Flower and Pot: A Note on Process

Read El-Tamami and Doshi’s coauthored story, “Flower and Pot,” here.

Vidhi Doshi: This story came together when two women, 2,700 miles apart, met day after day in a Google Doc. It started with a flower and pot. We passed paragraphs to each other without really knowing where the story was going, or what was going on in the other person’s life, what their day had been like, what their mood was. All we had was rock-solid trust that the other person would send back something more intriguing than we could imagine alone.

Later, when we asked each other how those sentences and paragraphs had come into being, we discovered extraordinary parallels in our patterns of existence, in our family histories, in our scattered lives. Our worlds, though geographically far apart, feel strangely close.

Perhaps, while we wrote together, we were connected by some invisible force that collapsed the space between us. Perhaps the pull of another person and the shared act of creating tethered us. We didn’t think much about all that while we were writing, though; we just wanted to create something bigger than ourselves.

Wiam El-Tamami: A flower, a pot, and two women: one in India, the other in Egypt. Vidhi is in Mumbai; I’m in Cairo. We met online, became friends through writing. We’ve read a lot of each other’s work, and we have an ongoing conversation about our lives, our writing, and our movement through the world—in text messages, long voice notes, shared work-in-progress, and bursts of asides about things we’re reading or thinking or going through, things that are dispiriting or heartening, open questions. This spring, it occurred to me that I would love for us to try to write a short story together.

The idea was simple: one of us would write a single paragraph, then send it to the other, who would write the next paragraph and send it back. (We broke the rules from the start. I wrote the first two paragraphs and sent them to Vidhi, who wrote a few more; we ended up each responding with a passage of whatever length made sense: sometimes a bit longer, sometimes shorter.) We didn’t discuss the story at all while writing it.

The most remarkable thing was how much fun it all was—how freeing! We wrote fast, didn’t overthink. Every time Vidhi passed the story back, it felt like a gift. I had no idea what she might have written—I was often taken completely by surprise by the direction she had chosen (it seems she often was, too, by the decisions I had made). There was so much play, anticipation, shared delight—at times I actually found myself laughing out loud at something she’d written. And I think we both felt expanded by the experience; we ended up creating a story that was very different from anything either of us would have come up with on our own.

We were both working on other writing projects at the same time, and this one, interestingly, felt so much easier than our individual projects. There was such a fluidity and lightness to the process. The key thing, we realized, was relinquishing control and taking things one step at a time. Of course, this is true of any creative process—but it was made palpable here by only needing to write one passage at a time, and by trusting that someone else was there to carry this, too. Whenever we are creating we are not alone: forces beyond form and name come to our aid, as well as deeper resources in us that can only be accessed through creativity—not to mention our whole ecosystem of peers and a vast lineage of people whose work has come before ours. But sometimes it is hard to remember that, and to trust it.

Friendship, solidarity, shared work, and the collective imagination mean everything in these increasingly deranged times. Writing has brought Vidhi and me together; and through the shared process of making this story, we have supported and challenged each other towards liberation in a concrete way, on the page: relinquishing control and trusting one another, thereby liberating our spirits, imagination, sense of humor, and joy.