Category: Writing as a Team

Two people writing as a team can have advantages over soloist authors. But to have a fruitful writing partnership we must adopt a process that utilizes our strengths, and we need a relationship that’s strong enough to support the endeavor. Here’s where we explore the matter from various angles.

The Time Jen Lost Her Mind

r-avatarWe talk a lot about the importance of having a careful outline when working with a coauthor, but today we’re going to talk about the time Jen did the exact opposite.

If you ever glance at the comments on this blog, you are familiar with our good friend Reggie. Before she moved away and left us bereft, Reggie was a member of our critique group. For a few glorious months, Jen and Reggie were both fortunate enough to have employment that left them a staggeringly huge amount of unsupervised internet time. Instead of taking up online poker, or developing porn addictions, they took to throwing stichomancy writing prompts at each other, dozens per day, with the goal of maximizing the absurdity. As was perhaps inevitable, they developed a shared cast of characters that roamed at will through all the prompt responses. What began as a lark rather abruptly developed into a novel. Jen roped Kent into writing one single scene so that it could be said to be truly coauthored by Rune Skelley. The female coauthors appear in the novel as a gay male couple writing an opera about the alleged protagonist. In rough draft form it was nearly 200,000 words, many of them filthy.

Some of you probably read the preceding paragraph and got excited at the prospect of such unfettered creativity leading to something so monumental. Sad to say, this is a cautionary tale.

The entire Saga of Hieronymus Warhol was written in small bites of insanity, completely out of order. That impressive (and bloated) word count is made up of snippets of micro-fiction, averaging less than 500 words. It has a cast of, literally, almost 100 characters, all of whom have peculiar backstories and character traits that the reader is expected to keep track of.

Once the many plot lines were tied together with an improbable bow, Jen and Reggie spent a few weeks wrangling the pieces into chronological order while laughing their asses off. It may be considered gauche to laugh at your own jokes, but that never stopped these two. After that came identifying the plot holes that needed to be filled (as opposed to the ones that were purposefully ignored), assigning the prompts to fill those holes, and then the Sisyphean task of editing such a beast. Entire characters were excised. Sub-plots were fed to the wolves. It’s a process that is still not complete, years later.

With great glee, Reggie and Jen submitted their ugly baby to the critique group and snickered at their consternation. And to this day, the still-unwieldy beast sits on Jen’s and Reggie’s hard drives, gathering digital dust and wondering why nobody wants to publish it.

If you’re an agent or a publisher and you’re interested in some highly experimental fiction about an insane artist, his many lovers and family members, a pair of centuries-old incestuous sibling sorcerers, several satyrs, a sex spy, a large, strange man, and university politics, drop us a line!

practical, nuts-n-bolts how-to collabo diy-a-palooza Part 1

r-avatarSo you’re persuaded that a writing partnership is the right approach for you, and you’ve tracked down a like-minded coauthor. Now you just need to know how to get started. Over the last year or so, the Collaboration posts here have covered much of that, but in no particular order. Herewith, a more concrete take on the subject.

You will need workspace that accommodates both of you. In Rune Skelley’s case, that’s a single room with two computers. But if you and your partner are set up in separate buildings, even different cities, that’s fine too as long as you’ll be able to communicate frequently and effectively.

You will need a project that you’re both excited about. The project might come first, could actually be the catalyst that inspires two people to go into partnership. It might not be so spontaneous, though, so be prepared to devote some time to finding your common interests. Talk the ideas through and assess how they might allow each of you to play to your strengths. Excessive difficulty settling on an idea, or a sense that you’re “settling,” can indicate compatibility issues that might call for reexamination of the partner arrangement.

Technically, that’s all you need. Everything else you can improvise as you go along.

