I’m a huge pop music fan, and one of my favorite things to do while listening to music is to sing along. This clearly doesn’t make me unusual in any way (though the fact that I like to play “air bass” on the steering wheel while I’m driving might distinguish me a bit). However, unlike most people who sing with the music on their sound systems, I tend to sing the harmony parts. Even when a song doesn’t have a harmony vocal, I’ll often add one.

I didn’t realize until recently that “singing harmony” has become something of a preference in my writing life as well. All of my nonfiction work has been collaborative, including the New York Times bestseller I wrote with Ken Robinson, The Element. I’ve collaborated on fiction as well, though the first time such a collaboration is appearing under my name is with the publication of Differential Equations, which I wrote with Julian Iragorri. Differential Equations is a novel with fantastic overtones set in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, and a fictional South American country we call Legado. It’s a novel I never would have written by myself – Julian, who is South American, brought most of the core ideas to the table – but it is one I was absolutely made to write. I grew up admiring the great magic realists like Garcia Márquez, Borges, and Cortázar, and I have long wanted to create a story that carried their spirit while also being distinctly American.

This is one of the pleasures of singing harmony. Doing so is all about developing a blend unattainable by one voice. If either Julian or I had written Differential Equations alone it would have been decidedly different from the novel we are putting out into the world. If I had written it by myself, for instance, it would not be called Differential Equations, because while Julian can actually perform these complex and amorphous mathematical expressions (they’re a key metaphor in the novel, though no actual math takes place in the pages), I can only understand them well enough to write about them very, very vaguely. We brought different skills and backgrounds to this novel, as well as a handful of experiences that were extremely similar. It was very much like singing the kinds of harmonies the Beach Boys perfected, where thirds and fifths and augmented sevenths occasionally merged into unison.

For me, the appeal of singing harmony while listening to music is that it is a more active experience. I’m not simply following the lead singer; I’m working off of the lead singer to add more texture. Collaborative writing affords me the same opportunity to stretch myself. Writing with others allows me to bring my voice to something I would never have written about otherwise, while adding textures of my own. I’ll continue to sing lead with much of my fiction – a sequel to Blue, my national bestseller from last year, is simmering in my head, as is an entirely new novel – but as it turns out, I’m a dedicated harmony singer, both in my car and at my desk.

Lou Aronica, the founder of Fiction Studio Books, is the coauthor of Differential Equations, on sale today.

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