This post is part of a series about writing with a co-author. To read all my advice about the full process of collaborative writing (including stories and bonus chapters not found here on the blog), order my book, In It Together, a guide to writing with a co-writer without losing your mind.
Hopefully now you have an idea of some of the benefits of collaboration, as well as some of the pitfalls. I want to take a minute before I jump into the details to admit that while everything I said in the last chapter is true, I may have slightly misled you. Yes, I believe collaboration can produce excellent results. Yes, I think partners can produce books that are better than what either of you would have produced on your own. Yes, I enjoy the benefits of not having to do absolutely all the parts of the process I hate, and the privilege of relying on other people’s strengths to make my books better.
But is that why I collaborate?
Not really.
I didn’t get into collaboration because I thought it would make my books better. I certainly didn’t think it would reduce my workload. (As I mentioned, I initially worried that the result would be a train wreck that required twice the work to produce, and I was right on the second count.) I wasn’t looking to increase the brilliance of my work through the magic of synergy. And I wasn’t trying to pawn off the parts of the process I hate. (Though maybe I should have been. It’s a nice perk.)
No, I collaborate for the pedestrian reason that I enjoy it.
I like working with people.
I like listening to other people’s ideas and figuring out how to build on them.
I like the social interaction.
I like playing in other people’s settings and with other people’s characters.
I like having someone with whom to share the highs and lows of the book business.
I just like it.
And if you don’t, probably all the objective benefits in the world aren’t enough reason that you should do it.
That said, I would caution you against deciding you don’t like it if you’ve never tried it. Or if you tried it once or twice, had a bad experience, and decided the whole co-authoring thing wasn’t for you. I have also had bad experiences, and if they had been my first experiences, I might have decided this myself, and then I would have missed out on all the many positive experiences I’ve had with various co-authors.
There might be any number of reasons why a given collaboration experience was a negative one. You might read through this book and see a number of things you might try to do differently with your current or future partners that could turn what was previously a poor experience into a great one. You might discover that with the right project and the right partner, you enjoy collaboration after all.
But I also wouldn’t encourage you to continue collaborating if you discover in practice that you hate it. You’re never required to have fun a hundred percent of the time while working on any creative project (and anyone who tells you otherwise deserves to be put permanently on mute), but if you’re not being fulfilled by collaboration on at least a basic level, it’s probably not for you.
One of the benefits of co-authoring, for me at least, is the joy of it. I genuinely value my co-writer’s contributions. I treasure the privilege of getting to play with ideas, worlds, characters, and settings that I never would have thought of on my own. There’s something energizing about having someone to share the excitement with when things are go well, and to share the misery with when things go poorly.
I didn’t start with that expectation, though. I started with a project I couldn’t get out of my head.
I met James Goldberg in graduate school. It was his first semester and my last, and we were taking a class on writing for children and young adults taught by accomplished young adult author Chris Crowe. In that class I workshopped part of the (still unpublished) novel that was my master’s thesis and the first draft of what would become Chasing the Skip, the first novel I sold in New York. James wrote pieces of several stories, one of which was about a Sikh teenager who questioned her commitment to her faith and her heritage and the Mormon boy who fell in love with her. We only read a few chapters of the book before James abandoned it, but the story stuck with me.
Over the years, as James and I went on to do critique group together, I would periodically ask him when he was ever going to finish that book. James did not make any more progress on the project. At some point, it occurred to me that I was more invested in it than he was, and I bemoaned that I would never get to read the rest of the story.
Seven years after I’d graduated, I had gone to the library to work on a draft of my YA spy thriller A Thousand Faces. At the time I had a two-year-old, so the easiest way for me to get uninterrupted writing time was to leave the house. I was sitting in the library, minding my own business, revising my ending, when I had this thought:
You should ask James if he wants to co-write that book with you.
My immediate response was to tell myself this was a terrible idea. Writing a book is hard enough. Writing a book with someone else would be much more difficult. Plus, I didn’t want James to feel like I was trying to take over his project. (I kind of did want to take over his project, if only to see it finished.)
I went home from the library and told my husband about my idea, and asked him specifically to tell me it was a terrible idea and I shouldn’t do it.
He liked the idea.
I ran the idea by James, suggesting that he should tell me it was terrible.
He loved it.
As a last line of defense, I told him to go home and ask his very wise and wonderful wife, Nicole, if she thought the idea was terrible.
Around the time I received word that she also thought this was a wonderful idea, my husband made a very good observation. “You know this is a good idea,” he said. “You just want it to be a bad one so you don’t have to put in the work.”
Touché.
The truth was, I wanted to write that book with James. The moment the idea popped into my head, I couldn’t let it go. Difficult as it was (and we’ll get to that immediately following this chapter), it was the one and only correct creative decision to say yes to that project. It was, as Amy Tan said in her memoirs, “the right and irresistible thing.”
In fact, if a collaboration is not irresistible to you, I would encourage you to resist it.
You’ll know the right projects when they come along. You will want to do them because you will know that only an idiot in your position would refuse. You will want to do them so much you will be able to taste it. Collaboration is a commitment, and like with a romantic relationship, you should not feel lukewarm at first. There will be plenty of time later when things get challenging to dither about whether or not this was a fantastic decision. When you first jump into it, it should feel like a delicious decision. It should feel like your one-true creative passion (or the one-true thing that is going to fill up your bank account) to write this particular book with this particular person.
If it doesn’t, you are very likely to run out of creative steam when things get difficult. If you’re already having concerns, there may be good reasons for those, and you should listen to yourself before you rope you and your partner into a situation you both would have been better off avoiding.
There are as many ways to collaborate as there are individual collaborators. If you are excited enough to say yes to a project, there are many ways to structure that partnership, and even more methods of writing books together.
Now that we’ve gotten the why out of the way, let’s start to talk about some of those different ways of structuring your work together, so that once you say yes, you can maximize your chances of success.