Realistically, there are a few other points you should address up front in the interest of a productive and efficient collaboration. It’s a good idea to understand each other’s work styles early on, because there will be differences. Some stuff is obvious, even cliched: one of you is a morning person and the other is a night owl; one of you is very detail oriented and technical while the other is an endless font of chaotic inspiration. Some of the most successful duos have contrasting personality types. Often it’s that very contrast that drives their creativity. Just keep in mind that the less energy gets spent on driving each other crazy, the more there is left to put into the work.

Future installments of this How-To will take up some of the less obvious ways you and your partner need to get on the same page. Here’s a preview of what to watch for.

  • Defining your process: you each have your own work style, but there has to be an agreed-upon set of steps when you work together.
  • Project management: which one of you sets the schedule, makes sure you have file backups, and keeps things organized?
  • Your combined voice: getting a feel for it, techniques for fostering it.
  • Edits, Critique, and Revision: divvying things up, advantages and pitfalls when working with a partner.

Coordination

r-avatar“Johnny went to the psoe priret.”

That’s what you get when your right hand thinks “post office” but your left goes with “supermarket.” There might be occasions when you wish Johnny would go to the psoe priret and just never come back, but that way you don’t get the mail or anything for dinner.

In a partnership, each coauthor is like one hand on the keyboard. They must act as one in order to create intelligible prose. It’s not enough that that both pursue sensible ideas; they must pursue the same idea. They must both want Johnny to go to the same place.

Even if you don’t opt for a combined nom de plume, you and your writing partner must form a single virtual writer. No matter how solid your outline at the beginning (you do use an outline, right?) every story grows into some unanticipated shapes during its construction. Partners need to stay so in tune to each other that they can adapt to these ongoing mutations. It’s true that some authors don’t use outlines, and that doesn’t make them wrong. But consider: two writers each making everything up as they go can’t really be called a partnership; how do they even know they’re writing the same book?

This sounds like a nigh-impossible requirement, almost like a psychic bond. It’s really not that severe. Expect it to take practice, and talk to each other about both the project itself and also what you think it means to be a writer. Writers working together can be every bit as graceful and in tune as a figure-skating duo. They might not be as exciting to watch, but what they create is what matters.

Seeing Double

r-avatarHave you ever tried to type in tandem with another person? One of you is the right hand and one of you is the left hand, and it really doesn’t work well. That’s how some people picture a writing collaboration.

That’s actually a fairly awesome metaphor for the challenges of coauthoring that we’ll revisit in a future post, but today’s topic is a lot more concrete. When you have a writing partner, you need two of everything.

You each need a desk and a chair. You each need a computer. Each computer needs a copy of your word processing software (we love Scrivener). If you’re more low-tech, and like to write longhand, you could get away with only having one computer, but then it becomes someone’s job to input all of that chicken-scratch.

Working with two computers, you tend to end up with two copies of every file, which means that at least one member of the writing partnership needs to have killer organizational skills. On Team Skelley, that person is Jen. At the end of each work session, Jen and Kent use the miracle of computer networking to give each other a copy of the day’s output. Kent’s work gets added to Jen’s project folder, and Jen’s is added to Kent’s folder. Sometimes, though, one or the other of us will add a few lines to a character summary, or type up a page of notes, and those items don’t always participate in the daily prisoner exchange. So every few weeks, Jen grabs both project folders and goes through them carefully to sync them up. This task is not made any easier by Kent’s hoarder tendencies, and by the time a novel is complete, we usually have a big stack of obsolete partial manuscripts that need to be kept  indefinitely. If we didn’t work electronically, we would have had to build an archive wing to the house years ago.

Or possibly two.

We are the peanut gallery

r-avatarWednesday’s 4 Elements prompt became the epicenter of a strange little storm of collaboration in the comments. While it started with a simple (and blunt) observation, it ultimately became the transcript of a collaborative process in motion.

Jen and Kent sometimes have similar conversations via e-mail. But most of the time, all the back-and-forth and brainstorming are done verbally, and only the final outcome is recorded anywhere. This time we captured the whole thing, silly as it is.

