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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.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.

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.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.

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.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.

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.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.

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.

Before we move on to talk about process, I want to say a word about the insidious little devil that will wedge itself right into your workload and slowly dismantle your partnership piece by piece.
I’m talking about our friend resentment. I recommend, for the health of your partnership, that you never, ever do work that you resent.

This is easier to deal with in a work-for-hire relationship. As long as you made sure that your contract pays you sufficiently for the labor the job requires, there is nothing to resent. You are doing work. You are making money. The arrangement is simple and transactional. If you find you are not receiving enough compensation for your labor and you are beginning to be resentful of the time your project is taking, next time ask for more money. If your client won’t pay you more, and you know you would resent continuing to do work for them at that pay rate, its time to walk away in favor of better paying work. The relationship is clear cut and simple.

Tiered partnerships also frequently have this advantage. Assuming that the senior partner has communicated expectations and the junior partner has made sure in advance that the arrangement is an equitable one, it’s possible to stay away from resentment. You may run into cases where the terms change or one partner doesn’t follow through on what they originally agreed, and resentment may begin to creep in. But generally speaking tiered partnerships have an advantage in this area.

It’s much harder with an equal partnership. Partly because no partnership is ever one hundred percent equal.

Wait, what?

Isn’t equal right there in the name?

Here’s the thing: writing labor is very hard to quantify. Anyone who’s written a novel can tell you that not all chapters are equally easy to write. You could write a thousand words one day and they could be the easiest you’ve ever written, and the next thousand words might take ten times as long and be much more difficult. You could spend an hour writing words that flow like a dream, and you could spend the next hour tortuously bleeding words from your soul. Not all hours of writing are the same amount of work. Not all chapters and scenes and pages require the same amount of labor.

Likewise, not all tasks are equally difficult to all people. So even if you divide your labor “evenly,” say, with each partner writing a thousand words each week, you can’t guarantee that they’ll both have done the same amount of work. Their output might be the same, but the work they had to put into it to get there will vary from person to person, even from paragraph to paragraph. Even if you divided your labor by time, each putting in the same number of hours, some of those hours of labor will be much more difficult than others.

You want to make a good faith effort to divide the work evenly so that everyone is happy with the division of labor. The book needs to be imagined, brainstormed, outlined, drafted, revised, proofread, published, and promoted—which means there are hundreds of discrete tasks you must divide between the two of you. Drafting may seem like the biggest task, but it isn’t always so: you’ll also need to balance the workload of content revision, continuity editing, line editing, proofreading, and promotion. If you’re self-publishing you will also have to either divide or hire out editing, layout, and cover design. There will be promotional emails to send and advertising to monitor. (We’ll get into all of this more in depth in part two of this book.)

I suppose you could devise some complex rating system for tasks in an effort to make everything perfectly fair, but I recommend that you don’t. Trying to quantify difficulty and effort in such a detailed way will probably breed resentment rather than eliminate it, because it will just feed the selfish part of your brain that worries at every turn that it might be doing more than your partner.

Instead, I recommend you adjust your expectations by accepting that, at times, you might end up doing slightly more work than your partner, and let that be okay.

Don’t misinterpret me; you should absolutely not stick with a partner who takes advantage of you. If your partner has stopped writing, is no longer accomplishing their agreed-upon tasks, or is not prioritizing your project, you are under no obligation to continue doing your half the work. (Unless you are contractually obligated, of course, which we will address in a moment.) But there is a huge difference between doing most of the work unfairly and recognizing that there will be slight imbalances that are inherent and immeasurable and will likely even out over time.

When Your Partner Stops Working

What if you do realize that you’re carrying the project, even though the partnership is supposed to be “equal”? What if it’s become obvious that you are doing most of the work, and your partner is repeatedly dropping the ball?

First, ask yourself if you are okay with that. There’s nothing wrong with doing more work than the other person if you’re not feeling resentment. You can think about what concessions you are and aren’t willing to make. Is the project important enough to you that you’re willing to do more than your share of the work to see it finished? If that’s the case, how do you feel about still giving your partner equal credit or compensation? What about creative control?

When I have been in situations where I am doing more of the work than one of my writing partners, I’ve found personally that the last of these is the most important to me. I don’t mind sharing money and credit. People get credit and money for their intellectual property all the time, and if it’s valuable enough for me to continue working on it, then that’s my choice, and there is nothing to resent.

In equal partnerships, I have sometimes accepted equal credit and compensation for unequal work, and I don’t regret the times that I have. All of my co-writers have made meaningful and irreplaceable contributions to all of my collaborations, but the distribution of wordcount has not always been equal. In cases like that, I have sometimes asked my partner for more creative control, but never for a larger share of the compensation or credit. Those are my choices, and when I fully own them, I’m able to avoid falling into resentment.

You might make different choices. You might even want to go back and renegotiate your contract, if your co-writer is amenable. These are conversations you can have, as long as you offer clear communication and your partner is willing to work with you. There’s nothing wrong with working under less than completely equal circumstances, as long as you’re happy doing so, and are doing so without feeling coerced or taken advantage of.

But if resentment starts to creep in, it’s time to make some changes. What do you do if you find yourself presented with work you resent?

The first thing I recommend is that you don’t do it. Stop working. Not permanently, just long enough to sort out how you need to proceed.

First, you need to get at the source of your resentment. Do you feel the workload is unfairly balanced? Are you unhappy about the direction of the project, which has soured you on the labor? Are you upset about something unrelated?

Once you know what the problem is, refer back to the chapter about communication and talk about it. Hopefully you will do this before you start lashing out at your partner in overt or subtle ways, and before your resentment hurts not just the project but also your working relationship.

