Clay Stafford talks with Andrews & Wilson “On Collaborating”

Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I was excited to sit down and talk with Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson, the acclaimed co-authors of the #1 international bestselling author team of Andrews & Wilson, who are unparalleled in action thrillers. I wasn’t disappointed. Their mastery of the genre, evident in their numerous bestsellers, makes them the perfect tour guides for those of us who aspire to craft compelling action scenes, but also their collaboration style is something to be envied. Moreover, their approachability and wealth of knowledge make them a team you can comfortably learn from without feeling intimidated.

Clay: “Brian and Jeffrey, you’re a writing team, but before you became that, can you tell us a little about your solo careers before your very successful collaboration?”

Brian: “I have a psychology degree from Vanderbilt.”

Clay: “Very helpful for a writer.”

Brian: “Very. I was always interested in the mind and how people think. I think that helps inform my interest in character and human dynamics. Then, I made a hard pivot when I went into the military, became a nuclear engineer, and was a submarine officer. That informed me of my interest in mechanical things and engineering and how things work. Living on a submarine is obviously like the ultimate Skinner Box. It's a human experiment. You shove a hundred people into this machine that has a nuclear reactor and can carry nuclear weapons, and you put it underwater where you're driving around, and you can't see where you're going; everybody's trapped inside, breathing recycled air, and eating three-month-old food. That's the perfect platform for me to think about microcosms. And every story is a microcosm. I lived in the microcosm of a submarine.”

Clay: “And that makes me think you're living the dream, the way you described that one.”

Brian: “Living the dream. Now they let me out, which is great. And make sure you put in the interview somewhere that there's a great irony that a submarine officer who was reading Hunt for Red October on a submarine chasing Russians around has an opportunity, twenty-plus years later, to write on the 40th anniversary of Hunt for Red October, a submarine novel about a submarine chasing Russians around. So that's a cool full-circle element. When you're out there serving, you're away from your family, you're away from your friends, you're bonding with the other servicemen and women in your community. One way you bond is to share stories, tell stories, and talk about what matters to you and what you're afraid of. It's how we digest and connect with people through storytelling and listening to stories. I think that military service helped weave this into my DNA. That storytelling is an important part of our community, and getting stories out there about the men and women they're serving, what they're going through, and what it feels like is important for the rest of the nation. The people who are not serving and maybe aren't familiar with military service or the sacrifices men and women make to keep the nation safe. What inspired me to want to be a storyteller is how story time was part of the community I lived in.”

Clay: “How about you, Jeff? Your solo career before you got into this partnership?”

Jeffrey: “Mine is the complete one-eighty-degree opposite of Brian's. Brian came into storytelling after all his experiences. And I had all these experiences because I'm still that nine-year-old with a rifle or the fire hat or whatever. My bio reads like someone who never grew up, which might be partly true.”

Clay: “We'll ask your wife.”

Jeffrey: “Right. No, I know better than that. Writing is the one great constant in my life. When I've done all these other things, being a pilot, being in the teams, being a doctor, and a firefighter, and all the things I've done, I always wrote. I started writing when I was probably my daughter's age, which is eight. I would write fan fiction for my favorite shows and published my first short story when I was 13 or 14. I've literally always had storytelling as part of my life. At times in my life, it was my catharsis; at times in my life, it was my creative outlet, and at times in my life, it was a passion that I wanted to turn into a career, which I've been blessed to do now. It's kind of the opposite of Brian. The writing was always there, and then I lived all these other lives that slowly informed that craft and helped me develop it differently. When Brian and I met, I believe he had two novels out. I had two out and a third about to come out. We were both writing individually, and this partnership grew out of friendship rather than necessity. We were writing, and we connected at ThrillerFest in New York. Because of my social paralysis, I'm uncomfortable in big groups of people, and my wife laughs about it because I do well. I think I look okay socially, but I don't like it. I was sitting in the hotel room looking through all the pictures of the people I might meet at this opening meeting during our debut author year when Brian and I were both debut authors. I was finding all the military people. I was like, ‘Okay, I can talk to those guys. We'll have something in common.’ Brian happened to be one of them, and I was burning the pictures into my head so I would recognize them at the cocktail party. And sure enough, I saw Brian there and said, ‘Hi.’ He was alone because he was a submariner, so he was crying in his beer, and I felt sorry for him. The partnership part of it came much, much later. But the history was there for both of us. I think that made it work.”

