Theirs Is a Novel Kind of Marriage : Authors Erdrich and Dorris Write Everything Together

When Harper & Row announced that it had paid $1.5 million at auction for the rights to a new novel by Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, the occasion marked the first time the two writers had collaborated on a novel--formally, that is.

Erdrich and Dorris have long had a marriage of careers as well as the conventional kind. During the last decade, the two novelists have shared the process of developing every piece of writing that bears either or both of their names.

Their time away from the typewriter or the word processor is often spent discussing work in progress. The territoriality of most writers vanishes when they go to work.

Erdrich managed what every fiction writer dreams: Her 1984 first novel, “Love Medicine,” was a best seller and a critical hit. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for best novel. She was hailed as “the most interesting new American novelist to have appeared in years.”

Second Book a Hit, Too

Nor did she fall prey to the sophomore jinx. “The Beet Queen,” published in 1986, again won the admiration of critics and readers.

A year later, Dorris published his first novel, “A Yellow Raft in Blue Water,” now in paperback from Warner, to similar success. Erdrich’s third novel, “Tracks,” is out this month from Henry Holt & Co.

The new novel and first to bear both their names, “The Crown of Columbus,” is scheduled to be published in the fall of 1990, two years before the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America.

Like their other books, the new novel will feature an American Indian character, in this one a woman who discovers hundreds of years later the lost diary of Columbus’ first voyage.

Common Themes

All of their novels bear some similarities. Both set their stories among rural people of the northern plains. Erdrich’s tales take place in North Dakota, Dorris’ novel in Montana--areas of the country that they think most Americans find unfamiliar.

That many of their characters are American Indians or of mixed blood is no coincidence--Erdrich is a Chippewa, Dorris a Modoc.

Few other contemporary novels deal with life on and around the reservations. Fewer still pack the emotional power of the stories Erdrich and Dorris tell.

Erdrich, 33, trained as a poet in the Johns Hopkins creative writing program. She says she never anticipated “doing such a close literary relationship,” but that the benefits have been extensive.

Dorris, 43, an anthropologist who says he learned much of what he knows about writing from his wife, concurs.

Home for Their Work

Their Cornish, N.H., home suits their work style. A Colonial-era farmhouse, it abuts a winding country road. The structure has been renovated to provide family space for their five children and private offices for the two writers.

Each writer retreats to an office to write, but neither feels alone.

“We each have the other perched on his or her shoulder while we’re writing,” Dorris says.

Many writers help each other out--reading drafts, offering technical critiques or a bit of editing. It is even more common when two writers live under the same roof.

But Erdrich and Dorris cross the fuzzy boundary between professional courtesy and full collaboration.

Erdrich and Dorris met in the early 1970s at nearby Dartmouth College, where she was a student and he taught in the Native American Studies program.

Letters Fueled Relationship

Over the years they corresponded, exchanging poems and stories, and in 1975 they published their first collaboration--a children’s story he wrote and she illustrated--in The Circle, a magazine of the Boston Indian Council.

A closer relationship began in the early 1980s, when she returned to Dartmouth as writer in residence.

Their working relationship evolved slowly, but in Erdrich’s matter-of-fact description, the complex development of their unusual collaboration sounds natural and easy.

“We just exchanged things and commented, and got closer and closer in realizing how we talk about things. Then we started plotting out the characters.”

Dorris breaks in: “And then we started word to word to word.”

Ownership Lines Blurred

For Erdrich and Dorris, the process of collaboration blurs usual lines of literary ownership, of authorship, even of artistic responsibility. Each writer makes a commitment to the other’s work that is equal to his or her own.

It is a remarkably generous covenant between writers, who often place the importance of their own creations above all else, and has led some critics to question who does what--or whether they really collaborate at all.

“Why would we make it up?” Dorris asks with a tinge of exasperation. “It’s too complicated to make up.”

In some respects the process sounds simple. Dorris explains how it worked for Erdrich’s first novel.

Kept Working Together

“When ‘Love Medicine’ started, there was no question that it was Louise’s book, nor is there any doubt now. But we continued plotting together and talking about the characters and figuring out new twists.

“We exchanged pages back and forth all the way through--not just at the end, but all the way through. Then at the end, we read the whole manuscript aloud until we agreed on every word.”

Erdrich says that the “Love Medicine” experience consolidated their method. Each helps the other imagine the story and characters into existence. They delight in the process.