One thing to especially avoid is ruminating on your own resentment while continuing to do the thing you resent. Rumination is when you sit in your negative thoughts and play them for yourself over and over. You tell yourself how unfair the situation is, rehearsing again and again how you’re being taken advantage of, all without recognizing your own part in continuing to do the work and remain in the situation. No partner can take advantage of you without your consent, and persisting in painting them as the villain in your own mind without taking productive steps to change the situation means you are just as much a part of the unfair system as they are. You may have reasons to stay in the situation—you may feel guilty for refusing to pick up the slack, or you may have a hard time letting go of your goals for the project. You may even be contractually obligated to continue! But letting those feelings turn into contempt for your partner—even when they have let you down!—will not help you, or anybody.

When You Are Behind
It would be lovely to assume that you will always be the partner who is on top of things, and never the one who gets behind or fails to complete their work. But life gets the best of all of us. I’ve had to tell partners I’m going to need more time or a break from working on a project while I attend to other things—doing this is a natural part of a healthy working dynamic, so it’s to be expected.

What should you do if you find yourself unable to meet commitments? The first thing to do is to communicate sooner rather than later. It’s better to express weeks or months in advance that you won’t be able to meet a deadline than to spring this on your partner the day the work is due—or even later. It’s easy to want to avoid this conversation, especially if you’re feeling guilt or shame about not being able to meet your deadline, but failing to communicate will only make the situation worse. Don’t put it on your partner to notice that you’re struggling to keep up; take responsibility for your own work and communicate your struggles promptly and clearly. Then, as a partnership, you can work out a way forward.

The Pressure of Deadlines
But what if you have a deadline and your partner isn’t doing their share of the work? In that case don’t you have to pick up the slack?

I would argue that you usually don’t. If your partner can manage to stop meeting their obligations, what rule of the universe says you have to do the work for them? There may be consequences if you simply stop. You may miss your deadline. And while deadlines are important, you won’t be the first writer, and certainly not the first partnership to miss one.

If your partner is not picking up what you perceive to be half the work, you don’t have to do that work for them, especially if you’re going to resent them for it. You aren’t really doing them or yourself any favors if the task gets done at the expense of the well-being of your relationship. You may hoist the pail of water up from the well, but in doing so, you’ll have dumped poison into the well so every bucket from now on will be laced with it. No one needs help like that.

Am I advocating that if your partner misses a deadline, you should begin to miss your own in retribution? Certainly not. But you can slow down and communicate with your partner about what’s happening. A quick flag for your partner that you’re making an adjustment will suffice: “Hey, it looks like you need more time on that! I’m going to hold off on writing my next chapter and let you catch up. When you finish that, we can talk about next steps.”

You’ve been up front about your intentions. No one is punishing anyone else. You’re patiently providing them with more time, while they are receiving the time they need to finish the task. This may also help your partner not to resent you; if you leave your partner behind while they struggle to catch up, they may come to resent you for taking over and doing more than your share of the creative work. Maybe the book will get done more slowly, but that’s okay. Not all collaborations can or should be completed on tight deadlines. You won’t be the first writers to miss a deadline, and for much worse reasons than having patience with yourselves and each other.

The truth is, most writing work can be done later. Generally, writing deadlines are not a matter of life and death. In several of my collaborations we had a mantra: friends before fiction. This means that when we have to choose between the good of our partner and the good of our project, we choose our partner every time.

I’ve had to temporarily halt production on several collaborative projects because my partners were caught up in medical crises. In some cases, the pause measured more than a year, but that’s okay. Sometimes life happens, and it can’t be helped. In one case I volunteered to finish most of the incomplete draft, so we could jump straight into revisions when my partner’s health improved. In another case I put everything down and didn’t touch a word of any of it. What you do when life happens and your partner can’t contribute is up to you, but certainly don’t do work and then resent your partner for it. You’re not doing anyone any favors if you do that, and you’re probably doing active harm.

Contractual Obligations
But what if you are contractually obligated? What if you’ve gotten yourself into what I consider one of the worst possible situations in which a writer can find themselves—you’ve already been paid for a project, you’ve already accepted an advance, you’ve already paid taxes on it (or, heaven forbid, spent it), and now you’re on the hook for a book that isn’t written yet, and your partner isn’t doing the writing.

Friends, if you are not currently in this situation, I would encourage you to do everything you can to avoid it. I have requested more revisions to contracts to avoid the possibility of this ever happening to me than I have for any other single issue. That is a truly horrific situation in which to find yourself, and I would suggest you be very, very careful about accepting advances that you can’t pay back on projects that aren’t written when part of the work is dependent on other people.

But if you are already in that situation, you may be in the one, singular position in which you don’t have a choice about doing work you resent. In that case, take some deep breaths. Tell yourself that you have learned some things. Promise yourself you will never allow this to happen again. Recognize that, while your partner may have wronged you, you also made decisions that have led to you being in this regrettable situation. And then grit your teeth, do the work, and dig yourself out of the bad situation. If it destroys your partnership, know that you really didn’t have any other options.

Tell yourself that you are getting something out of finishing the work yourself: you are earning the peace of being well and truly done with the situation. Try to maintain the basic level of respect for your partner that is due to every human being. Be as kind as you can, because adding cruelty will certainly not make the situation better and will absolutely make it even worse. Do what you have to do to get the work done, and know that you are not the first writer to find themselves in a situation like that, nor will you be the last. Sometimes, in terrible circumstances, there are only terrible solutions, and you have my deepest condolences that you had no truly good options. Finish the work, and then move on with your life a little wiser and don’t look back.

