My ENTIRE book rests on my discovery of the next line…yeah – I have no idea what my book is about.)
— Zana Fraillon (@ZanaFraillon) August 13, 2019
Another writer responds. It’s Bren MacDibble posting from a much less chilly night in Kalbarri, Western Australia, a cool coastal town with the dazzling aqua-blue Indian Ocean on one side and the edge of the desert on the other. She has an idea. What if a character says, “We all know what happened. Our plane wasn’t the only one that fell from the sky that day.”
MacDibble’s response wasn’t the only response, Fraillon says, “but it was fantastic. It sparked all these ideas for another project in my head. So I said – half joking and half hoping: we should collaborate on something.”
Thus began the process of co-authoring a novel by two award-winning authors who had never met and lived more than 3,000 km apart.
*
We’re chatting on Zoom from three locations and two time zones. It’s a fun and lively meeting for them because these two authors rarely speak; instead, they share ideas via DMs on Twitter, using short, snappy sentences, capital letters for drama, and lots of ellipses for thinking time. “We’re writers — that’s how we talk,” MacDibble says with a laugh.
“It was a real brainstorm,” says Fraillon. “The ideas were coming so fast that I couldn’t write fast enough to say, ‘what about this, what about this?’ And Bren was doing the same. The plot for the story evolved very quickly in one session, but then we kept kicking around ideas for a few weeks before setting out to write it ourselves.”
The result is The Crow’s Song, a story centered on two young characters separated not by distance, but by time: one lives in our present, the other in a walled community 100 years in the future. It’s an adventure story for young readers, set in a post-climate change, post-pandemic world.
“It’s about how we’re connected over time and what kind of ancestors we’re going to be,” says Fraillon. “How can I “ancestor” better? The stories and objects we pass by and the way we care for the Earth now will affect the people living after us.”
The manuscript itself was not written on Twitter. Fraillon, 41, and MacDibble, 56, agreed to write one chapter each in their character’s voice and set off to write their own chapters up to the point where the characters met. Then they alternately combined their chapters into a word document and sent it every few weeks by email. They never called each other to chat – all communication was via Twitter DMs as they worked across different time zones. There were no word limits or time limits.
“We knew, for example, that a character would discover the body of a raven and later release a disease,” says Fraillon. “This idea came from a news story about an ancient deer that was discovered due to thawing permafrost and carrying anthrax. This was the middle of 2019 and a pandemic seemed like such an absurd idea. We were looking for an event that could disrupt a society in a modern world, not knowing it was going to happen.”
They had been writing for nine months when reality came to meet the plot in the form of Covid. Private messages turned to panic.
“JESUS. No one will want to read our bloody pandemic book after this!” posted Fraillon in the early evening on April 2, 2022.
“Can we write it with a happy ending?” replied MacDibble.
“We had a crisis of confidence thinking that no one would want to read a story about a pandemic because here was a true story and it’s not fun anymore,” says MacDibble.
But they went ahead and took it slow, writing about 10,000 words each before showing it to the next writer. “It didn’t feel like we had a deadline, and because there were two of us, I didn’t have the self-doubt and crisis of confidence that I normally have. “Bren was always there,” Fraillon said. “It was like having two brains.”
After writing the same number of chapters each, “we shared them together and it just worked, it was incredible,” adds MacDibble.
Fraillon admits he was surprised by how easy it was. “Honestly, I thought we were going to have to do massive amounts of editing to make it all work, but it all came together almost perfectly.”
By the time it came to a final edit, Covid had Australia on lockdown. Fraillon endured the world’s longest traffic jam in Melbourne, with a 5km radius limit and an 8pm to 7am curfew. “It was such a strange thing to live through, but going through it, I was realizing that now I really knew what my character was going through. This feeling of isolation. To not be able to rely on the support networks you’ve always had. That sheer terror of being sick,” says Fraillon, who was homeschooled during the lockdowns and later became seriously ill herself.
She says she felt this was something we might not go through and a lot of people didn’t. “For a long time, it felt almost wrong to write about it, but at the same time, I also felt a desire to get words on paper, to find a way to make the situation somehow bearable.”
Then, as travel restrictions eased, Fraillon and MacDibble finally met for a lunch in Melbourne with their publisher in August 2022, three years after they began working together.
How was that? Kinda awkward?
“Not at all,” laughs Fraillon. “We chatted so much online it felt like meeting up with old friends.”
The two writers are still on Twitter and still calling out their minds, looking for “weird stuff, fun stuff.”
MacDibble says she hopes children will use The Crow’s Song to explore ideas of what might come next in the future. “It’s not really fair to write children’s books that warn about environmental issues,” she says. “It is the adults who have to move now. But kids need to be able to talk about issues in a safe space, and fiction provides that space.”
Her only regret is that the characters are “vaguely vegetarian”.
“Pushing a vegan agenda is never popular with adults,” she says, “But I think kids would love it.”