That’s the kind of dynamic that makes writing with a partner so much fun. You can raise a concern, or ask a weird question, and there’s someone there to provide a response. Next time, it’ll probably be your turn to answer the weird question (probably with another question, even weirder).

To get all serious for a minute, something that we all struggle with is critical distance. It’s very hard to be objective about your own writing, unless you step away from it for so long that you don’t recognize it when you come back. Having a partner can help with that. Of course, it relies on both of you being able to speak frankly.

Kent now feels obligated to revisit that prompt and see if he can make it cohere this time.

Professional Crastinators

r-avatarCollaboration can lead to amazing synergy, the end product being greater than the sum of its parts. You and your writing partner cover each other’s weaknesses and inspire each other to great heights. When it works, it is a thing of beauty.

The downside is something that could be called synergistic procrastination. Every writer has experienced the work session where nothing gets done: blame writer’s block, or video games, or phone calls, the weather, YouTube. Perhaps you have every intention of banging out a couple thousand words, right after you check email, and then it’s suddenly quitting time. Or you just need to do a little research, but get distracted by the whole wide internet. Unfortunately, when you have a co-author, the potential exists to feed into each other’s procrastination. It might start off as a necessary conversation about a plot point, but it snowballs out of control.

Something that we grapple with from time to time is a sort of anti-competetiveness. If he’s not going to work tonight, then neither am I! If she can get a hot beverage, then I can too! I haven’t heard any typing from the other side of the room for awhile, I had better stop being productive and look over to see what the problem is! It’s a very juvenile mindset, and luckily we don’t succumb to it too often. When we do, the work session is usually shot. We try to go have fun and not brood about it, and try again the next day.

tl;dr – a longwinded explanation for why today’s Collaboration Post is going up so late.

Finishing each other’s sentences

r-avatarWith our workflow, the basic building blocks of a first draft are scenes. The outline gives us a very rough scene list, and then we move on to making stubs, which for the most part correlate one-to-one with scenes.

We divvy up the stubs, and normally each scene is written wholly by one or the other co-author. Things sometimes call for a bit of improvisation, though, like the other night. We each pecked away until we got almost to the ends of our respective scenes, and then both of us felt stuck. So we swapped scenes. What stymied Kent turned out to be easy for Jen, and vice-versa.

Either one of us writing solo would have just stared at the screen. Separately, we’d have been blocked. Together, we barely broke stride.

Our “official” process would place this type of cross-fertilization in the second-draft phase. We know that the rough scenes come off the conveyor belt with a bit too much of the particular flavor of the collaborator who took care of it. Or, perhaps a bit too little of the other’s seasoning, as the case may be. Either way, we fix it by revising each other’s scenes. We do that on successive drafts, until sometimes we don’t even really remember who originated a certain scene.

In this case, we got a jump on that part. Now that we’re working on our fifth novel together, we’ve internalized the Rune Skelley voice to such an extent that we no longer need to explicitly merge our individual styles. But we do still rely on each other to augment strengths and cover for weaknesses.

 

Bedtime Story

r-avatarAs you write you become fully engrossed in your scenes, whether you write solo or with a collaborator. You know why you chose the words you did, and why you left certain things unsaid. You have an innate understanding of the work because you created it. When you are working with a writing partner, it can be a challenge to fully absorb what your other half has composed, to gain that same level of understanding. But for a novel to feel like a cohesive whole, and not merely the sum of its parts, both you and your co-author must find a way to gain that intimate knowledge.

One of our nightly rituals is to read aloud the new pages that were written that day. It really helps to bond us both to the work, and we both get it imprinted in our brains. After the reading, we discuss. We talk about what we liked in each other’s piece, and what we think needs work. We share why we handled things in a particular way, and talk about whether it was the best way. This is a great time to iron out little inconsistencies, too. It can be tricky to make everything line up seamlessly when we’re working simultaneously on scenes that lead one into the other. Some changes get made immediately, others get a note that will be addressed during the first editing pass.