Speaking of getting out, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t include the next chapter—how do you know when a partnership is beyond saving and it’s time to quit? And once you decide that, what do you do next? Hopefully the skills we’ve already discussed will make all your partnership problems solvable, but when a partnership is no longer working for you, there’s no shame in walking away. In the next chapter we’ll talk about when and how to do that in a way that is respectful to everyone involved.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.

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.

Very few first-time collaborators think about signing a contract before they begin, but all of them should. In an equal partnership, especially among friends, you might feel like you don’t need a contract yet, but if anyone is writing words on the project, you definitely do. Contracts are friendship saving, because they ensure that everyone has agreed about what they’re getting into. You don’t want to spend hours, weeks, months, even years on a project only to discover that you have vastly different ideas about what you will do with it after the fact.

Your contract may cover lots of things, particularly if you’re in a tiered partnership; when IP lawyers get involved these contracts can grow long enough to make your eyes cross. If you’re in an equal partnership and don’t have high value existing intellectual property (like a mega-selling published series in the setting) you can probably make do with something much simpler, only a few pages long.
There are many sample contracts to be found on the internet. I am not a lawyer, so I can’t give you a foolproof contract, but I will discuss a few points that every collaboration contract should address.

Money
Let’s address the big one first: your contract must state how proceeds from sales of the work will be divided. If you’re in an equal partnership, the share is probably fifty/fifty. If you’re in a tiered partnership, it might be fifty/fifty, but it also might not. Junior partners might be offered an upfront fee or advance on their work in addition to a royalty. They might work for a flat fee and receive no royalties at all. Regardless, take a good long look at the way money is going to be allocated and ask yourself if you’re going to feel good about the way profit will be distributed before you sign and before you invest yourself in the project.

This may seems simple, but there are a few other things you’ll want to consider. If the work requires expenses—like editing, advertising, or cover design—who will pay for those expenses? Will that person be reimbursed, and if so, how? It’s worth taking a minute to think about how you’re going to handle these things in the future and codifying them into the contract, so you don’t have a dispute about them later when there’s an already-written book on the line.

A word to prospective senior partners: if you’re thinking of offering less than fifty percent to your co-writer, you must do so from a position of power. I would never accept less than fifty percent (or a proportional equal share, like 33% in a three-person partnership) unless the senior partner had something significant to offer—like a very large audience and a practically guaranteed sales record. If you are a mega-selling author, you might be able to offer a lower percentage, and your junior partner could be assured that they are going to make a reasonable wage for their labor nevertheless. If your junior partner is undertaking a serious risk that the product will not make much money, you’re doing them a disservice by offering less than fifty percent.

Credit
On this point, equal partners also have it a bit easier. In an equal partnership, both authors are generally credited as the authors of the work, or they select a pseudonym to represent them both. Collaboration contracts generally stipulate that the authors will both refer to themselves as co-authors or co-writers and not claim to be the sole author of the work.

There are a few issues that even equal partners should consider. If both your names are going on the cover, whose will be first? Do you want to use a pseudonym? If so, what will the pseudonym be? Lots of co-authors use them (like Christina Lauren, the romance-writing duo whose first names are Christina and Lauren), but many also do not. For the Five Lands series, Megan, Lauren, and I elected to use a pseudonym so as not to clutter the front of the book with three names and muddy the branding. Whatever you decide, putting it in writing upfront will help prevent disagreements later on.

In tiered partnerships, there are a few other considerations. Will your names be the same size on the cover? If not, how much smaller is the junior partner’s name allowed to be? Should your name be at least forty percent the size of your co-writer’s? Fifty? Larger or smaller? If you don’t get this in writing now, publishers may not honor it later, so it’s good to have it agreed upon (in writing!) in advance. In my original contract with Dragonsteel, I was offered equal size for my name on the Skyward novellas. I appreciate the respect Brandon showed me by offering this to me . . . but I’m well aware that his name sells books, and as I like selling books, I negotiated for his name to be bigger than mine. What matters ultimately is not the size of the names on the cover, but the fact that you agree to how each writer will be credited upfront, in advance, and in writing.

Intellectual Property
Who is going to hold the copyright for your book? Who will own the IP and therefore the rights to write other books in the setting? In an equal partnership this might be held equally, but it also might not. The important thing is that you both agree in advance, so you know what you’ll be allowed to do with the setting if the partnership ends, and more importantly, what won’t be permitted. In a tiered partnership this is even more complicated; if the senior partner has other books in the setting, they may want a longer clause with additional protections to make it crystal clear what the junior partner has rights to and what they don’t.

There is a lot more to IP than just print rights. What about film? What about merchandising? How about foreign rights? All of these things need to be addressed in the contract so everyone knows who owns which pieces of intellectual property. Laying this out in advance will not only protect your relationship with your partner, but can save you from lawsuits in the future.

Control of Decision Making
It’s important to decide in advance how decisions will be made, especially for anything that isn’t codified in the contract at the time of signing. If it’s an equal partnership, the contract should stipulate that decisions will be made jointly. If, in the equal partnership, partners have specific jobs and decision-making responsibilities, those should also be outlined to avoid future confusion.

In a tiered partnership, no doubt should be left about exactly how much control, if any, the junior partner has over the final product and the future publishing decisions related to it. Make sure you feel good about whatever the decision-making arrangement will be, and think long and hard about how it might impact you in the future.

