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.
Now that we’ve gotten all the principles out of the way, we can move on to the fun part: the business of actually writing. Now that we’re prepared to balance work respectfully and communicate effectively, it is, at long last, time to start writing! In this section, we will discuss many strategies and techniques to work together as a team. Chances are that some of these strategies will work for you and some won’t. That’s okay! As with all writing processes and writing advice, some tools with mesh better with your individual and team writing styles than others.
So, here you are. You haven’t even begun your book and you’re already encountering your first negotiation. It’s time to pull out your mutual respect and communication skills, and figure out what your pre-writing process will be. If you are in a tiered partnership with a prolific co-writer, your partner may already have an idea of how they’d like things to go. Depending on the rigidity of the situation, you may have to adapt to their process more than you would in an equal partnership. Everyone else will need to do some negotiating and experimenting to figure out the best writing process for their team.
Be Flexible and Try New Things
As you begin, it’s important that you both be open to trying new things. Writing a book together is not the same as writing one on your own—the truth is, neither of you know what will work for you yet, because you haven’t written a book together. It’s possible that things you’ve tried in the past and disliked will work much better with a partner. It’s possible that your tried-and-true writing strategies won’t work at all when you try them as a team. You don’t know until you try, so you’re going to need to do some experimentation. This book will give you lots of suggestions; choose the ones you like, confer with your partner about which are exciting to them, and then do some writing and see what works for you.
Flexibility is of the most important attributes of a collaboration partner when it comes to writing process. Much like when we left our ego at the door, we need to leave behind all of our preconceived notions about the right and wrong way to write a book. It’s always a dangerous thing to codify your writing process to the point of inflexibility. If this is what you always do and it’s the only way you can write a book, what are you going to do if that particular method fails? You’re either going to quit or you’re going to discover that your immutable process maybe wasn’t so immutable after all. You’re going to discover your own adaptability.
Both you and your co-author come to collaboration with some already established habits and processes. Every experienced writer will have developed their own way to write books, and this may change and vary over time as skills develop and life circumstances change. Regardless, you each have a process, and those processes are likely to be different from each other. Maybe one of you is a confirmed “pantser,” or discovery writer, (a term for writers who plan very little and instead fly by the seat of their pants and discover the story as they go) while the other is a die hard “plotter,” or a writer who outlines extensively before they begin.
These labels are helpful when you use them to describe processes that are beneficial to you as you work. They are less helpful when you let them limit you. Just because you are a “pantser” does not mean you are deathly allergic to all outlining activities and will have some kind of anaphylactic reaction if you sit down and put some ideas on paper before you begin to draft. Just because you’ve been a plotter in the past doesn’t mean that you couldn’t benefit from some exploratory early writing, or let your partner write through a couple unoutlined chapters to see if they can solve a tough plotting problem.
The good thing about all writing tools is that they are each just one tool in the toolbox. You may own and prefer a miter saw, but if your friend has a table saw handy, some jobs may be easier if you let them lead for a minute with their preferred tool.
How Do I Know If It’s Working?
For our purposes, we’ll designate a process as working when it both yields words consistently of a quality you’re happy with and leaves both partners feeling good about the process.
This means that if a process makes one of you happy and yields words, but drives the other person nuts, it is not a working process for your team. Both partners must be happy with both the product and the process for that process to be called a success. This also means if a process makes both of you really happy but doesn’t produce a product of quality, that’s not a good process either, as it isn’t getting you any closer to your writing goals.
It’s worth noting that the quality of the product needs to be judged according to the stage—you wouldn’t want to declare a process useless because it didn’t produce a publishable first draft! Almost no one produces a publishable first draft—most works need substantial revision. But if your process doesn’t produce a first draft that is ready to go on to revisions, then you have a problem. If your pre-writing process doesn’t produce ideas that you can use to begin shaping a book, you likewise have a problem.
And, of course, if either of you is unhappy with the way the work is going, you also have a problem. It’s important that both partners treat this as a problem: just because you are happy doesn’t mean that you should argue that your partner should be happy. In a partnership, we have to make the comfort of our partner a priority, just as much as we prioritize our own.
Here is another cardinal rule of collaboration: if one of you is unhappy, something needs to change. The happy partner can talk all day long about why they’re happy, but if it doesn’t solve the problem for the other partner, both partners still have an unsolved problem and need to proceed accordingly.
Process vs Product
Another thing to consider when you run into challenges is whether the issue you’re encountering is a process problem or a product problem.
All books will have issues that need to be ironed out in revision. If a chapter came out poorly, it’s possible that one or both of you have some kind of process problem—the pre-writing or outlining was not sufficient, the drafting schedule is onerous, the communication between the two of you isn’t going well and it’s showing in the work. It’s also entirely possible you have none of those problems, and the chapter just turned out poorly because chapters do that sometimes. You have a product problem only, but your process is working fine and you just need to keep at it. If you have a process problem, you’ll want to communicate and adjust the process so both of you can turn out quality work and be happy about it. If you have a product problem, you’ll want to sit down (when it’s time to revise) and look at what’s wrong with the work and make plans to revise it into something that will be a better fit. (More on that in the chapter about revision.)
But try not to make the mistake of treating a process problem as a product problem, or vice versa. Most writers will write poorly if the process isn’t going well. Most writers will also turn out work that isn’t great even if the process is going well. You’ll need to diagnose what you’re dealing with first, and then apply a solution, because trying to change up your process to make sure chapters are always perfect is unnecessary (and won’t work). Likewise, trying to fix the product when the process is the problem will leave the real problem undiagnosed and continuing to fester. In general, it’s good to check in with each other periodically and make sure the process is working for both of you—and be open to making adjustments as necessary to keep things running smoothly for both of you.