Clay: “How did the collaboration start?”

Jeffrey: “He stalked me like a little girl. It was weird.”

Brian: “Now remember he just explained how he stalked me.”

Jeffrey: “I think I said I felt sorry for you.”

Brian: “I think you stalked me. I believe what you just described is the definition of stalking. No, I think he charmed me.”

Clay: “This sounds like me telling how my wife and I met and got together, and mine is all lies.”

Jeffrey: “It's very uncomfortable, isn't it?

Clay: “But between all the stalking and the give-and-take and the ‘I don't want to see you anymore,’ how did it eventually work out?”

Brian: “All kidding aside, we met at ThrillerFest at the cocktail party and became fast friends. Our family values are similar. We have the same sort of world outlook, and we're both driven and intellectually curious people. We joke about Jeff’s bio all the time. Also, I have a variety of experiences, and we're both intellectually curious people who are interested in this world that we live in and in storytelling. If you put all those things together, it does make sense that we would become friends. Every year, we look forward to catching up at ThrillerFest, and I think during our third year there, I was thinking about my next project, and the idea just popped into my head. I said, ‘You know, we should do a SEALS and Subs book because combining those two communities in the story would be cool.’ And he's like, ‘That does sound interesting. I don't know how that would work, you know. I don't understand. You know, writing is a very individual thing. How could we possibly make this work?’ and I didn't have a perfect answer. I said, ‘Well, we could just try dividing the chapters and see what would happen.’ I think Jeff was like, you know, in his mind, he's thinking, ‘I don't see this happening.’ So, he was like, ‘I'll help. It sounds like a cool idea. I'll be your subject matter expert. I'll help you with whatever you need from naval special warfare, that sort of thing.’ The same advice he was giving earlier. He said, ‘I'll offer to be that resource for you. And I said, ‘Okay,’ and then I said, ‘Well, why don't you look at this chapter? And maybe you could help write it.’ Then he started getting into it because he's a storyteller and couldn't help himself.”

Jeffrey: “He manipulated me with his psychology degree. The story's true ending is that I did go into it thinking I have no idea how I've been writing my whole life. I don't know how two people write together. You do the nouns; I do the verbs? What are you even talking about? And I did want to help him because he was a good friend. The story became increasingly developed because we were brainstorming, which turned into a really good story. He asked me two more times after the first time, ‘Why don't we take a crack at writing it together?’ I said, ‘No, no. Again, I don't know how we would do it.’ This was a great book, and I was jealous. He said, ‘Look, let's do this. Let's write five chapters. We'll divide them up. You write some. I'll write some. We'll talk about it. We'll try it out, and if it's working, we'll keep going. If it's not working, you can have the story because I don't think I can write it without you.’ And I was like, ‘Sweet. I gotta have this story to be my story.’ And so, we sat down, started writing the chapters, and as I recall, we just kept going. We never even brought it up again. It worked so well that it didn't even occur to us to have the conversation again. I think Tier One, the first book we wrote together, was done in four and a half months. We crushed it. Outside of interviews, we've never talked about it again. It's a given that this is how we do it. It's efficient. It's so much more fun. I'm sure if your writing partnership isn't what ours is, it would be horrible if you weren't getting along. We never argue about anything. It's enjoyable. I get to do the job I love with my best friend. There's no downside to it, and we're incredibly efficient. As you know, we release three or four books a year. So, we turn a book in about every fourteen or fifteen weeks. We couldn't do it alone. But it's just so enjoyable. And there's no writer's block. You get on the phone like, ‘I'm not sure what to do.’ You get on the phone, and five minutes later, the idea is better than anything you would have come up with individually. It's been a real joy. At first, I didn't see how it could work, and now I can't even imagine doing it any other way.”