“Once you get to know a character well, the interesting part of writing is putting them into different situations and seeing what will happen,” explains Dorris. “We know we’re doing well when we go to the other person and say, ‘You’ll never believe what so and so did today.’ ”

First Editors for Each Other

They have an agreement that nothing goes to an editor until they reach accord on every word. If either one doesn’t like something--a word, a phrase, a minor character trait--the manuscript is changed before it goes in the mail.

“It’s not like we bend to the other’s will immediately if we feel strongly,” Erdrich says. “But we change; we always do.”

“And it’s always been the better thing to do,” Dorris adds.

Sometimes they reach consensus by compromise--trading off favored bits of writing to each other.

For example, early drafts of a love scene in “The Beet Queen” had the point-of-view character imagining wings in the air--a kind of heavy-handed symbolism that Dorris disliked but Erdrich cherished.

Quid Pro Quo

She agreed to clip the wings--if Dorris would impose a nastier fate on a despicable character in “A Yellow Raft.”

“I begged him to take revenge on that viper,” Erdrich says. “It was worth the wings to get revenge.”

Even beyond such trade-offs, the commitment to consensus means each writer must trust the other without reservation--and be worthy of the same trust in return. Erdrich shakes her head, remembering how hard-won that trust was.

“We had to go through all the things you might imagine--like writing the best thing you ever thought you wrote and the other person saying, ‘Oh, no, this is terrible.’ You just have to trust that the person knows best.”

When things aren’t going well, they take to the road.

Walking and Talking

Throughout the countryside around them are dirt roads and overgrown paths that might have been logging roads half a century earlier. They take a lot of walks.

“We do a lot of planning of the books walking up and down the roads,” Dorris says. “After frustration that it didn’t work, you go back to it and try again. Sometimes you try three or four times.”

“We feel very sorry for each other when we have to say, ‘This doesn’t work,’ ” Erdrich says. “But it’s always better. It’s like taking the medicine you need.”

Dorris explains that they have to count on each other being the toughest critic imaginable.

“You have to know the other person is not going to capitulate just because you are upset, frustrated and despairing,” he says.

Creative Help

Having a dependable critic on hand in the next room speeds up the creative process.

“When you’re writing away and you know it’s weak,” Dorris says, “you can count on the other person to find the weakness--and to find a solution.”

According to Erdrich, faith in the other person makes the creative process easier.

“You can say, ‘I know this is not right, but please help me fix it,’ ” she says. “What a relief!”

While their candid mutual criticism gives each of them the freedom to be imperfect, it also gives each the freedom to experiment--to let go of the rules and try something different.

Can Take More Risks

“It lets you take all sorts of risks because you know the other person will be a kind of safety net,” says Dorris. “If you go off on a tangent and it isn’t working, they’ll catch you--or change it so it does work.”

Given how closely they collaborate on all their projects, people inevitably ask why one name or the other goes on the finished book.

“The byline goes to the one who puts the words down,” Dorris explains. “That doesn’t mean the other didn’t have some say in the words and a great deal of influence. But the person who sits down and puts the words down and fights to defend them” is the acknowledged author.

Erdrich elaborates: “You write the draft by yourself, but the other person is always there emotionally and mentally.”

Help With Hard Work

Working on the other’s writing has some less obvious advantages, too. Erdrich points out that the white-hot moments of inspired creation are few and far between. Most of the time writing is simple hard work.

Turning from conjuring her fiction onto the page to reading the latest pages of her husband’s writing offers a form of relief.

“When I sit down with the pages of Michael’s manuscript, I feel totally involved,” she says. “I feel a real connection. It’s really wonderful to be involved to that degree and to feel you are really doing something--not just editing. You really have a say in what happens to the characters. I feel fortunate.”

That dual involvement, as creator and collaborator, might slow some writers down, but it works well for Erdrich and Dorris.

‘Something Autobiographical’

In addition to the novels, they write magazine articles--”so we can do something autobiographical,” Dorris says.

“Our fiction is entirely imagined.”

Along with the Columbus novel, they are planning the final Erdrich novel of a quartet, which will bring back characters from the first three. A nonfiction book about fetal alcohol syndrome by Dorris is due in May, 1989, from Harper & Row.

“We have no social life,” Erdrich says without lament.

“And we both have a whole lot to say,” Dorris adds.