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), read my book, In It Together, a guide to writing with a co-writer without losing your mind.
The purpose of this book is to help you make your partnership work, but it must be said that in some cases, it won’t. We’ve discussed some of the red flags that might signal a need to end the partnership, but let’s take a hard look at some signs it might be time to give up.
Communication Fails, Over and Over Again
One communication failure isn’t necessarily a harbinger of the end, but if you’ve tried all your best communication practices (and even some new ones!) on multiple occasions and your partner still doesn’t seem to hear you or take your ideas into account, your partnership may not be reparable. In my experience, communication breakdowns are the single biggest problem that partnerships face, and if you can’t communicate with your partner in a consistent, respectful manner that gets everyone’s ideas heard and integrated, then it’s possible what you have is a terminal case of partnership mismatch. It’s worth giving it some time, though, and really working at it to see if the communication barriers can be overcome. If everyone is willing to work on the problem, change is possible, but if one party isn’t, it may be in your best interest to move on.
Lack of Commitment
Repeat after me: I cannot make my partner write.
You cannot make your partner do anything, but you definitely cannot make them prioritize your collaborative work, meet their deadlines, produce words, or follow through with their other commitments to you.
There are a lot of reasons why people don’t write when they mean to. What sometimes gets mysticized as “writer’s block” is actually a diverse set of very real problems. Maybe your co-writer is struggling with anxiety or depression. Maybe they are chronically overscheduled or mismanaging their time. Maybe they take on too much because they have a hard time saying no. Maybe they suffer from crippling self doubt. Maybe they have health concerns that are getting in their way of functioning at their best.
You can absolutely empathize with this. You can slow down and work at your partner’s pace. You can put a project on hold (even for years!) until they are in better place to contribute. You can even occasionally do a job that was supposed to be theirs because life happens and it’s good partnership practice to help each other out.
But when you’re bailing your partner out more often than not, or when your best efforts to accommodate their writing speed have still not resulted in them keeping their commitments, it’s time to admit that you can’t carry the project on your own. If you wanted to carry a project entirely on your own, you would be writing a single author book!
It’s okay to admit to yourself that your partner isn’t committed enough to the project (even for entirely understandable reasons!) and give yourself permission to cut your losses and move on to other things. It doesn’t make you or them a terrible person—it simply means that the project didn’t work out, and that’s okay.
You Want Different Things
It’s possible that, over the course of your partnership, you’ll discover that you have wildly different goals. If one of you only wants a hobby co-writing fan fiction and the other wants to be the next Stephen King, you’re going to have a very hard time agreeing on even the simplest of decisions. How could you agree when you’re both trying to take the project in different directions?
Not ever writer needs to have career ambitions, and not every collaborative project needs to be professionally published. But it is important that you both agree about where you want to go with the project, if you want to continue to write more books together, if the project is going to be a series, and how it will make its way out into the world, if it does so at all.
If you’ve communicated clearly about those goals, and they still don’t match, that’s okay! It doesn’t make one of you better than the other, but it does mean that, unless you can agree on some common goals for this project that meet both of your needs, continuing with your project might be a bad idea.
You Heart Is No Longer In It
We’ve talked about the ways your co-writer might disappoint you, but sometimes you might be the one who no longer has room for this project in your life. Your life and career situations may have changed since the project began, or you may simply have run out of enthusiasm. If you’ve moved on in spirit, it may be tempting to ghost your partner or to string them along because you don’t want to disappoint them.
You will only prolong the disappointment by dragging things out. Be honest with yourself and your partner; if you know you’re no longer able to collaborate on the project, say so upfront and begin to dissolve the partnership. As the least interested party, you can be generous about the terms of your departure. While you will no longer be able to contribute, you should consider whether you’re willing to give your partner permission to continue with the project on their own, and what rights, credit and compensation you would be willing to waive if they choose to do so. Don’t offer anything you’ll resent in the long run, and make sure to get everything in writing, but if you’re already checked out of your collaboration, do your partner a favor and make it official.