Non-disclosure Agreements
Most equal partnership contracts don’t require NDAs. If you are new or midlist writers, it’s not necessary to contractually prevent partners from discussing your business dealings outside of the partnership. In tiered partnerships with established writers, however, it’s common practice for junior partners to sign non-disclosure agreements stipulating that they won’t talk about the details of the project publicly. These NDAs can be anything from waiting to announce project details until the senior partner announces them first to never speaking about the existence of the project for eternity. The key is to be sure you’re ready to abide by the terms once you sign them, so read your NDA carefully.

Kill Clause
The contract should address what will happen if the partnership ends, and what the obligations (if any) of each partner will be in that event. Be sure you know how to get out of the arrangement if necessary, and what rights you keep (and which you lose) if you decide to do so.

Please Read Your Contract
This should go without saying, but please read every word of your contract, both when you receive a draft to negotiate, and before you sign the final version. Make sure you understand everything it says, and if you don’t, seek clarification before signing. You can and should negotiate any wording that you’re uncomfortable with; any good partner will listen to your concerns and make concessions where they can. If they can’t, it’s better that you know in advance that the situation was untenable than to sign an untenable contract and later have to extricate yourself.

A Word about Work-For-Hire
Contracts are important in any collaboration, but when you’re entering into work-for-hire, especially in cases where the primary benefit to you is monetary, you want to make absolutely sure that the rights you are giving away are rights you feel comfortable losing. In cases where you receive no rights to intellectual property, no royalties, and no credit, you want to be certain that your payment structure is clear and tied to measurable goals and outcomes. And then you want to produce words and let them go without becoming too attached to them, because after you have fulfilled your contractual obligations, they aren’t yours anymore, and you only have the rights compensation that are outlined in your contract.

In these kinds of partnerships you can ignore everything I said earlier about irresistible deliciousness. You are not looking for creative spark. If you get a little spark out of the project, that’s wonderful, but in this case, the benefit to you is the money.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! When you are a professional, money is a powerful motivator! No one looks down on plumbers for charging for their work, and no one has a right to tell you that you have to prioritize creative fervor over money. We all need to support ourselves (and any family that might be dependent on us), and that’s a good and noble thing to do. But if what you’re getting out of the collaboration is money, make sure the money is going to be worth the work you put in or you may end up signing on to a project you regret.

What If Things Change?
If you leave anything out of the contract, or if your circumstances change and you both consent to change the terms, you’re not necessarily locked in. You can create a contract addendum at any time to add further stipulations or change previous ones, so long as you both consent and sign the addendum as well.

For example, it’s possible that you’re not sure if you’ll want to publish under a pseudonym, and want to wait to make that decision. In that case, you can put a clause in your contract that says something like, “Co-authors may, by mutual agreement, publish the work under a single pseudonym.” This ensures that, even if you haven’t made the decision yet, you’ve stipulated up front that you both have to mutually agree.

When Megan, Lauren and I first signed our collaboration agreement, we didn’t know if we would sell our book traditionally or decide to self-publish, so we threw in a line that we would make those decisions in the future “by mutual consent” and went on our way. Later, when we decided to self-publish, we signed a contract addendum that outlined exactly how we would handle setting up our publishing business, and elaborated on how expenses would be handled.

You don’t have to know everything today, but you do want to be sure you’re happy with everything in the contract at the time that you sign it. You can change things later, but only if you both agree to sign an addendum, so make sure that you’re okay living with the terms of your contract forever, because it’s possible it will always be in force.

Dealing with contracts may not be the most pleasant part of collaboration, but having it negotiated and signed in advance (or right now if you’ve already begun!) can save you both personal and legal trouble in the future. It may feel like asking for a signed contract shows a lack of trust, but a written agreement protects all parties, and ultimately is another way that partners can show mutual respect for each other, by making sure that everyone is comfortable with the terms and protected in writing.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.

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.

While writing and publishing a book, any writer must make thousands of decisions, from story structure to word choice to publishing path. In a joint project, many of these decisions will need to be made as a team. While communication and mutual respect are fundamental to decision making, I want to take a moment to talk about some of the unique challenges to making decisions as a team.
Many decisions you make will come easily—the best course will be obvious, and you will agree about what to do. Let’s talk about what to do in those other times, when reaching a consensus requires communication and effort.

Care About Your Partner’s Needs
When making decisions in a partnership, it behooves you to care about your partner’s needs and look out for them with the same care that you look out for your self. It’s important to have boundaries, and I’m not advocating that you allow your partner to walk all over you. But respecting both your needs and your co-author’s will make you a more cooperative and kind collaborator, and set you up to treat your partner as a teammate and not as an opponent in the decision making process.

Decision-Making Styles
Like communication styles, decision-making styles can also vary. Some people make fast, instinctual decisions, while others like to take time to weigh all the evidence. Some people make decisions based mostly on how they feel, while others need to logically work out all possible ramifications before they can make a decision. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any decision making style—but if you make decisions differently from your partner, you’re going to need to recognize your differences and exercise patience with each other so that you can both come to conclusions you’re comfortable with.

I tend to trust my own instincts. On most matters, I come to decisions very quickly, and I don’t tend to second guess the decisions I make. This makes me very efficient when I’m working by myself, but it doesn’t make me the best communicator when it comes to making decisions as a team.

When I’m working with other fast decision makers, this is not a problem. Brandon and I can zip through ten huge decisions in a twenty minute phone call, because we both talk and think very quickly and come to fast decisions about what we’d each like to do. Even when we disagree, we tend to each state our cases immediately, and then either agree on what should happen next, or agree to revisit it at a later time after further consideration. That’s a wonderful asset, because I get limited face time with Brandon due to his busy schedule.

