Collaboration

This is a flash fiction piece that first appeared in 6 Sentences.

They were close friends for over a decade, and then one of them began to write fiction. Each time she completed a first draft of a story she would send it to her friend who would make cogent comments about plot, point of view, tense, temporal distance, and pacing, for her friend had been an English major in college and knew about those things while the fiction writer was a novice, a structural geologist who simply liked to write. The fiction writer was grateful, incorporated the suggestions, and made many revisions, working assiduously to shape the stories into tight, focused narratives, and when she arrived at the point where she believed the stories were complete, she began to submit her work to small literary journals and magazines. Finally, after many months, one manuscript was accepted to a prestigious university quarterly. She was so elated that the first thing she did after receiving the email was to call her friend to share the good news. The friend listened to the excitement in the fiction writer’s voice as she described the story that was just accepted, but when it was her turn to speak she said simply, “You mean the story we both wrote?”