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.
One of my favorite things about collaboration is the pre-writing process, because when I write on my own, I am genuinely terrible at it. When I’m writing a solo book, I don’t generally do a ton of pre-writing. I’m impatient to get started; I like the process of telling the story a lot more than planning the story, and I don’t want to sit down and work out the hard knots before I get into it. I jot myself down an outline of a page or two and then I write.
And, frankly, I make a mess. My first draft turns into half a draft, at best. I have to rewrite large portions once I get things figured out—sometimes I have to rewrite the entire draft.
Co-writing helps me to slow down. Instead of letting myself believe that my half an idea might turn out to be a whole one if I just start writing, I have to sit down and articulate my ideas to my co-author, which helps me notice where the holes are before I write myself into a corner and have to toss thousands of words.
For our purposes, we will define pre-writing as everything you do before you begin to seriously draft a project. This can include idea generation, structure decisions, character development, note taking, outlining, and even the beginning stages of exploratory writing that is focused on defining tone and creating characters, conflicts, or setting. When pre-writing, it’s helpful to have two minds at work—where one of you might let your excitement carry you away, the other can step in, pull back, and ask questions. With two sets of eyes on the work, you can identify overlooked elements of the planning stage that are going to cause you problems later on.
Communication is always important, but in the pre-writing stage, it is absolutely crucial that you both talk and listen to each other. If one of you does all the invention, your process will be lacking important input. If you both do more talking than listening, you’re likely to pull the project in different directions, to the detriment of the product. If neither of you is comfortable contributing ideas, the pre-writing process will devolve into a frustrating game of “I don’t know, what do you want to do,” and progress will be stymied.
The goal during pre-writing, as always, is to be flexible and get everyone’s ideas on the table. Phrases such as “what if,” or “yes! and . . .” can help you express your own ideas tentatively and give validation to your partner’s contributions. If you criticize each other’s ideas without giving them fair consideration, you might miss out on creative directions that could have greatly benefited your project. At this stage, it’s incredibly important that you communicate respect to your partner, and make the environment safe for everyone to share their ideas.
All Ideas are Important
I am not going to tell you that all ideas are good. Many ideas will, in the context of your project, be profoundly bad ideas. But bad ideas are also important, because they can lead you to the good ones.
How does that work? You reaction to an idea—the reasons you think it are bad in this context—will tell you something about what a good idea for this particular situation might look like. For example, if you’re trying to come up with a conflict between two love interests in your contemporary romantic comedy—some issue to really push them apart and drive up the tension when they’re getting close to getting together—you might reject any number of ideas before you find the one you want to go with.
An alien invasion would be a tremendously bad idea in this context, because you’re writing a contemporary novel, not science fiction. You’ll want all of your chosen ideas to complement the genre, not fight against it. So unless you’re prepared to change to writing a science fiction novel, you’d want to reject that idea.
Still, you learned something. You need an idea that is consistent with the genre. What ideas are consistent with the genre? Asking this question opens up more information about what a good idea would look like, taking you one step closer to finding the idea you’re looking for.
Of course, this is an obvious example. You probably won’t have this exact conversation, because you’ll both already know you want a solution that is genre appropriate and won’t make suggestions this far afield. But it illustrates a point—if you think an idea is bad, ask yourself why you don’t like it, and what you would like to see instead. That’s a much more helpful response than telling your partner you don’t like their idea, period, with no feedback.
Ideas are not inherently bad. They become bad ideas because of the context—the way that they work in the story. In one of our Extra series sequels, Megan Walker and I were planning to have a character investigate a murder. There’s nothing wrong with this idea—in fact there are millions of books that have been written about investigating a murder.
The idea wasn’t a great one for our series, though, because it’s romantic comedy, not romantic suspense. The idea was steering our book in the wrong direction, so we considered replacing it with something else. However, this bad idea taught us three things. One, the right idea would fit better with our series. Two, the right idea would have more comedic potential. And three, the right idea would not put our main character in immediate danger and steer the book toward romantic suspense.
While we were mulling over other possibilities, I had what I thought might be a truly terrible idea. But, knowing the use of tossing around bad ideas, I gave voice to it. “What if,” I dared to ask, “we removed the murder, and replaced it with an outbreak of pubic lice?”
