You Have a “Boss”
On being self-employed: “The hours are great, but my boss is a jerk.”
Writing fiction is a traditionally solitary activity. Being productive at it requires discipline, because it’s always easier to just mess around on Facebook or Netflix, or wherever you like to squander the scant moments we’re granted on this orb, than it is to devise clever scenarios for captivating characters and encode them evocatively through the maddeningly and beautifully deficient medium of language. No one will ever know. (Nor will they ever read your novel, if you don’t write it.)
When you’re writing with a partner, you have someone counting on you. Of course, one of the major draws of the writing life is that it’s not a nine-to-five grind; you don’t have some stuffed-shirt micromanager giving you a hard time. So, does having a partner mean writing becomes a job?
Firstly, no. Not if you have (and are) a good partner.
Secondly, even if you prefer to think of writing as a calling you need to take the work seriously. If you don’t do the work then no one else will take you seriously.
Your partner isn’t there just to make you feel guilty when your daily word count is low. Neither one of you should be “in charge” of the partnership. There will certainly be instances where one or the other of you will be better suited to take the lead, and that’s good. It means you have varied strengths to play to. In the Rune Skelley arrangement, Jen is more organized and so she handles project management. She likes doing it, and Kent is grateful for the structure.
To make a partnership work, you both have to be the boss sometimes. And to make it work well, you both have to try to be a good one.