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 you have a plan, you’re ready to write a book together. But how are you going to go about actually writing words? You have some choices about how to organize this work—and the different methods vary widely, ranging from writing every word together as a team to one partner writing all the prose with no help from the other. Obviously these two disparate choices would make for very different partnership experiences; the way you decide to put the words on the page will vary based on the type of partnership and your style of working together.
Here are some of the common techniques for drafting as a team, as well as some pros and cons of each.
Write the Book Together, Word by Word
This is what many people imagine when I say I collaborate, and it is also the only method on this list I’ve never used. Why? Because it sounds torturous to me to write individual sentences by committee. I know some partners write this way, but they are by far in the minority, and for good reason.
This method will take a very long time; when you draft separately and then review each other’s work, you only have to talk about things you really love or really don’t like, and can avoid discussing all the baseline things that just work and don’t need to change or be celebrated. If you are writing the words together, every sentence has to be discussed, which will expand both the time you spend together and the amount of discussion necessary per word of the draft.
The counterbalance is that you both have a lot of control over the words as they go onto the page, which could be a good thing if that kind of control is important to you.
If this method is working for you, that’s great! But if it also sounds torturous to you, I have good news. There are lots of other more common methods to write a book together.
One Person Writes the Draft
Most common in tiered partnerships, one option is for one partner to write the entire first draft. This makes it very easy to homogenize voice and style, because the style choices are all being made by the same writer.
The drawback, of course, is that this is a tremendous amount of work for one partner to do. In a tiered partnership, that might be appropriate; the senior partner might be responsible for the characters and the worldbuilding, while the junior partner writes most or all of the prose. Indeed, for many senior partners, this is the biggest purpose of co-writing: it allows them to produce more books under their IP without being limited by their own drafting time. All of my books with Brandon Sanderson were written this way, with the exception of Bastille vs. The Evil Librarians, of which Brandon had already written nine chapters before he brought me onto the project.
Most equal partnerships, however, want to find a way to share the drafting burden.
Each Partner Picks a Viewpoint
This common strategy works well for books with multiple viewpoint characters: you can each pick a different viewpoint and write all the chapters from that character’s point of view. In this case, differences in style and voice can be an asset—your personal styles work to make the character voices distinct from one another. My romantic comedies with Megan were mostly written this way—I tended to write the male points of view while she wrote almost all of the female ones.
There are other advantages of this method—it allows you to each claim characters and dig deep into their viewpoint. When you’re outlining and brainstorming, you might each take a “side” and advocate for how that character would see things. This can be useful because it’s often difficult to see a situation from multiple characters’ viewpoints at the same time; you can each take responsibility for a given character’s motivations and advocate for them as you work out what each character will do in your plot.
This can become a bad thing if it turns into a competition; you don’t want the conflict your characters feel to bleed off the page and affect the dynamic of your partnership. If you find yourself starting to get upset because the character is upset, you’ll want to take a step back and separate for yourself what emotions you are feeling because of appropriate book conflict and which need to be worked out separately. This can especially become a problem if you use the roleplay pre-writing method, because doing improv as the characters can make them particularly strong and dynamic in your mind.
Divide the Chapters Evenly
Another option is to divide the chapters evenly without worrying about specific viewpoints. If there’s only one viewpoint character in your book and you’re both doing an equal amount of the drafting, this may be your best option. If you do have multiple viewpoint characters, you can divide chapters based on your individual strengths and weaknesses, or based on who is most excited about writing a given scene.
Megan and I used this method for most of our fantasy books, and also our epic fantasies with Lauren Janes. Each week, we would look at the next chapters that needed to be written and each select two that we wanted to write. We each had characters that we tended to select more often, but that wasn’t the only criterion we would use. Megan was fantastic at writing scenes that developed interesting side characters, whereas I hated writing group scenes, so she tended to write both of those. Megan hated writing scenes where two characters had a long conversation with lots of ground to cover, so I tended to write those.
There will always be some scenes no one wants to write, and those can also be divided based on who wants to avoid them the least. For Megan and me, those were usually action chapters where we weren’t crystal clear on the blocking. Sometimes I’d get stuck with one I wasn’t terribly excited about; sometimes she would. We’d try to keep this in balance so one person wasn’t getting stuck with all the chapters they were dreading all the time.