Megan looked at me like this was the most ridiculous suggestion I had ever made, and maybe it was. But, as we mulled the idea over, we realized it did fit better with our series. It did have comedic potential. It did not put our character in any immediate danger, and it certainly did not steer our book toward romantic suspense.
So it was that we scrapped the murder investigation from our outline and replaced it with a crabs epidemic.
Yes, we really did that. Yes, we published it that way. Yes, we were happy about it.
Objectively, writing a book about investigating an outbreak of public lice is a much stupider and worse idea than writing a book about investigating a murder. The plethora of murder mysteries and the utter dearth of crabs outbreak mysteries is proof enough of that. But in this context it was a good idea, because it allowed us to keep the mystery aspect of the book while still maintaining the tone of our series, in which people do not generally encounter dead bodies but do with great frequency encounter mishaps of a sexual nature.
As a partnership, you should not be afraid of bad ideas. Bad ideas can be worked with. No, your biggest fear should be a lack of ideas. When neither of you can come up with a single thing that could possibly solve a given plot or character problem, that’s a sign that you’re tapped out for the day, and it’s time to put the problem away, let it simmer at the back of your minds until your next planning session, and come at it fresh. Continuing to chase after it when you’re both worn out will only lead to frustration, and often fresh brains solve very easily problems which worn out brains would have circled forever.
You Can Discovery Write . . . And Rewrite
I advocate for extra planning for most collaborations, but if you both agree that you want to discovery write, you absolutely can. I’ve known of several collaborations that began as a letter writing game—one writer wrote a letter in the voice of a character, and then the other writer wrote a letter back, with no preparation. There’s nothing wrong with using this or any other discovery writing technique as a team, as long as it passes the test for a working strategy: it produces work you are both happy with, and you both feel positively about the process. If both those things are happening, feel free to discovery write.
But here’s the big caveat: be aware that you will almost certainly have to rewrite large portions of your work. A lot of discovery writers use their first draft as a pre-write and then rewrite their books. Others, though, can bring together a story as they go, and their first drafts end up with conflict and character arcs and mostly intact plots, requiring only an average amount of revision.
This is very unlikely to happen with collaboration. This is because you aren’t dealing with one mind that can guide the story in the direction it needs to go, but with two minds that will guide the story in two different directions, because they cannot coordinate with each other unless at least some planning takes place. People, as it turns out, cannot read each other’s minds, so if you want a cohesive first draft, you will need to do some planning. If you are okay with using your first draft mostly for idea generation and then tossing all the parts that didn’t work on the cutting room floor, discovery writing as a team might work for you, but if not, you may want to reconsider.
One wonderful thing about writing tools is that most aren’t mutually exclusive. If you are committed to discovery writing but aren’t wild about the mess you are likely to make if you try to discovery write a whole book without coordinating, you could discovery write a few chapters, enough to generate some conflicts and characters, and then sit down and talk about what you like, what’s working, and which conflicts and characters you want to make central to the rest of your work. You can then make a plan, and take advantage of the best of both strategies. In fact, most writers I know use a mix of these two strategies anyway; the key is finding an effective mix that works for you as a team.
Brainstorming Techniques
The technique you’re going to use the most when you brainstorm, of course, is conversation. This will be almost universally true—in order to run ideas by each other and settle on a few, you have to talk about them, whether in person, in text, or by phone. Your brainstorming will probably begin as a series of unorganized conversations where you begin to articulate what the project means to each of you, and what shape you each envision it taking. These conversations can be about the general shape of the project or about small details; all of it will help you form a shared vision for what the book is going to become, and that vision will help guide all the conversations, decisions, and work that will come after.
It’s helpful in these initial conversations to create a sort of north star for your project, a pitch that tells what it is. If you know you’re writing a romantic comedy about an outbreak of pubic lice, you’ll have a guiding principle to govern your other brainstorming, which can help you avoid trying to combine ideas that don’t fit cohesively together.
You’ll also want to watch out for creeping egos. Those should have been left at the door, but occasionally you may find that one partner has come to pre-writing with a rigid idea of what the book should be, and is resistant to changing anything about their original idea. If the rigid partner is also the senior partner in a tiered collaboration, this may be something the junior partner can work with, or it might be cause for them to decide this isn’t the best co-writing situation after all. In an equal partnership, it’s never appropriate for one writer to dictate the direction of the entire project, so either the rigid partner needs to find some flexibility and work on checking their ego, or the project is going to encounter some serious roadblocks and resentment is likely to build.
