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.
If I were to give you one rule for collaboration, it is this: there is no room for your ego in co-authorship.
You are working with another person, ostensibly, because you want their input, you value their ideas, and you desire their contributions. You’re also working with them, theoretically, because you want them to weigh in on your ideas, help you vet which ones are the best ones, and build upon them.
If you don’t want those things, you would probably be better off working alone. When you assert your ego, valuing your ideas over your partner’s, or becoming defensive about feedback and criticism, you shut down the collaboration process.
It’s easy to do this. Novelists especially are used to their ideas reigning supreme in their own stories, and no one likes to be told that their own inspiration is, well, uninspired. But once you’ve entered into a collaboration, your job is to champion your partner’s ideas, look out for their interests, and above all, listen to and value what they have to say.
Does this mean you should keep quiet about your own opinions? Should you champion their interests at the expense of your own? Absolutely not. If you do, then you’re denying your partner the opportunity to return the favor, and denying the project the full scope of synergy that is possible when two people share openly and truly value each other’s contributions.
How do we do this? There are many ways, but I’m going to highlight three: adjusting our expectations, letting go of control, and trusting our partner.
Adjusting expectations
It has been said by people wiser than me that expectations are disappointments in embryo, and this couldn’t be more true when it comes to collaboration. If you have a full vision of exactly what you want a project to be and can’t stomach the idea of it straying from your vision a hair to the left or a hair to the right, that project is not a good candidate for collaboration. Even if you were to produce it as a senior partner in a work-for-hire partnership, your hired writer is going to exercise their own creativity within the parameters you give them—that’s their job! And, moreover, you should want them to, because that shared creativity and the interesting results thereof are one of the main benefits of co-authorship. Stifling the flow of differing opinions is a fool’s errand; you’ll only anger your partner and frustrate yourself.
So how do we manage our own disappointment when projects take turns we don’t expect? First, I try to view my own ideas of what a project should be as tentative and malleable. I come to collaboration meetings with ideas, but try to maintain the mindset that none of them are the idea. The one true idea is still out there, ever elusive, and it’s our job to bring our individual ideas together and combine them.
If my partners love my ideas, that’s great! But many times they have ideas that are even better than mine. Even more frequently we hash out a combination of my ideas and their ideas that are even better than either of our ideas were in isolation. That’s the magic of collaboration, and if I came to meetings defensively trying to shove my own ideas to the forefront while ignoring my partners’, I would be doing a great disservice to my partners, the project, and myself.
Let Go of Control
Let’s face it; the publishing industry can turn you into a control freak. There are so few aspects of our careers that are in our control, while the rest spin somewhere outside it. We have no control over whether an agent likes our work, whether a publisher wants to publish it, whether the Amazon algorithm favors our books, whether readers show up to read them. There are certainly things we can do to influence these things, but at the end of the day, all methods can fail, and we can be left with disappointment.
The only thing we have real control over is whether or not we are writing our next project. We can control which projects we decide to pursue and whether or not we produce words. While we are working on our projects, we can control our own narrative choices; which words we put on the page, and what stories we tell with them.
No wonder it’s so hard to give those things up when it comes time to collaborate.
In a co-author relationship, you have even less control, because you’ve voluntarily given some of that control over to another person. Why? Because in exchange for that loss of control, you receive the labor, support, creativity, and ingenuity of a second person. And if you’re working with the right person, those things can more than make up for that loss of control.
When we feel the desire to steer and control the direction of our partnership, we can take the time to stop, acknowledge our desire for control, listen to the needs of our partners, and consider how our need for control is impacting our partnership.
Resist the urge to look over your partner’s shoulder or second guess every decision they make. Allow your partner to make decisions without expecting them to seek your permission. As the work progresses, recognize that it’s okay if not every detail reflects your personal vision. Celebrate your partner’s contributions, even when they steer the product in a different direction than you anticipated.
When we choose to give up control of some of the process to our partner, we’re able to fully participate in the collaborative process with considerably less stress and interpersonal conflict. Through a combination of letting go of control and adjusting our expectations, we can turn ourselves into someone who is much more pleasant to work with. Much as we might want it to be otherwise, at least half of the problems we will encounter in our partnership will be caused by ourselves. It takes two people to have conflict, but the only person we can change in any conflict is ourselves, so if we focus only on what the other person is contributing to a problem, we will never be able to do our part in finding a resolution.
Trust your partner
When James and I were ready to publish The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, we needed to design our cover. We had a conversation about using an image of a girl in a chunni and a background with indian fabric designs. It turned out we had very different ideas of what this was going to look like when it was finished, because when I put together a mock up with a silhouette of a girl in a chunni, and I was happy with my work. I sent it to James for feedback, and he hated it.
He tried to explain to me why he hated it, but I had a hard time understanding. In my mind, the mock up was exactly what we discussed, but to him, it hit all the wrong notes. During our conversation, James offered to go with what I’d done—he wasn’t being able to articulate what was wrong with it, after all, and maybe I was right and he was wrong.
I could have congratulated myself for winning the argument and gone with the cover as it was. But I trust James. I knew that if he said there was a problem, then there was a problem, whether he was currently able to explain it to me or not. I asked him to continue trying to tell me what was wrong, so we could pivot and go in another direction.
James thought about it, and when he came back, he told me the problem was the silhouette—when the chunni was reduced to an outline, it looked heavy and dark. Chunnis, culturally, are represented with aesthetics of lightness. There’s nothing technically wrong with a silhouette on a cover, but that silhouette on that cover was culturally inappropriate, which made it a bad design. If I had let James let me have my way, we would have ended up with a cover that was completely inappropriate for the book. Armed with that information, I created another mock up that used transparencies rather than silhouettes to emphasize the light aesthetic, and that’s the cover we went with for the final product.
You work with your partner for a reason, and hopefully that reason is because you trust their judgment and value their input. Every collaboration can benefit from the attitude that if your partner says there’s a problem, there’s a problem, whether you currently understand what the problem is or not.
Does This Look Different in Tiered Partnerships?
There’s no place in an equal partnership for ego, because a project in an equal partnership should be a mix of both people’s ideas and talents. But even if you are the senior partner in a tiered partnership, your ego still has no place in your collaborative relationship.
Sure, the senior partner has more control over the project. The senior partner might even deserve to have more control, given their established track record or financial stake. But no one wants to work for a boss who can’t take feedback, who doesn’t want to hear the contributions of their collaborators, or who throws their weight around when they could instead have been polite and considerate.
I have written several books with publishing giant Brandon Sanderson. I don’t bring this up to tell you how great I am, but rather to emphasize how great he is: the man has an entire company of people whose job it is to execute on his vision. His books have a fan base that is both wide and devoted. His business and storytelling brilliance is basically unparalleled. If anyone has a right to have an ego in a partnership, it’s him.
But, universally, in all of my interactions with Brandon, he has treated me with respect. Yes, he has the final say in all creative and business decisions, but he listens to me and tries to accommodate what I need and want out of the partnership and the creative work wherever possible. When he can’t, he takes the time to explain why and to help me get on board with his decisions instead of handing down orders or laying down the law. And if Brandon Sanderson can set his well-earned ego aside and treat his co-writers with respect, then surely you can, too.
