One Is The Loneliest Number

How do solo writers do it?

Our evenings lately have been spent sprawled on the big leather sofa with the laptop and a small mountain of meaningfully marked-up copies of our manuscript. One of us (usually Jen) wades through all of the critiques while the other (usually Kent) mans the laptop, adding comments and making edits to our master copy. Jen interprets all the line-edits and deciphers everyone’s handwritten comments, directing Kent to the proper parts of the manuscript so that together we can discuss the proposed changes.

It’s slow going, and we generally only manage one or two chapters per night. Each of those chapters is gone over with a fine tooth comb (hey baby, that is one fine tooth-comb you’ve got there!) four or five times as we consider the feedback from all of our beta-readers. Working with a partner makes something like this bearable, oftentimes even enjoyable. It’s hard for us to imagine this part of the process as a solo author. Who do you talk to about whether a suggestion or complaint is valid? Who do you high-five when a passage works exactly as you planned? Whose shoulder do you cry on when a passage doesn’t work at all? And most important: who do you send for snacks and refills of fortifying beverages?

The writer’s life can be a very solitary one, but with a writing partner it doesn’t have to be.