But not everyone thinks like I do, and when I’m working with a more methodical decision maker, I’ve had to learn to slow down and give time for my partner to think things through and get comfortable with their own decision before we can hash things out together. This isn’t an inherently better or worse way to make decisions; it’s simply different, and taking the time to accommodate both of our decision making styles allows both of us to fully contribute to the project at hand. Having patience for and awareness of our differences helps to avoid conflict and frustration as we each use our separate processes to get on the same page.

The State of Not Knowing
One of the biggest enemies to effective decision making, in my experience, is discomfort with the state of not knowing. When it comes to difficult decisions, it’s easy to focus on how much we wish the decision was already made. We’re nervous we won’t be able to come to a satisfactory solution. We’re afraid we will never solve these problems and will be unable to move forward. We don’t like being in a state of conflict with our partner (whether real or perceived), and we just want to agree already so the decision can be over. In this state, we fixate on what we want right now, which is to not have to have this conversation anymore.

This is, unfortunately, not a good mindset in which to make decisions. When we’re making decisions, our focus needs to be on brainstorming new solutions and weighing the costs and benefits of each. We need to be immersed all the way in the conversation, not trying to escape it.

Decision Challenges
Regardless of your decision making style, you will find that sometimes you agree and sometimes you disagree, sometimes you have strong feelings on what should be done, and sometimes your feelings are less strong. Especially in equal partnerships, the challenge of making decisions without a heirarchical structure can derail your progress on your collaborative project. Let’s look at some of the situations you’re likely to find yourself in when it comes to making partnership decisions, as well as some of the benefits and challenges of each.

You Have Different Ideas About What to Do
This is the situation everyone is most worried about, but in my experience it’s actually the easiest decision-making challenge to solve. If you both have different ideas about what should be done, that means you both have ideas! That’s wonderful, and something to be celebrated not feared.

The first thing to do is to listen to each other. It’s easy to let your emotions run away with you as you stew on the possibility that you won’t get what you want, but if you really listen to your partner, their perspective may change what you want so that you now want something else! Or it may not, but you don’t know until you’ve really given what your partner wants a fair chance.

As you each take turns making a case for the path you’d like to take, make sure to drill down to why you want the outcome you do. I’ve found that most often when my partner and I disagree about what to do in a given situation, be it a creative or business decision, it’s because we don’t understand the the reasons and logic behind the choices.

Once we understand the reason and logic, we can start looking for solutions that satisfy the why behind both our preferences. We might seem like we’re at an impass if one partner wants one thing and the other wants the opposite, but when we can see the intent behind the preference, we can start to look at decisions not as binaries, but as a nuanced set of possibilities. Keep discussing and brainstorming until one of you genuinely changes their mind based on the new information, or you find a solution that satisfies the why behind both of your preferences.

To find such a solution, you make need to back up until you find values you both share. If you’re making decisions about promotional opportunities, for example, your shared value might be that you both want to find new readers for your work, and you both want to try new promotional approaches as a means to reach those readers. One of you might think trying Amazon ads is a great next step, while the other might be afraid of putting money into ads at the risk of not seeing a return, but if you agree on the core goal, you have a place of agreement from which to base your discussion. Knowing the reason your partner objects—the why behind their opinion—can help you figure out how to mitigate their concerns and come up with a solution that suits both of you. Maybe there’s a different, less expensive marketing opportunity to try first. Maybe you can agree on a limited starting budget so the level of risk is in your partner’s comfort zone. However you compromise, your solution should take into account both of your opinions and the reasons behind them.

Be careful in your discussions that one of you doesn’t simply tire the other one out. The intent should be to make decisions that are best for both of you and the project, not to wait the other person out long enough to “win.” In fact, if one of you “wins,” everybody loses. If you find yourself (or your partner) ready to give in just to be done with the discussion, it’s time to shelve that decision and pull it out another day when you’re both fresh. Often, when your brain is sharp and rested again, new possibilities will occur to you. Your brain is likely to simmer on the problem in the background, and often you’ll both come up with new possibilities and perspectives if you give yourself a break and time to reset.

One Partner has a Strong Opinion; the Other Doesn’t
On the surface this is the easiest situation in which to make decisions. The partner with the strong opinion makes the decision, and you’re done. Right?

Maybe. It’s okay to allow the person who is more invested to make decisions . . . sometimes. But some people have more enthusiastic personalities—maybe they honestly care more deeply about more things, or perhaps they simply express that they care more exuberantly than other people.

I am such a personality type—my expression of my opinion can ere on the side of the dramatic. And I can tell you, if my partner defaults to my preference every time I express my opinion with more gusto than they do, this very quickly becomes a very big problem.

I’d suggest that the person who is more invested can safely make decisions that mostly affect them. At one point, Megan and I heard that TikTok was becoming a good tool for book promotion. Megan volunteered to check it out, and began the process of researching and posting. I offered suggestions, but ultimately I let Megan spearhead the push, because she was the one doing the work. She was the one whose workload was affected by the decisions. My personality is such that I can summon an opinion on virtually any subject at will, but it would have been inappropriate for me to primarily make the decisions when I wasn’t the one who was having to carry out the results of those decisions with my own labor.

In situations where you are both equally affected, if one person genuinely cares a lot more than the other, it’s fine to let that person have their way . . . as long as this happens about an equal amount of the time. If the same person always cares more, then they will overtime exert an undue influence on the project, and the work gets deprived of the more reserved partner’s influence. So go ahead and make decisions this way, but keep an eye on the pattern. If you find one of you much more frequently cares more and therefore gets their way more, you’re adding an imbalance to the partnership and depriving your project of one partner’s input. If that’s the case, you’ll need to stop making so many decisions based on strength of opinion alone.