Clay: “You guys live in different cities, too.”

Jeffrey: “Thank God, because we are good friends. We’d get nothing done.”

Brian: “We'd watch Jim Gaffigan and drink Bourbon every day, and we'd have no books.”

Clay: “So that's a good thing. How do you plan your stories? Because you've got two brains here trying to work independently but together. How do you plan the stories out?”

Brian: “Do we have two brains, Jeff?”

Jeffrey: “I think we used to. He's making a joke, Clay, because, for the last couple of years, we've realized that we've hybridized into a single organism to the extent where I'll have a brilliant idea like, ‘Oh, my gosh! I know how to solve that problem we were talking about this morning,’ and I'll get on the phone with him. I'll say, ‘Hey, I want to tell you something,’ and he’ll go, ‘Hold on!’ and he'll tell me exactly what I'm about to say. It's bizarre.”

Clay: “Twin telepathy, right?”

Brian: “Yes.”

Jeffrey: “It’s weird, man. It's a real thing. But anyway, Brian, what were you going to say?”

There’s a pause.

Clay: “Jeff, with twin telepathy, you should know.” I laugh.

Brian: “That’s what I was going to say.” I laugh again. “It's a funny joke, but I feel like there is some of that now that we've written so many books together, where it's like two dozen novels we've penned together that we start to anticipate. And you know, we have a method, but I think, as far as an individual, we're not plotters, and we don't outline the entire novel as some people do. We're in the pantser category. But we do have structure to our approach. We write in the three-act structure. Our books are written from multiple points of view in third person. So, we sort of approach this as, like any good group project, which is at the beginning of every novel, we sit down and talk about the story's themes and objectives. In broad strokes, where do we think we want to end up? And then we start division of labor. Because we write multiple point-of-view novels, we can each take different characters and write a single point-of-view per chapter. We divide the chapters between us, and it's just the first couple because we're not sure exactly where we will go. So maybe Jeff will take chapters one, three, four, six. I'll take two, five, and eight, and we start writing and write in parallel. We write simultaneously, and the key to our success, and I would say, our superpower, is that throughout this process, we're always talking and giving each other free reign to edit each other's work. Would you agree with that?”

Jeffrey: “I think that is the key—every few chapters, we swap. If I finish a chapter, I send it to Brian. When he finishes his, he sends it to me. So, it doesn't go into “The Manuscript,” our master file, until I've written it and he's edited it, and vice versa. So even though we're writing in tandem and writing different chapters, both of us have touched every chapter before it goes into the master file, which is a little weird but is our superpower because it gives us that unified voice. Sometimes, you can tell when something's co-authored because you can say, ‘Okay, that clearly is a different voice.’ We don't have that problem. But the other thing is, we're editing as we're going. We're also stimulating each other as we're going. I'll send him a chapter. He'll send me one. I'll read his and be like, ‘Oh, my God! I know what we can do with this!’ Now I'm off to the races writing something else because we have that sort of logarithmic increase in creativity. After all, we're both seeing it. So yeah, I do think that's the superpower. We did that from the very first book. We've never not done it that way. I don't think it would work any other way.”

Brian: “Clay, you said something early on that guided our partnership. Jeff was like, look, we need to approach this as a business. This is a business, and the book is our product. It's not about who wrote what chapter or who thought of what idea on what page. In an interview, you’ll never see us saying, ‘Well, I wrote this, and then Jeff wrote that.’ That's not how it works. This book is like a kid to us, you know. It's like anybody who's a parent understands that you can't take credit. These books are like our kids, and we both try to put the best guidance and put our all into making the book as exciting, informative, and suspenseful as possible. And it's between the two of us and our little additions all through this process to the point where you can't name who did what, on what day, and what page. It's just an Andrews & Wilson book, and once it's out there, that's the thing we're proud of. We're not proud of, ‘Oh, well, I thought of this great thing on page thirty-seven.’ That's not how we work.”