Even if you work by yourself, you should routinely read your stuff out loud. It’s a very useful method for spotting awkward construction, and repeated or dropped words. Read to your sweetie or your pet if you feel silly reading aloud to an empty room. Or marry your writing partner and spend your life crafting your own favorite bedtime stories.

Is it good for you?

r-avatarRune Skelley novels tend to contain quite a bit of sex. How graphic it is, and how kinky, depends on the project. Not all stories call for any, and the decisions about where to draw the line on details are for each author to make for themselves. Like anything else that happens to your characters, though, it should be rendered convincingly.

It’d be too easy to drop in a joke here about writing what you know. Joking aside, how does any of us really know what sex is like from the other side? (In the case of gay relationships, the “other” side isn’t any different. So this post doesn’t really apply.) A female character should approach romantic or hedonistic situations from a fundamentally feminine viewpoint, while a male character’s viewpoint on such matters should be informed by a different set of factors. We’re all familiar with general stereotypical differences between men and women; falling back on those tropes will probably just distance readers from your characters. But there are real, honest differences. You want your characters to exist as individuals, complete persons of whom gender is only part of their makeup. You need to give them honest feelings and desires, not the flimsy sham of a cliché.

Writing with a partner who happens to be of the opposite gender offers a chance to explore intimacy and physical pleasure more fully (at least on the page). But if you and that partner aren’t comfortable being frank with each other about the experience of sex, then it’s probably best to focus on stories that don’t call for it. That would also be true if we replaced “sex” with “politics” or “religion.” If talking about the issue would involve incessant giggling or reliance on euphemisms, then you’re not ready to write together about it.

Tag-team typing

r-avatarKent and Jen spent most of the evening revising a query letter, by literally passing the keyboard back and forth. It’s not the normal Rune Skelley process, but with something as brief as a letter it made sense. It was exhausting!

That’s probably the image that a lot people form when they hear that we write together. Maybe some co-authors do work that way all the time, but it seems doubtful. When we’re working on a novel we go through distinct stages, and how we collaborate changes depending which stage we’re in.

The initial conceptualization and outlining are intensely collaborative and real-time. Much of it happens out loud, with one of us charged with taking notes.

After that comes the creation of stubs. Jen does 99% of the stubbing, but as soon as there are a few of them in the bag Kent can get started on the first-draft prose. So in this phase of the project, we’re working in the same room at the same time, on the same novel, but we’re tackling separate aspects of it in parallel. It’s a divide-and-conquer approach.

Once stubbing reaches a certain point, Jen joins in on the prosification. She and Kent choose which scenes to work on based on which characters and subject matter they feel the greatest affinity for, and sometimes there’s a little arm wrestling involved.

Eventually, all these isolated scenes written by different people need to come together into a harmonious whole. Smoothing the seams and debugging the story flow is the bulk of the work involved with our second draft. This marks a return to a more simultaneous work style, discussing the moves as we make them. There will often be rewriting or entire new scenes that we discover a need for, so there’s also some parallel work going on.

Somewhere in here is when we begin taking chapters in for our critique group. Gathering and analyzing the feedback is another intensive aspect of collaboration. We’re both there, and we trade knowing glances as readers speculate about plot twists. We pore over the marked-up copies we get back, and collate the input that we plan to factor into the next revision pass.

While the manuscript is “rough” we tend toward the parallel approach, splitting up the scenes between us and putting more polish on things each time through until it’s time to shift gears again. In the finishing stage, we pull up our chairs to the same desk and go through the whole book together. It looks a lot like how we worked on the letter tonight, but that resemblance is superficial. We have a highly developed system for those late-stage edits on our novels. What made the letter so much more tiring was that we were composing it as much as revising it. Rather than just needing to agree on whether or not we need the word “had” in a sentence, we needed to create cogent sentences out of thin air.