What do you do then? Forget about how strong an opinion is. Remove that aspect from your conversation entirely. Really focus on the “why” behind your opinions, as you would do in a situation where you disagree, and keep discussing it until you find a solution that suits both your opinions, no matter how strong.

In this situation, it will probably be tempting for the partner with the less strong opinion to undercut the conversation by announcing something to the effect of, “I don’t really care that much anyway,” or “we can just do it your way, I don’t care!” This might be an attempt to avoid conflict, or an honest attempt to let the other person have their way. And if decisions get made that way on occasion, that’s perfectly fine! But if you’ve already identified this as a problem in your partnership, it’s best not to give in to that impulse. If you are the less forceful partner, you need to shift your focus to value your own opinion, even if you perceive yourself to be less invested. Offer your opinion with confidence, without worrying that it isn’t strong enough to be valuable. If you are the partner with the stronger opinion, gently remind your partner that you want to know what they think, even if they don’t perceive it to be a strongly held belief. Reassure them that you want to know because you value their input, and that you don’t require them to pledge fealty to a particular position in order to find it valuable to the project.

You Both Hate All The Options
Sometime, you may find yourself in a position where you both hate all the options, but you still have to make a decision. Maybe it’s become clear you’re going to miss a deadline and you have to figure out what to prioritize and what to let go. Maybe you’ve just discovered a massive plot problem that’s going to involve rewriting thousands of words, or abandoning everything you’ve written and starting over. Maybe your hoped-for publishing opportunity fell through, and now you have to pivot and form a new plan in non-ideal circumstances. I’ve had all these things happen, and it sucks! In publishing, things frequently go wrong and we have to move on to plan B, C, or Z, and it’s perfectly fine not to be happy with your options under those circumstances.

But, even in the face of only bad options, decisions still have to be made, and paths ahead still have to be forged. If you find that you don’t disagree so much as simply dislike the available prospects, I’d suggest you also focus on the why behind your feelings. Why don’t you like this option? Why don’t you like that one? Digging in to why you’re both less than thrilled with the available choices will help you figure out what would make the situation more palatable to both of you—or which of the bad options feel the least bad under the circumstances. Sort through the choices and stay committed to finding a solution that works for both of you—even if you’re passionately arguing for why you don’t want to do things, instead of advocating for things you do want.

No One Cares Either Way
In my experience, the hardest decisions to make as a team are not the ones where you disagree, but the times when no one has a strong opinion at all. I think of these as the “oh, I don’t care, do whatever you want” decisions. That’s a great and fine answer to get from your partner when you know what you want—the promise you are free to do it (so long as it is genuine and not masking deeper feelings), can be a real gift!

But if you also don’t care about the outcome, if you were in fact asking because you don’t care and you only wanted someone to make the decision for you, then having the decision kicked back to you puts you at risk of getting caught in a game of decision-making ping-pong where you both try to get the other person to make the decision.

Unlike with genuine disagreements, you don’t have any opinions to fall back on or drill down to the why. Why don’t you care? Probably because this decision matters very little in the long run, but it nevertheless has to be made, and one (or both) of you has to make it. And the more times you parry the decision back and forth, the more likely it is that one or both of you will become frustrated that something so unimportant is taking up so much time and effort.

The first thing to do in a situation like this is to make sure that you’re both being honest. If one (or both) of you is secretly harboring a deeply-held opinion that you are witholding from the other in an effort to be accommodating, you probably believe you are being helpful and considerate when you are actually being obstructive. Fundamental to decision making is the requirement that everyone must practice good communication—and that means being upfront and honest about your opinions and needs.

If you are both being honest and no one in fact cares about the outcome of this decision at all, then you need to examine if there is anything either of you really doesn’t want to be the outcome of the decision. Go ahead and rule out any options that either of you are truly opposed to. You should be left with only the choices that you’re both truly, one-hundred percent honestly okay with.

After that, you just need to pick something and move on with your lives. It’s fine to assign one person to do this, so long as the same person doesn’t always get stuck making all the decisions no one wants to make, because if that position is unwanted it can quickly build resentment. Flip a coin, if you must, but please, choose and move on before you get into an argument about something that doesn’t really matter.

It’s tempting in this circumstance to tell yourself you’re doing your partner a favor by letting them make the decision, but recognize that if you continue to give your partner no support except to announce that you don’t care, you’re actually shifting the mental burden onto them. Instead, show commitment to your partnership by offering to share in the decision, even if sharing means you dig out your own coin and do the flipping.

If flipping a coin sounds untenable to you, there’s probably some underlying anxiety surrounding this decision that’s affecting one or both of you. If it truly didn’t matter, deciding at random would be a great option! So if that’s the case, try to get to the root of the anxiety that’s paralyzing you, and recognize that it may be about something entirely different. Decision paralysis can be a symptom of a larger problem in your partnership, and if it is, you’ll want to openly and honestly communicate about that rather than convincing yourself it’s all about this inconsequential choice. There is nothing more frustrating or futile than trying to solve the wrong problem, so make sure you’ve correctly identified the conversation you should be having, so you don’t drive both you and your partner insane.

Fall Back on your Contract
When you begin a collaboration, you can’t possibly communicate about every problem that might come up in advance. There are too many variables and surprises inherent in writing and publishing to think of everything that might possibly go wrong. But there are some key things that you’ll want to have already decided before you write a word (or, if you’ve already written words, decided right now, don’t wait!)
I’m talking about your collaboration contract. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about why you (yes, you!) need one, what should be included, and how that will help simplify your communication about the project going forward.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.

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.