Jeffrey: “Literally, it's not how we work like there are times when my wife will read a book, and she'll be like, ‘Oh, chapter 17, that was you,” and she thinks I'm making it up when I swear I don't know if I wrote that first or second. I remember that chapter. I had something to do with it, but by the time it gets into a book you're reading, one of us wrote it, the other rewrote it, then it all got edited, then it went to DE, then it got edited again. That lack of ego is the key, and that's from the military background because it's part of your DNA. If you spend significant time in the service, the team and the mission are before you. It's more than a bumper sticker. It becomes who you are. It's all about the team. It's all about the mission. It's not about credit. It's not about who did what. You can't drive an eight-billion-dollar submarine by yourself, and one dude doesn't fast rope in and get Bin Laden, right? It's all team before self with our backgrounds. That's what made it so easy, and it is, I guess, the best way to say it. It made it easy because it's who we are.”

Clay Stafford: “Did you guys draw up a contract? If somebody's going to start collaborating with somebody else, how involved should the legalities get?”

Jeffrey: There should be something. I think how detailed it needs to be depends on your business relationship. Don't ever sacrifice a personal relationship. How many friendships have been ruined over a business deal, right? There should be a discussion about what you want to do, even outside the contract. That was the key to our success. From day one, we talked about what we were trying to achieve. What was our goal? We were on the same page, not just on the creative side but the business side. I don't think I’ve thought about it in years until you just brought it up. I'm sure it's invalid now, but we had a document when we started, but it was super simple. Whatever comes out of anything we ever write as Andrews & Wilson is fifty percent yours and fifty percent mine. Every bit of responsibility, every bit of liability, every bit of financial success, is split down the middle fifty-fifty. Ours was a one-page document we wrote and then gave to our agent. I think there should be something. It would be a mistake not to have something to point to if there were ever conflicts. But even more important than the legal document is that conversation of: what do you want to get out of this? What do I want to get out of this? Are we on the same page? Are we on the same page creatively? Are we on the same page business-wise? That's very, very important.”

Brian: “The exercise of addressing these questions and drafting something forces you to have a conversation that might be uncomfortable or feel awkward otherwise, and you might just sort of kick that can down the road. You may not be on the same road if you kick it down too far. I think that, more than anything, the business discussion is super important. As we discussed, we try to give back to the community because the community has given so much to us. One of the things that I always ask aspiring authors when they ask for help is, ‘Well, what do you want to get out of your writing career? Do you want to have a book out there that everybody can read? Is it that simple? Is it that you want to say I'm a New York Times bestselling author? Do you want to be rich and famous? Do you want to have your book adapted into a movie?’ It can be all those things, or it can be one of those things. But if your writing partner has different aspirations than you, then that's important to establish upfront because you will be rowing in this same boat and must be rowing in the same direction at the same pace. It’s difficult to make a living in this business. It's competitive. And for most people—and there's no shame in saying this—writing is a side gig, and it takes a long time until you make enough money to call it a career and write full-time. And if you're two, you're splitting all that money. It might be a situation where one person's financial needs differ from the others, and they say, ‘You know what, we’re not making enough money for me to continue this. I have to work on the side. I have to have my day job.’ Okay, is it a situation where one person works eight hours a day and the other works two? Are you guys okay with that? How does that look? These logistical questions are important, so everybody's expectations are on the same page at the beginning of the partnership.”

Clay: “We talked about all the good things and the symbiotic relationship you guys have. What are the challenges of team writing?”

Brian: “The challenge is we're producing so much content right now. How do we keep it fresh? How do we stay motivated? How do we ensure the other guy gets time with his family? We spend a lot of time ensuring that our family needs are met, our financial needs are both met, and we're still having fun. And so, there are conversations about, ‘I'm going to be going on vacation now,’ or ‘This book is gonna be due then,’ and ‘Okay, I got a family thing.’ And so we do a lot of planning and communication constantly to make sure the other guy’s emotionally, professionally, and financially okay. And that's been something that we've done from the very beginning. As Jeff said, we're best friends and business partners, so we must ensure that both elements are taken care of.”

