Swimming Lessons: A Novel

Terrified of the water but needing to learn how to swim, Laurel convinces Marna, a former swimming champion who had given up her Olympic dreams for marriage, to give her lessons, a request that marks the beginning of an extraordinary friendship. Tour.

Talking to Lynne Hugo and Anna Tuttle Villegas
Their unusual story: Lynne and Anna have never met, but together they wrote SWIMMING LESSONS via countless faxes, phone calls, and FedExes. This exchange (sent by separate faxes to their publisher!) gives the fascinating background.

You’ve written a novel together but you’ve never met -- why not?

Lynne: Though I’m eager and look forward to spending time with Anna, it doesn’t feel at all crucial to me. I’m closer to her than to friends I’ve known for years. We started out as two writers supporting one another’s journey out of genuine enthusiasm for the other’s work, with regard to both style and subject matter. Until now, I’d never understood how some people could develop a complete relationship with someone they’d never met in person. Although the nuances of voice and laugh communicated by phone have added a significant dimension to our friendship, I feel like I know Anna thoroughly from our written correspondence.

Anna: I teach English full-time at a college in California, and my writing takes place during my vacation breaks, so I rarely do recreational travel because it robs from my writing time. Once we began SWIMMING LESSONS, we realized that we didn't need to meet in order to collaborate.

How did you begin writing SWIMMING LESSONS?

Lynne: In August, 1996, when I looking for a literary agent, one of them gave me Anna's name and number for a reference. Our first phone call lasted over an hour as we discovered we had similar publishing starts and literary interests. A phone call or two later, we decided to exchange our work for feedback. And when, a few months later, Anna began telling me about the twists and turns her love life was taking, we began to envision SWIMMING LESSONS.

Anna: Lynne and I were faxing each other almost daily by that fall, recounting at length our household lives (we have daughters a year apart in age) and our writing ambitions. About this time, a professional acquaintance introduced me to a man she thought I’d like. To make a long and compli! cated story short, it turned out that although this woman seemed to be playing the role of beneficent Cupid, she was really intent on casting me as a voyeur to her own obsession with this very attractive and sadly manipulated guy. Poor Lynne suffered through my blow-by-blow accounts of the Fellini script I was living. Once, exasperated with me because I hadn't yet extricated myself from the bizarre triangle, she wrote: "Anna, I'll be blunt. I think you're being used!" I remember saying, "But it's so interesting! I'm taking notes! This is fascinating!" Our back-and-forth commentary of those months -- at least a novel’s worth of correspondence -- inspired us to begin SWIMMING LESSONS. We imagined two women, a strong, single professional named Laurel, and a not-so-confident housewife named Marna, both in love with the same man. I would write Marna, and Lynne would write Laurel, and we would trust each other in the imagination of our characters' stories. When we exchanged the chapters, it was as if we were meeting the characters for the first time.

Lynne: As the characters interacted more and more, Anna and I spent literally hours on the phone in marathon sessions. We’d go over chapters the other had written, discussing, questioning, challenging, affirming, correcting--in short, serving as each other’s editor.

Anna: We plotted the novel on a storyboard, assigning crucial scenes to the chapters in sequence. We’d write one pair of Laurel/Marna chapters at a time, exchange the chapters by fax, and then speak over the phone about them. The first time Marna appeared in a Laurel chapter, I got so excited I had to call Lynne and tell her how magical it felt. There was my character, cast in a dramatic scene in Laurel's life.

Lynne: Our writing rooms were papered with notes from our phone conversations and revisions to our storyboard, and virtually all other work faded from consciousness.

Anna: Maybe a good analogy for our composing process would be a ride-and-tie r! ace, where a single horse is shared by two riders. The partner on horseback rides ahead and ties the horse; when the walker catches up, the horse has rested and it's now her turn to ride. The partners are both on the same trail, sharing the horse and traveling the same direction, and whether they're walking behind or riding on ahead, they reach the finish line together.

What is the nature and evolution of your friendship? And how do your personalities affect your writing?

Anna: Partly because of the ironic intimacy of knowing each other only through phone and fax, partly because we are both in the stage of life when our desire to write is pressing in more and more on our daily lives, I feel closer to Lynne than I do to almost any other nonwriting women friends. She was my sounding board throughout prepublication and release of my first novel in 1997, and I felt absolutely uninhibited in expressing to her the reservations and self-doubts that I couldn't express to my agent or editor. Our friendship is stronger because of our collaboration, and our collaboration is sturdier because of our friendship. Collaboration is a miraculous antidote for the writer's doldrums: in each other we've found built-in taskmasters, editors, confidantes, spirit-boosters, and teachers.

Lynne: Anna and I are both very verbal, in love with words and particularly with beautifully crafted written words. We love an excuse to laugh, are passionate readers, and socio-political liberals. We keep dogs and fish, feed birds, plant extravagant gardens, love ponds, rivers, oceans. And chocolate. Because we draw our imagery from the worlds we observe and engage, our common interests provide a heuristic unifying element to our separate voices, and help to produce a seamless manuscript that appears to have come from a single writer. Anna: Which is not to say that we are psychological clones or that our writing habits are parallel. Lynne is the most enthusiastic first-drafter I've ever encountered: she soars into orbit in th! e creative mode. She writes very fast, riding a wave of confident joy about what she's composing. I, on the other hand, am kind of a depressive, self-doubting, tormented first-drafter. I question every word that hits the page and spend endless sessions reworking the previous day's writing before I can move on. I write a first draft slowly, in a state of constant anguish. With revision, though, we seem to swap character. I find it very easy--almost joyful--to come back and rework, to tinker and to sink myself back into the character and plot. We balance each other in the yin and yang of the creative process. The cosmos sees to it that whenever one of us is at some extreme of light or dark, the other one is in the opposite mindset.

How do you picture one another?

Anna: Physically, we're Mutt and Jeff, I'm sure. I'm very tall; Lynne is not. Neither I nor Marna is adept at "arranging" ourselves. I'm guessing Lynne is much more careful with her clothes, and I know for a fact she goes regularly to a real hairdresser rather than do what I do, which is wear my hair in a ponytail for months before dragging myself in to a shop to get it cut. When I went to New York to do a round of visits connected with my first book, Lynne coached me through my wardrobe. In fact, a dress that Laurel helps Marna to pick out is an actual dress that Lynne found for me in a catalog, a dress I now own.

Lynne: Anna imagines, I know, that I pay more attention to clothing than she does, and I’ve enjoyed being well-dressed in someone’s mind. This will be a bad thing about meeting her: she’ll realize that my working wardrobe consists of black (doesn’t show chocolate streaks when I wipe my hands) sweatpants from Walmart which look like knickers thanks to my domestic skills, which have never included figuring out what can go on high heat in the dryer and what can’t. I’m still holding out hope that her eyesight is as bad as she says it is, in which case she might not notice I’m even shorter than I might have ac! cidentally told her.

Are you looking forward to meeting after the book is published?

Anna: Now that we know the most significant parts of each other's personality, meeting will be fun -- we've been dying to share a bottle of wine together -- but in some ways it will be almost anticlimactic. (This is very space-ageish and virtual reality-like, isn't it, that we've made the corporeal element of friendship almost insignificant?) We'll probably want to drink more than one bottle.

Lynne: Anna has to be pretty happy about meeting me. I’m not a teenager or a nutcase, and everyone else she knows is. Personally, I’m happy about meeting her so I can borrow her clothes. I figure her miniskirts will make spiffy ankle length dresses, as long as I wear spike heels so they don’t drag on the ground.