Let’s face it, most people are not the best communicators. Even those who are good at communication in some circumstances can devolve quickly when they’re upset, stressed, or disagreeing about things that deeply matter. If you’re writing a book with another person, you’re bound to find yourself in all of those situations at one time or another. And when you do, you’re likely to engage in some unhelpful communication strategies in an effort to manage your own stress level and to get what you want—but when you do, you sabotage your own goals and your partnership.
Let’s start by talking about what our communication with our partner should not look like. Lest you think I’m judging you again, you should know that I’ve made all of these mistakes in my collaborative relationships at one point or another, so trust me, I know how easy it is to fall into unhelpful communication patterns, and how much better your communication can be when you learn to avoid those traps.

What Not To Do

Begin with Accusations
If you’re upset about something that’s going poorly in your partnership, one of the worst things you can do is begin that conversation with an accusation. Announcing to your partner that “You never doing any of the work!” or “You didn’t do any of the things you said you would do!” or “You’re being a bully!” will only serve to shut down communication and put them on the defensive. When you begin with accusations, you ensure that what follows will go poorly. If your partner is an ideal communicator, they might sidestep your invitation for unproductive discourse, but it’s not fair to rely on them to get the partnership back on course when you’ve so thoroughly disembarked from the path of productive communication yourself.

Assume You Know What Your Partner Is Thinking
This goes along with accusations, but one should never assume that they know what their partner was thinking, and should certainly never assume malice. When you accuse your partner of failing to write a chapter they agreed to out of spite, or intentionally ignoring a request that they may simply have forgotten, or pretending to be confused to manipulate you, you deprive yourself of really knowing what was happening on your partner’s side. Maybe they had a legitimate problem with that chapter and were waiting to talk to you about how to proceed. Maybe they simply misunderstood your request, or didn’t receive it. Maybe they honestly forgot. Maybe they are honestly confused.

It’s hard enough to keep track of what’s going on in our own minds; it’s never helpful to assume what’s going on in your partner’s, particularly if you’re telling yourself an unflattering story. It’s tempting to make yourself the hero of the story, deserving of grace for your own failings, while painting your partner as the villain who did things to harm you on purpose.

But unless you are working with an actual super villain, this is unlikely to be the case. Generally people do things for legitimate reasons. Even if they’ve made a mistake, they probably didn’t do so to intentionally sabotage their business partner. Asking questions will get you a lot farther toward solving problems than baseless assumptions.

Address Issues in the Heat of the Moment
If most arguments start because the instigator is feeling a high level of stress and emotion, it stands to reason that most of us do better addressing issues after we’ve calmed down a bit. It’s tempting to jump in (often with an assumption and an accusation) at the exact moment your annoyance is triggered, which is why so many annoyances build up over time, only to be unloaded at the smallest infraction. This leaves your co-author feeling blindsided and attacked, and also gives the impression that you’re blowing the whole issue out of proportion.

And with good reason! They are being blindsided and attacked, and the things that trigger ire in the moment are rarely the soul of the issue at hand. You’ll have much better success if you swallow your outburst in the moment, do some soul searching about what’s actually bothering you, and present your concerns when you are ready to be kind and thoughtful, rather than when you’re filled to bursting with emotion.

Speak in Absolutes
As much as we all love to throw around words like “I always” and “you never,” these words are helpful even less often than they are true. Rather than generalizing a problem into something your partner “always” or “never” does, stick to the issue at hand. Did they do this thing this one time? Is it observable and true? You’re much more likely to get a positive response when talking about a specific instance than you are when you bring “always” and “never” into the equation.

In the event that you need to talk about a pattern of behavior, you can still avoid speaking in absolutes. “I’ve noticed when X happens you tend to Y, for example last week when . . .” will still get a better response than “Everytime X happens you always Y . . .”

Overgeneralizing raises the chances that your discussion will devolve into the definition of “always” or become focused on the times when your partner had a different response, which is not helpful and won’t get your problem addressed.

Sugarcoat at the Expense of Clarity
So far we’ve discussed aggressive communication strategies, and those of you who are less prone to outburst are probably feeling pretty good about yourselves! Alas, being too nice can be just as destructive to a partnership as accusations or attacks; when you sugarcoat your opinions to the point of obscuring them, your mangle your message so it won’t be clearly received.

Being too nice? Is this really a problem? It is, because communication cannot occur when one partner is so concerned about hurting the other’s feelings or causing conflict that they hide the full extent of the truth from their partner. Over time, unaddressed problems will build up, and the partner who doing the sugarcoating will be unable to get their needs met or their voice heard. At best, this causes resentment and confusion, which is bad enough, but it can be much worse.

I’m aware of one partnership in which the partner in charge of the finances was afraid to tell their team that they were having cash flow problems. Because the situation was sugarcoated, the team made several financial decisions they would not have made if they had understood the full truth, landing them in a mountain of debt, unable to fulfill their obligations to their customers, and leaving them on the verge of bankruptcy. In the worst cases, withheld information may result in grave errors that can be both traumatic and costly, potentially ending the partnership and having ramifications that outlast it.

It’s good to be kind and to care about your partner’s feelings, but the kindest thing in any circumstance is to make sure that your honest input is communicated clearly, even if you know your partner isn’t going to like it.

Stay Silent to Keep the Peace
A sister to sugarcoating, remaining silent about problems in your partnership will only allow those problems to fester. Contrary to the Disney wisdom, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” in a partnership you must speak your mind. Communication is not limited to either speaking with accusations or remaining silent; we can all learn to speak clearly and kindly, even when we know our partner may not like what we have to say.