I’ve said we generally stuck to our own viewpoints for the romantic comedies, and that’s true, but sometimes one of us would fall behind, and the other would write a chapter or two of their character’s viewpoint to catch up. There were also sometimes chapters that one of us really didn’t want to write for whatever reason—usually ones with lots of side characters for me, or the long talking chapters for her—and our partner would step in and do a chapter or two of the other person’s character for that reason. For example, most of the group challenge scenes from our survival reality show novel, Starving with the Stars, were written by Megan, regardless of whether they were in Jillian or Alec’s viewpoint.
James and I also used this method when we wrote The Bollywood Lovers’ Club; we’d look at the next two chapters and decide between us who wanted to write each one. James had a lot of cultural knowledge that I lacked, so there were some scenes that were much easier for him to write than they would have been for me. If that wasn’t an issue for a set of chapters, we would choose based on who had a vision for what a scene should be, or who was most excited about writing it, whether or not they had a reason.
However you decide to draft your book, the most important thing is that you’re both comfortable with your decision, and that you’re making progress. Remember the metrics of success: if you are both happy with your method and you are producing words, then your process is working. Congratulations. Keep at it until your project is finished.
Matching Voice, Tone, and Style
Whatever drafting method you choose, you may be concerned about how to match tone and voice. This is the single most common concern I hear from writers who are considering collaboration, but matching tone and voice, in my experience, isn’t as hard as people expect it will be. This is for one very important reason: most writers already have a range of voice, tone, and style that varies from book to book, from series to series, from genre to genre. Changing your tone to match your co-writer is not very different from, say, changing your tone from snarky and sparse when writing a first-person comedic fantasy to more serious and stylized when writing a serious epic fantasy. In each case, you choose your diction based on your genre, so if you have experience writing in more than one genre (or even subgenre), you probably have experience adjusting your voice to fit the project.
In the case of your collaboration, you’ll both need to decide what you want the tone and voice to be, then try your best to match it. This may be a challenge, and may require concentrated effort. But most writers have a range, and that range can be expanded through practice. The more similar you are in writing style to begin with, the easier this will be, but even if your voices are somewhat different in your single-author work, you can grow to a middle place with some effort. If you’re struggling with this, practice, and, like with most things, it will become easier over time. (And, in the places where you fail, there’s always revision. More on this in chapter seventeen.)
Another thing you can do if you’re struggling to matching styles is to study your partner’s work and make an effort as you draft to do more of what they do. When I wrote Bastille vs. The Evil Librarians, I took a careful look at Brandon’s prose and sentence structure, at the way he crafted jokes and the way he structured his chapters. Then, as I wrote, I did my best to emulate his style intentionally. I can’t be Brandon Sanderson, but I tried to be like him as much as I could.
Fortunately, with that book, I had the benefit of writing from a new point of view—which meant that any voice differences between me and Brandon became a feature rather than a bug, because they accentuated the voice differences between Alcatraz and Bastille. In these cases, it’s possible you don’t want your voices to match. If you’re each writing a different viewpoint, your differences in style might be a feature, in which case you should lean into those differences, accentuating what makes your individual styles unique.
When I began work on the Skyward Flight novellas, I didn’t benefit from this quite as much. Brandon had written from the point of view of one of my main characters before, and since I was writing three different points of view, any differences in my work that were common across all three protagonists would stand out as a voice difference between me and Brandon rather than a feature of the narrative.
So, as I wrote, I paid a lot of attention to the way Brandon told stories, to his balance of drama and humor, to the way he wrote dialogue in group scenes and the way he wrote introspection. And then, I did my very best to emulate that, so our voices would be indistinguishable. When it came time for revisions, I asked my beta readers to flag for me any parts that sounded like Brandon didn’t write them, and I adjusted my language and sentence structure in those places to blend better into Brandon’s existing work in the series. I consider it the highest compliment when readers tell me they read the books without realizing Brandon didn’t write the prose, because that sort of seamless transition was exactly what I set out to accomplish.
Megan and I had a very similar writing style, so I didn’t have to work terribly hard to match her voice. But she was a lot better at setting and description than I was, so I learned a lot about those elements from studying the way she set them up in her own work. I did my best to emulate her skill, trying to bring our styles more in line. This was immensely helpful when I pivoted to writing Skyward Flight, which required a lot more description than my other books, and has also trickled into some of my single-author work. Ostensibly I was putting in the work so my chapters would match Megan’s, but working on my own weaknesses made me into a better writer overall.
