The Best Part of Collaboration

Our mission to slenderize the Music Novel is going great. We’re about a third of the way through the manuscript and well over halfway to our goal for cuts. We haven’t set a revised target number of words to remove, just agreed that we won’t stop editing upon reaching the original objective.

It’s going well, but it isn’t going fast. It sometimes takes several looks at a page before the extra words start flashing in red. It’s not always just “yoink!” — sometimes sentences need to be restructured or synonyms need to be found.

The biggest time-sink, though, is syncing up all our changes. It never feels like it should take all that long, because few of the edits are controversial in any way. But it can take as long to convey the edits between us as it took to do them in the first place.

We could certainly speed that up. Using the export features in Scrivener allows us to swap edited nodes in seconds.

But that big source of delay is also the best thing about writing together as a team — talking to each other about the text. Walking each other through the process we used to streamline a paragraph or the rationale for cutting one altogether. Even though few of those conversations involve any disagreement, it’s good to be able to talk shop with a fellow writer.

So, we won’t be utilizing all available technologies to bolster our productivity metrics. We’d give up too much in the process.