How Role-Playing Helps Our Writing—and Our Marriage
As co-writing partners who fully embody the stories they tell in their writing process, authors Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka share how role-playing helps their writing, and their marriage.
We role-play every night. Or, nearly every night. We take breaks, every now and then, when time permits. Usually, though, it’s nightly. Often for hours. We find it invigorating, restorative, revealing. It strengthens our connection. In fact, it’s one of the foundational pieces of our marriage.
The role-playing we mean happens not in the bedroom, but in our office. We’re referring to our co-writing process, years of nights working together to get into the heads and hearts of the characters we’ve put on the page.
The comparison to role-playing isn’t unfounded due to the way we write together. Instead of exchanging chapters or wholly dividing duties (one of us editing and the other drafting, for instance), we write everything together, in real time, in one room. Every sentence is proposed out loud, discussed, and incorporated once each of us feels the character’s voice is reflected.
We write in first-person, often in dual perspectives in each book. What results is what we described earlier, writing sessions of hours where we’re literally speaking to each other in the voices of our characters, their love story playing out in the words we share.
Notwithstanding the performative piece of our writing process, writing gets us out of our own heads and voices in deeper ways. One of fiction’s greatest gifts for the writer is permitting them to interrogate their own philosophies, fears, passions, and uncertainties. The veil of imagination frees the writer to express unexplored attitudes from the sanctuary of non-ownership. It is the opportunity to hear one’s own thoughts in another’s voice, evaluating their pleasure or discomfort from the vantage point of authorial distance.
Unlike writers who work on their own, we experience this effect within the ever-ongoing conversation of marriage. We speak with each other in our writing with the unique communicative freedom the medium offers. Fiction is not only a forum for the examination of our own feelings—it is a place where we can share them when the inertia of daily life and long-lasting love may not otherwise have easily permitted.
Unsurprisingly, we have ended up dedicating our romance career to the feeling of “role-playing” in fiction. In our first novel for adults, The Roughest Draft, which follows (what else?) a pair of former co-authors uncovering their feelings for each other on the page, we delved into how the emotional freedom of fiction can permit one to offer up one’s deepest held confessions. In the voices of their characters, they can divulge years of love and regret.
However, in developing our next adult romance, we noticed how The Roughest Draft does not perfectly reflect our own experience of co-writing with our romantic partner. Unlike The Roughest Draft’s couple, Katrina and Nathan, we don’t keep secrets (okay, other than who polished off the last sugar cookie left out from the holidays). Instead, for us, co-writing is not the opportunity to uncover old fears or long-held passions. Rather, it is the freedom to explore new ones.
Our upcoming romance Do I Know You? is founded on this feeling. The central couple, Eliza and Graham, fight the distance in their five-year marriage with an unconventional way of spending their weeklong anniversary vacation. Due to misunderstandings and delightful surprises, they wind up pretending they’re perfect strangers, interacting as hotel guests in made-up personas.
During the week, they flirt, they “exchange numbers,” they have their “first date” (not to mention other firsts…). Even more importantly, Eliza and Graham speak out loud parts of themselves they did not realize were meaningful until they heard them in the voices of their personas. Which parts? Without oversharing plot points, we’ll just say the couple re-examine wounds in the past and dare to imagine exciting developments in their future. While they’re not writers, the way they find freedom to communicate while rediscovering themselves is wholly inspired by what our writing process offers us.
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What have we learned from each other in our writing? Preoccupations. What our writing process has revealed to us is less daring revelation and more quiet current. In reflecting on what ideas for stories and characters have repeatedly held our interest, we have gotten insight into what hopes and insecurities occupy each other’s minds most often. We have found we often write characters who worry about expectations and the pressure of whether they conform to roles they hold or held. We write (in The Roughest Draft and Do I Know You?, for instance) meditations on interpersonal communication, on how the confessions we describe here are uniquely difficult.
We keep writing second-chance romances. We find our way over and over to characters who reckon with how love changes over the years, and with what one needs to do (or not do) for it to hold its joy despite them. Part celebration, part confession, in the hand of craftsmanship.
In the fondest moments of our career, we have used our stories to offer each other and ourselves the comfort we would want to hear. It’s okay if you change. Love endures. You deserve the excitement of the first date even within the companionship of long-lasting commitment.
While we’ve enjoyed the process with each other, the opportunity to re-examine yourself in fiction is one every writer can access. Even in the highest-concept or most market-driven of stories (and we love a high-concept, market-driven story!) offers room in characters or premise for the reflection of deeply held or new pieces of personhood. In whatever fiction you write next, we encourage you to engage with this freedom. Write a fear, or write a hope. Role-play a little.
Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka met and fell in love in high school. Austin went on to graduate from Harvard, while Emily graduated from Princeton. Together, they are the authors of several novels about romance for teens and adults. Now married, they live in Los Angeles, where they continue to take daily inspiration from their own love story.