Once you’ve had your initial conversations, agree on a general concept, and are ready to really buckle down and flesh out your ideas, here are some ideas for brainstorming as a team, followed by a list of details to make sure you cover before you start putting together an outline.
List What You Know
One of the most important things you can do at the brainstorming phase is write down everything you already know. Sometimes you may think you have a fully formed book, but when you write it down, you discover you only have a few ideas with lots of gaps between them. Other times you may think you’re missing major pieces, and write them down only to discover you’ve actually got a lot more formed ideas than you thought you had. Ideas are ephemeral that way; pin them to the page and your situation will become more clear.
Don’t worry too much at this stage if some ideas are contradictory, or “bad.” Just focus on collecting all the stray ideas you’ve generated in your conversations about the project. Collect them from your email and your text messages, try to recall them from your unrecorded conversations. The more you can get down, the more pieces you’ll have to begin to move around.
Identify gaps
Once you’ve recorded everything you have, emptying both of your brains, it will become more clear what elements are missing. From there you can identify questions that you still need to answer. Are nearly all your notes about the plot, but your characters are still a black hole? Do you have lots of notes on the characters, but no idea about the plot? Do you have some plot points well fleshed out while others remain hazy? Once you know what your gaps are, you’ll have some clear topics for future brainstorming sessions.
Pick a Gap and Generate Ideas
When you need to round out elements of your book, it helps to have focused conversations. Now that you’ve identified some gaps, you can sit down (in person or virtually, in real time or in text) and begin to flesh out the parts of your project that are still undefined. Keep track of your ideas by writing them down, whether it’s in a notebook, on Post-Its, or in a notetaking app. Interrogate your bad ideas so they lead you to better ideas—why don’t they work? What are you looking for instead?
You’ll know when you hit a really good idea because it will make you both light up—the moment when you think, yes, that’s it, that’s the perfect thing. That moment is golden, so make sure to take note of those ideas and expand on them as you flesh out the missing pieces of your book.
If you’re writing tragedy, you’ll know when you’ve gone far enough when one of you raises an idea and it stabs you right in the heart. I knew Brandon and I had hit on the ending to ReDawn when he suggested killing off some characters that would deeply impact my main character for the following book. The ripple effect of that moment made me reimagine Evershore entirely—so I knew it was the gut punch we were looking for.
If you’re writing comedy, you’ll know when you’ve struck comedic gold when you’re both laughing so hard your sides hurt. Megan and I were still laughing about some of our more ridiculous comedic moments years later—if you’re not laughing together, will your audience?
In some of my partnerships, I’ve used role-play as a tool to generate ideas for character arcs and conflicts. This is an advantage you have as a partnership—you can each give voice (either verbally or typed in a chat) to one of the characters, and play off each other. If both partners are comfortable with it, this type of roleplay can help you get into the heads of the characters and gain insight into what they think and feel, which can then in turn enhance your characters’ conflicts and decision points. This method isn’t for everyone, but if it appeals to you, it’s worth a try. See chapter fifteen for a more thorough analysis of how this works (and how it doesn’t.)
Pruning and Narrowing
Some ideas are, of course, mutually exclusive. You can’t throw everything in the book, so making certain choices will mean dismissing other possible options. Ever seen a superhero movie that suffered from having too many villains? You can’t put everything that excites you into every book, so you’re going to have to make some choices together about what to include.
In my experience, what you keep is more important than what you cut. As you look at your pile of unformed ideas, the most important ideas to keep are not necessarily the objectively best ones. The most important ideas to keep are the ones you are each most excited about.
I may have some bias in this. I tend to be that writer who latches on to very small ideas and gets unreasonably excited about them. This is something that my co-writers have to live with: they are all accustomed to me announcing in the middle of brainstorming that a given character desperately needs an undead bear to ride as a mount and another character really needs to see the ocean for the first time, can we do this, pretty please, I need it. The good news is, most of these ideas don’t take an incredible amount of space in the book, so when my co-writers let me have what makes me excited, I’m more engaged with the work and simultaneously perfectly happy to compromise on things that I care less about . . . like the plot.
