VANESSA GEBBIE’S FICTION WORKHOUSE (1)

I am a hoarder. I rarely throw things away, thinking they might have a use further down the line someplace. E-mails I hoard, too, and in reviewing how I come to be where I am I have been rereading many of those e-mails, over two hundred from Vanessa Gebbie alone.

In April 2008 Vanessa Gebbie, having read some of my work, invited me to be a member of her hand-picked group of writers working in her closed on-line site called 'The Fiction Workhouse' (FW). I was like a kid in a sweetshop on my first visits to the Fiction Worhouse – I remember the time so clearly. One of the first pieces I read there was a flash fiction piece by VG in which a young girl was observing an older man. Members were encouraged to read each other’s posted work and to pass comment on the posted pieces. Eager show-offy puppy as I was, I went one better: I wrote a reply to VG’s piece changing the point of view so that the man was now observing the girl. I wrote it in the same style. VG was so taken with what I had written that she wrote a response from the girl and so we ping-ponged back and forth until we had written between us 9 or 10 flashes. Then VG said we should each take away what we had jointly produced and using the pieces construct a complete story. This we did so that we had, in the end, two stories out of the process.

VG was excited at this new way of collaborating and wanted others in Fiction Workhouse to see what we had done and to see what fun this kind of collaboration could be and how it could produce very good writing. A brief online discussion took place about how we should submit the pieces, whether to competitions or to magazines. I was keen to acknowledge VG’s contribution to my piece. Someone else on FW suggested we sub only one of the pieces and that we go for co-authorship. VG got quite cross with this person and broke off discussion; instead, she e-mailed me privately. This is what she said:

“I was a bit thrown by X’s view that we should only sub one of the stories, and then as a joint thing. I can’t agree! Don’t know what you think… but we’ve invented a new form of collaborating in which the work becomes two very different pieces. Some of the images are the same, sure… but the themes, characters, focus, the whole story is entirely different. I have no trouble with them being treated entirely separately, do you?”

I didn’t. I was excited that as a writer she saw ideas as I thought they should be seen, as common property rather than private property, a sort of socialist view of ideas. She had used some of my ideas and I had used some of hers and there was no sense on either side that this was wrong. Indeed, VG wanted to hold it up as model for others to work by.

So taken with this way of working was VG that within a few weeks, on a quiet night in FW, she asked if I wanted to ‘play again’ and if I did she suggested I flash something up on the site to get the ball rolling. And so we did it all over again.

This sharing of ideas was established between us, so for VG to now cry 'thief' seems strangely absurd.

Early in 2009 VG was in South America. She still popped into FW sometimes, at a distance, to post prompts to stimulate members into writing. At this time she posted half a dozen. No one responded at all - no one except me: I responded by writing something to each of the prompts, show-offy puppy eager to please VG and not wanting her to be upset that others were not responding to her prompts. VG posted no more prompts but she sent me an e-mail saying there was a piano tuner in Ushuaia and there must be a story there. That's all she said. I responded: I wrote a complete story. On her return from SAmerica I was excited to show her and asked her if she wanted to see. I was a little crestfallen when she said she didn't want to see it as she was sure it would be extremely good and she did not want my ideas in this case to influence the story she wanted to write. There was no sense that I had done anything wrong in writing mine - why should there have been? Later, when my story did well in competitions, VG got upset. Whatever your thoughts about this, and the facts are as I have presented them, what is certain is that there was no malicious intent to misappropriate VG's ideas. So why does she cry 'thief' still, without giving any specifics of what I am supposed to have stolen from her?

"I am not a nice person," she once wrote to me; on another occasion, "I am not kind"; and yet another, "I have teeth and I bite". VG frequently fell out with the writers on FW and when she did it was all so acrimonious and she was known for her temper at FW and some of us acted as peacemakers on the site. And now she has fallen out with me.