Your Partner is Abusive
Last but certainly not least, if you’ve discovered that your partner has taken a lack of mutual respect to the extreme, or if you’re unable to establish mutual respect after repeated tries, or if their communication toward you continues to be hurtful despite your best efforts to communicate why it is a problem, then you should leave that partnership for your own well-being. There is no payoff in the world that is worth the cost of your mental health. Some people come off as harsh or critical but can learn to change their ways when their mistakes are pointed out to them, but other people bolster their own self-image or control their own anxieties by tearing others down, and the latter is not someone you ever want to work with.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
One huge barrier to leaving is the sunk cost fallacy. “I’ve put so much into this project and this partnership,” you tell yourself, “so I can’t give up now!” The trouble with sunk cost is that, while you can stay and continue to dump more time, energy, and work into the project, the ship just keeps sinking. And each time your use this reasoning to keep yourself stuck there, you add more and more to the pile of irretrievable losses. As the wisdom goes, don’t be committed to a mistake just because you spent a long time making it. It’s okay to cut your losses and move on. There will be other projects, other books, even other collaboration partners. It’s not worth tying your boat to a sinking ship. You can cut your line and row away, and while it might hurt to do it, it’s better than going down with the ship.
I don’t want to underestimate how much this can hurt. It’s gut-wrenching to look at years of work that you poured your heart and soul into and have to accept that it’s done, it’s over, that you will never be able to write another single word of your future plans in that series, that hundreds of thousands of words you have put your blood, sweat, and tears into will never see the light of day. It sucks. It hurts.
But trying to work in a truly untenable environment hurts more, so sometimes, even in the worst of all possible situations, you have to find a way to let go.
Looking to the Future
Once you’ve decided you need to end a partnership and walk away from a collaboration, much of what happens next will depend on your contract. This is one reason it’s so important to have one; your partner may be amenable to calmly discussing a division of assets in a way that benefits you both once the partnership is dissolved, but you can’t count on it.
Hopefully you have a contract that tells you who controls the IP and what will happen with money and credit. If you are in control of the IP and your contract is clear about that, you may be able to go on and write more books in that setting, with those characters, or even finish that book on your own so long as you meet your obligations to give your co-writer credit and compensation as previously agreed.
If you don’t control the IP, you’ll have to reconcile yourself to the idea that you may have to let go of that world and say goodbye to those characters. You can kindly ask your partner how they would feel about giving you the rights to the IP, but the answer will vary based on the circumstances and on your partner’s inclinations.
If they do agree to let you move forward with the project or another project in that world without them, be sure to get this in writing in the form of a contract addendum. The addendum should note that this contract supersedes the terms of the previous contract, and it should make it crystal clear what you are allowed to do with the work, and what credit and compensation your partner is due, if any. You may want to get a lawyer to look at this contract—it’s never a bad idea to do with any contract, but it’s especially useful in cases where you are moving forward with assets that might be contested later, and you want to make sure you don’t find yourself facing a lawsuit on shaky legal ground.
If your relationship with your partner has deteriorated to the point that you can’t negotiate with them over your partnership assets, and your contract doesn’t protect you in the way you would like it to, the only thing you can do is walk away. Unless you are already wildly successful, it’s very unlikely it would be worth fighting over in court, on either a monetary or emotional level. For goodness’s sake, don’t infringe on your partner’s rights by continuing ahead with the project unless you have the clear rights to do so—doing that would only open you up to legal repercussions in the future, and is a terrible way to treat a partner.
People with whom our relationships have deteriorated are still people, and they still deserve our respect, just as everyone does. Take the high road; in all of your interactions, be sure to continue to follow the principles of healthy communication. Even if you can’t have what you want, you will still be better off being the bigger person and conducting yourself with professionalism and respect even if your partner behaves otherwise, no matter how tempting it might be to strike back with threats or bad behavior of your own.
Instead, find yourself a new project. Renew your creative momentum with new stories. Find something to work on, something to be excited about. You may never be able to feel good about the way the partnership ended, but you don’t have to dwell on it forever or let it destroy the future of your own career.
Not all books get finished, much as we might want them to. There will be other books to write and other stories to tell. One of the best thing about writing books is that there is always another idea to develop, another set of characters to meet, another world to explore. Pick yourself up and jump into something new. You’ll make something beautiful as you rise from the ashes of what you left behind.
