The Joys & Terrors of Editing Your Spouse's Work

Steven Schwartz and Emily Hammond Writing is considered a solitary occupation but there's a hidden weapon in the process: the writer's spouse. He or she endures draft after draft, listens to complaints about writer's block, salves the writer's hurt feelings when rejection drops by. The role is even more complicated when both people in the relationship are writers and work so closely together that they border on collaboration. We'd like to talk about the ins and outs of editing one another's work, the contribution we make to each other's writing, the oddness of talking about characters all the time in front of our children ("Allan who?"), the arrangements for who gets to claim material, the blind spots, leaps, and transformations that take place once the process of showing our work to each other begins. This is also very much a discussion, with examples, about the larger nature of the editing process and what happens to writing along the way.