It’s very possible that you and your partner will be excited about the same things. In this case, you definitely want to include those things in your book. It’s also very possible you’ll be excited about different things, and in that case, you should also try to include all of those things in your book. When you look at the combined list of those things together, you have the soul of your story, the parts that speak to you most as a team.
You do need to be careful about how quickly you move from brainstorming into pruning and narrowing—some people have a tendency to want to brainstorm forever, while others want to narrow too soon, cutting off the creative process before it really has a chance to bear fruit. You have to strike a balance between generative exercises where you add to your pile of ideas and selective exercises where you choose between them—too much or too little time spent in either exercise will leave at least one of you feeling frustrated and your project underdeveloped. Where that balance is struck will depend on your individual personalities and your team dynamic—remember to watch for the signs of an effective process. If you’re developing a story you’re both happy with and you both feel comfortable doing it, then you’re hitting the right balance.
What to Plan
Remember as you brainstorm that anything you don’t plan upfront as a team will by default be decided by each of you individually as you write. This can be a good thing—if we include word choice there are hundreds of thousands of decisions being made on any given project, and unless it becomes an issue in revision, you probably don’t want to spend your precious partnership time debating the use of the word chasm versus ravine every time you need to talk about a big gap in the ground. Decisions that granular are best left to whoever is doing the drafting (or subsequently revision) of a particular passage. But there are a few basic things you want to make sure to cover before either of you begin to write, so that the work you do as you draft matches the work your partner contributes.
Here are a few topics you want to cover before you begin to write, to be sure you and your partner are on the same page.
Genre
Because genre will inform tone, style, voice, character, point of view, and virtually every other choice you might make, it’s good to decide together upfront where your book would be shelved in the bookstore. After all, how will you know what is a good or bad idea if you don’t know if you’re writing a romantic comedy or an alien invasion? Deciding on genre and subgenre in advance will help you bring your two minds with different ideas into sync with each other. Make sure you are both familiar with your genre, and if one of you isn’t, that partner will need to read some good examples as part of the pre-writing process to get themselves up to speed.
When I wrote The Bollywood Lovers’ Club with James Goldberg, James assigned me a lot of Bollywood movies to watch, since I’d never seen one, and they played a big part in the novel’s plot. In return, I assigned James a bunch of young adult novels to read, because it wasn’t his principle genre. The research we each did helped us form a shared vision of where our book would fit in the genre, and how it would interact with the culture in which it was situated.
Tone, Voice and Style
Especially if this is your first collaboration together and the first work being written in this setting, you’re going to need to decide on a tone and a voice. We’ll talk more about different ways to divide the work in our chapter on drafting, but let me say this here: even if you’re going to each do half of the drafting and be working on chapters at the same time, it might be helpful for one of you to write one chapter before the other starts writing, so that you both have something to aim for in terms of tone. (We’ll talk more about how to match tone when we discuss drafting in chapter sixteen as well.)
Another way to homogenize tone is to agree on a comp title, or a book written by another author that fits the style that you’re both trying to achieve. If one of you is trying to be James Joyce while the other is trying to be James Patterson, you’re going to have a problem, but if you both know what the general goal is, you stand a much better chance of striking similar tones from the beginning.
Your goal of tone and style must be within reach for each of you—if one partner writes incredibly flowery prose and the other writes sparsely, one of you will need to tone it down while the other will need to step it up so you can meet in the middle in a place that’s a good tonal fit for both of you. All writers have a range, and all writers can learn new skills, but no good will come of one writer trying constantly to match a voice that is terribly unnatural for them. Choose something that is comfortable for both of you, and the product will be cleaner and the process smoother.
Point of View
Who is your point of view character, and from what perspective will they tell the story? You need to sit down and have a conversation about whether you’re writing in first person or third, and how close the point of view is going to be. This may seem obvious, but sometimes the obvious things are the easiest to overlook. When James and I first started drafting The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, we each claimed one of the first two chapters, went our separate ways to write them, and then emailed them to each other and set up a meeting to go over notes.
It wasn’t until we read each other’s chapters that we discovered one of us had written in third person and the other in first. Our first conversation about each other’s work was about which we actually wanted to use, and whose chapter needed to be rewritten to match.