Adjusting As You Go
However you decide to draft your book, you’re probably going to have to adapt to each other as you go. You may discover that your tone needs some work to match. You may discover that, even if you outlined meticulously, you run into snags where one of you pictured things one way and another a different way, and you have to stop and nail down your own continuity for the sake of consistency.
It’s important, as you draft, to remain in communication. If one of you is writing the entire first draft, this will be less of a problem, as your partner can review the draft as a whole after its finished. But if you’re both writing words, you’re likely to write in slightly different directions, and like two lines setting off at slightly different angles, if you let that incongruence continue you can end up in very different places by the time you’re done.
If you’re drafting together, it’s therefore important to read each other’s chapters and have regular check ins where you talk about the direction of the book and keep your visions for future chapters aligned. It can be tricky, though, to talk about the problems in a draft when the words are freshly written.
Giving Feedback
Some communication about draft problems is going to be necessary. It’s inevitable that you will read your partner’s work and ask, wait, is this right? Is that how that works? Does this make sense? Your partner will likely be asking the same questions of you. If you don’t discuss these problems, they’re only going to magnified as you continue to draft, but it’s also important to be sensitive to the way your partner best receives feedback.
As we’ve discussed, I wouldn’t recommend working with someone who can’t take feedback at all, but many people have trouble taking feedback under certain circumstances. It’s perfectly reasonable for our partners, especially in an equal partnership, to expect us to deliver criticism in a manner that is not only respectful but tailored to their individual needs.
For example, not everyone can hear criticism immediately after they’ve written a chapter. Some people might need a few days to decompress. Or, they might be okay with hearing some feedback, but need it to be limited to only the feedback that is absolutely necessary to discuss at the time, while other feedback that won’t have a ripple effect through future chapters is noted and set aside until the rest of the draft is done. These are both reasonable requests, and if we can change our behavior in small ways that will allow our partners to be more receptive to hearing about problems in their work, we should do so.
If you notice your partner becoming defensive, rather than doubling down on the point you’re trying to make, it can be helpful to take a step back and ask questions about the process. Yes, the product needs work, but if you can change your process slightly to eliminate defensiveness and make the feedback easier for your partner to hear, everyone will benefit in the long run. Instead of being frustrated with your partner’s defensiveness, try to be curious about where it’s coming from so you can learn what might be a better approach to take in the future.
On the flip side, when our partner is the one criticizing our work, it’s perfectly okay to ask for accommodations that will help us to be able to hear that feedback better. Maybe you are the one who can’t hear criticism for a few days after writing a chapter, or who needs to hear ten good things about the chapter before you’re ready to hear what’s wrong with it. That’s perfectly reasonable, but it will help if you communicate that to your partner in clear terms, so they aren’t left guessing why they offended you, or worse, sending you into regular emotional disequilibrium which will eventually wear on both your creative process and the health of your partnership.
In addition, try not to take the feedback too personally. Every writer needs feedback. Everyone’s work has problems. It’s not a measure of your ability as a writer; books have so many moving parts that it’s impossible to get all of them working perfectly on the first try. This is another stage at which it’s important to leave your ego at the door and really listen to what your partner honestly thinks of your work. If they’re a good partner, they’re not saying this to hurt you, but rather so you can come to an agreement about what the book should be and make a plan for future revision.
Lastly, it’s important to be honest in your feedback. Don’t be unnecessarily cruel; you can learn to phrase your feedback in ways that are both clear and kind. Conversely, don’t obfuscate the issue, sacrificing clarity in the name of kindness. Don’t tell your partner it’s okay when it isn’t okay. In the end, that will only create confusion and more work and conflict in the long run for you both.
In the same vein, it’s good to keep forward momentum, but in collaboration, you might want to think twice on the common wisdom that you shouldn’t revise a single word until you’ve finished the first draft. Yes, you should push forward. No, you don’t want to get stuck in the revision phase eternally, never making forward progress. But you also don’t want to draft the entire book and then discover it was the wrong one, so don’t be afraid to discuss, critique, pivot, and even do some light revision when you find your work is wandering off course. You’ll thank yourself for it later.