Clay: “It’s that team spirit you discussed earlier.”

Jeffrey: “Yeah, one hundred percent. We've been writing together creeping up on a decade in a couple of years, and I'm not saying we always agree. But we've never argued. I don't think there's ever been a conflict. We're both faith, family, country. Those are all more important than what we're doing as long as our financial needs are met. And so, Brian calls and says, ‘Hey, I'm not going to be able to do this thing that we just got asked to do because Larkin's got something going on,’ no problem. I'll take care of it, and vice versa. We've always been team before self. On the creative side, it's the same thing again. It's not that we're always one hundred percent on the same page, but we have that team dynamic. Let's say there's something, and Brian calls up and says, ‘Well, you know, I don't know about this. I think maybe we go in this other direction.’ That has only happened a few times, but our sort of unspoken rule—it's been spoken about in interviews, but I don't think we ever planned it out—has always been we talk about the pros and cons of your idea versus my idea, and we tend to defer to whoever has the most passion for it. I might think his ideas aren't as good as mine, but he feels very strongly about it. Let's try it because it's writing; you can always change it, right? When we've trusted the other guy's passion, it's never been like, ‘I told you, I knew that wasn't going to work.’ It's always worked. And so there hasn't been any real conflict because we're proactive and team before self in our approach.”

Clay: “And all that would sound great to somebody reading this. Any advice for those thinking about collaborating with another author?”

Jeffrey: “I mean just the advice we've given, I think, which is, vet the relationship, and I don't mean vet it in a cold, clinical way. I mean, make sure that it will work not just for you but for the other person, and have those big upfront conversations. If you have a real conversation about expectations, goals, craft, business, all those things, you'll know if it will work. There’s not a huge number of collaborators, but the people who have conflict have conflict because of unspoken expectations and unmet needs. And so, if you can be upfront about those things and decide at the beginning that you're on the same page, you shouldn't have insurmountable conflict. Maybe I'm naive, but it seems like it would be true.”

Brian: “And I think you have to be honest with yourself about the needs of your ego. Why are you doing this? Is it because you want to say you wrote this book? For us, it's about the books and the brand. And so, if you think about it like a rock band, a lot of rock bands, just the lead singer is considered the band, and everybody else is sort of baggage along for the ride. For other bands, it's not that way. Everybody's sharing equally in this. So, in your partnership, is it about you, or is it about the team? Liv Constantine and her sister do a great job with this. It's about the two of them. But they're sisters, right? They're another enduring co-author team; if you talk to them, you can tell it's not about their egos. It's about them together.”

Jeffrey: And I will say, though, as a caveat to that, that doesn't mean that's the only model that works. It's what works for us. Catherine Coulter wrote with J.T. Ellison for a time. That relationship wasn't our relationship. Kathy was ginormous, and J.T. was breaking out. Theirs was more a mentor/mentee co-authoring relationship, which worked great. The books were good. Those relationships are all different. We're not saying it must be team admission before self, 50/50, or it can't work. We're saying, make sure you know what it is and what it looks like. There's nothing wrong with saying, ‘My goal is to write with somebody who has a following and get my name out there and have that association,’ as long as you both understand that's what you're doing and are both okay with it. That can still be a great model, but not talking about it and making sure you're on the same page is the death of the relationship.”

Clay: “So there’s many ways to structure it. Excellent advice for those thinking about a collaborative relationship.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Brian Andrews is a US Navy veteran, Park Leadership Fellow, and former submarine officer with a psychology degree from Vanderbilt and a business master's from Cornell University. Brian is also a principal contributor at Career Authors, a site dedicated to advancing the careers of aspiring and published writers. https://www.andrews-wilson.com/

Jeffrey Wilson has worked as an actor, firefighter, paramedic, jet pilot, diving instructor, and vascular and trauma surgeon. He served in the US Navy for fourteen years and made multiple deployments as a combat surgeon with an East Coast-based SEAL Team. He lives in Southwest Florida. https://www.andrews-wilson.com/