Character and Conflict
For fiction, you’ll need to decide who your characters will be, and what arcs they will have over the course of your story. You’ll also need to settle on a core conflict. Even if you’re going to discovery write aspects of your story, it will probably be good to have decided “we are writing a science fiction novel about an alien invasion” upfront, rather than trying to wing every single aspect of the story.
In pre-writing, I tend to focus on the protagonists, and sometimes forget to spend the time making sure my story has a good antagonist (or antagonistic force) who complicates the story in interesting ways. Taking the time as a partnership to define what the antagonistic forces in your story are and in what ways they will work against the protagonist will go a long way toward making sure your book has clear stakes and a coherent conflict.
Setting and Worldbuilding
If you are writing in a contemporary setting, you’ll want to establish where the book takes place. If one of you knows much more about the setting you’ve chosen, you’ll be able to rely on that partner to fill in the gaps and add details.
If your book takes place in a historical setting, you’ll need to agree on sources of research. Either you’ll both need to read sources and establish familiarity with your setting, or one partner will need to be designated the period expert and go over the other partner’s work, filling in the gaps, correcting errors, and adding details. Regardless, at least one of you will need to already have or develop expertise in your historical period in advance as part of the pre-writing.
If your story takes place on another world entirely, you have a lot more coordinating to do. You’ll need to look at the worldbuilding together, agreeing about what is possible and what is not possible, fleshing out what the world looks like. You’ll want to go over details like economy and ecology, magic system (if any), technology level and culture. It will be impossible to iron out every detail in advance without developing worldbuilder’s disease (the tendency of fantasy writers to build forever and never finish a draft). Some continuity will inevitably have to be fixed in post, but you’ll want to fill out a basic sketch so that you each have some familiarity with the setting you’re working in, as that setting will inform your characters, plot, and conflict.
Organizing an Outline
Once you’ve generated ideas and have a pretty good idea of the shape of the major parts of your book, it’s time to congeal your ideas into an outline.
The outlining process will vary some depending on the type of partnership. In some tiered partnerships, you may be handed an outline of the project that your senior partner has already written. You may or may not be asked for feedback on that outline, and the amount of leeway you’re granted to change the outline may also vary. In those cases, it’s good to get clarity on how much freedom you have to vary from the outline before you begin to write. Are you allowed to take the plot in a different direction? Are there places that you can change the plot as long as you hit certain benchmarks? Knowing this ahead of time might save you a lot of rewriting down the line if it turns out you have less freedom than you thought.
In other tiered partnerships, the junior partner might be the only one writing the outline. That outline might need to be submitted to your senior partner for approval, or for feedback. In this case, you’ll have a lot more freedom to shape the story, but you’ll also be responsible for a lot more of the outlining work!
In an equal partnership, you’ll need to hammer out the outline together. Sometimes its helpful for one partner to synthesize your brainstorming into a rough outline ahead of time to streamline the process. Other partners may prefer to sit down together to begin putting the pieces together into a plot.
You can use any plot structure guideline as a basis for your outline—I’m partial to the beat sheet from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, but you can use virtually any plotting paradigm that works for both of you.
Your outline can be as simple as a list of scenes and what you plan for them to accomplish; the purpose of the outline is for you both to know what each chapter is going to entail so that as you draft your part, you’re not duplicating or contradicting your partner’s work. (Some duplication and contradiction is of course inevitable, but by agreeing to an outline in advance, you can minimize the problem.)
Pre-writing can be one of the most exciting parts of the storytelling process. The ideas are shiny and new and full of possibility, and you haven’t yet hit the snarls of drafting or the tangles of revision. For collaborations, it can also be stressful—this is one of the parts of the process where you will need to work most closely together, and if there are problems in your communication, those may begin to show.
When disagreements arise, remember the fundamental principles of co-authorship—abandoning ego, showing respect, and communicating actively—to work through the disagreements and find ideas that you’re both excited to write. Taking your time in this phase will pay off later when it’s time to put those ideas into action.
Remember that as you move on to the drafting stages, you will inevitably find parts of your project that still need more development. The beautiful thing about brainstorming is that you can return to it at every stage of development: as you draft, as you revise, and as you polish your final work—to help solve problems and refine your book. The skills you build together as you pre-write your first project will be the foundation of all your communication as you move on to those other steps, so don’t be afraid to take your time, refine your process, and of course, take time to enjoy the ride.
