With 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.