Seeing Double

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.