“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.

Have 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.

Wednesday’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.