Playing to Your Strengths

Different types of stories demand different kinds of scenes, and everyone has particular strengths and weaknesses. Maybe your protagonist has just reached the pivotal moment, in which the clever computer hacking of the villains is exposed — if your command of high-tech jargon begins and ends with “there are wires involved,” you’re probably going to struggle to make this scene compelling.

Your Achilles heel could be fight scenes, or sex scenes, or culinary scenes. And despite the vibrancy of your prose, and the depths of character you’ve established, the soufflé will fall because it relies on convincing portrayal of martial arts (or marital arts). Partner to the rescue! Each of you is good at different things, and your writing gets the combined benefits of all the variations in your styles and life experiences.

The optimistic view of these tribulations is that we can get good at whatever we put our minds to. The necessary geeky mumbo-jumbo for your hero to toss off is just a little bit of research away, give or take seven rounds of revisions to really nail the vernacular. Of course, this stuff just falls out of your writing partner, who won’t need to spend time on research or go through multiple drafts to pull it off. If you and your partner can divide the work according to your strengths, you both stay more productive.

You hope that your partner is skillful at exactly the types of scenes you’re apt to fumble. Real-world partnerships seldom embody the ideal case of offsetting all of each other’s weaknesses, but going it alone means precisely none of your gaps will be covered. Plus, partners can join forces to tackle challenges that neither of them would be up for individually. Two heads are better than one (clichéd but true!).