Give Up Too Early
Many partnerships end because, instead of trying to communicate more clearly and recognizing their own contributions to miscommunication, partners let resentment build until it seems the only thing left to do is walk away. Some partnerships must end, especially if one collaborator refuses invitations to communicate appropriately or demonstrate mutual respect over a long period of time. But many times, if we really look at our own behavior and make changes, things can improve and the partnership can continue. Giving up too early deprives everyone of the opportunity to grow, change, and discover what beautiful things might come out of the collaborative creative process.

A Word about Boundaries, Ultimatums, and Threats
Everyone knows you’re supposed to have good boundaries, but so many times when we go to express them, what comes out is not a boundary, but instead a threat or an ultimatum, both of which are destructive communication practices. So what is the difference?

A boundary is a clear expression of what you will do in a given circumstance. It is tied to concrete behavior, and very specific. For example, “When you speak to me in that way, I feel attacked. In the future, if you begin to take a harsh tone in your criticism, I will immediately end the conversation. We can continue the conversation later, when we’ve both calmed down.” Boundaries are a fantastic tool for communicating what you are and are not okay with in the context of a partnership.

But so often when we mean to communicate a clear boundary, we miss the mark. What comes out is an ultimatum, or worse, a threat. An ultimatum is a statement that unfairly leverages the future of the partnership in an attempt to change our partner’s behavior. Our previous example might morph from boundary to ultimatum thusly: “If you ever speak that way to me again then we are done working together.” Occasionally an ultimatum is a necessary measure, but it’s only appropriate when dealing with the worst kinds of behavior. It is perfectly fair (though hopefully unnecessary in most situations!) to say, “If you physically assault me, our partnership will be over.” But the vast majority of behaviors do not warrant this kind of leveraging of the relationship, and so ultimatums are best avoided in almost all cases. When they are used in unwarranted situations, they are a form of coercion. One partner is forced to capitulate to the other or risk losing the partnership entirely, which is manipulative, unfair, and will create an unhealthy working dynamic over time.

Of course, sometimes we don’t stop at ultimatums. Sometimes we slide even further down the inappropriate communication rabbit hole into threats. What makes a statement a threat? Unlike a boundary, which focuses on clear, concrete, and appropriate actions you will take, such as removing yourself from a harmful situation, a threat doubles down on the problematic behavior you’re trying to address and adds to it a promise that you, too, will also behave badly. “If you ever speak to me like that again I will post your response on the Internet so everyone will know what a big jerk you are!” Ouch. Now we’ve moved from taking clear steps to protect ourselves into retribution territory, and retribution has no place in a partnership. The old adage, “two wrongs don’t make a right” has never applied more. So when you’re ready to address problems in your partnership, check yourself to make sure your boundaries aren’t being communicated in the form of ultimatums or threats, because doing so will deeply mar your message and greatly reduce the likelihood your communication will be favorably received.

This kind of communication also increases the likelihood of escalation, where both of you devolve into poorer and poorer communication strategies. This, my friends, is how partnerships come to miserable, dramatic, and unnecessary ends.

What About Your Partner?
As you read this, chances are you’re seeing yourself in some of these strategies. That’s okay! It’s even a good thing; it puts you miles ahead of the writer who is certain their communication is always perfect and pure. It also arms you with information you may need to improve your own communication in your partnership.

But what if you’re also seeing your partner in some of these problems? What if your partner also sometimes puts you on the defensive, assumes what you’re thinking, or stays silent when they should speak up?

First, it’s again important to remember that we can only change ourselves. If we try to change our partners, we will cause new problems rather than solve old ones. Secondly, we can’t even make suggestions about our partner’s communication when we are embroiled in poor communication strategies ourselves. Drowning people are better helped when their rescuers have solid footing; if we start to make suggestions about our partner’s poor communication when we are, ourselves, issuing ultimatums or beginning with accusations, they will be quick to point out our hypocrisy, and our message will be obfuscated.

So, much like with mutual respect, we need to first work on our own communication failings, and then decide which, if any, of our partner’s communication problems need to be brought up in a clear way at a time when we are not currently on fire with emotion about them.

And then, once you have clearly presented your partner with your suggestions about how they might also help improve communication between you, it’s up to them whether they want to take you up on your suggestion and make changes. You aren’t responsible for anyone’s behavior but your own, but if you’ve made kind suggestions on multiple occasions, without accusation, assumption, sugarcoating, or emotional charge, and your partner isn’t receptive to hearing what you’re saying or respectful of your boundaries over a period of time, then it might be time to consider whether the partnership can be saved.

What To Do
We’ve covered what not to do, but it’s difficult to avoid unhelpful behaviors unless we can replace them with tools that are more useful and likely to succeed. Let’s talk about some of those.

Say What You Mean
This may seem simple, but it’s amazing how much of the time, especially in casual speech, we say something completely different than what we mean. And despite our imprecise language, we then want to hold other people accountable for what we said, even though in many cases we didn’t actually communicate the things we meant in the first place.

Don’t complain to your partner about their bad grammar when you’re actually upset at them for making a story decision you don’t like. Don’t open a conversation with “this is probably a stupid idea, but . . .” unless you think it is, in fact, a stupid idea. Don’t begin a sentence with “this isn’t a big deal, but . . .” if it is, in fact, a big deal. Definitely don’t threaten to abandon your partnership unless you are actually ready to quit, and have thought this through and made that decision at a time when you were clear headed instead of the heat of the moment.

Many misunderstandings can be headed off if we take the time to make sure what we’re saying is what we actually mean—and that we’re getting at the core of the issue instead of dancing around it complaining about things that ultimately don’t matter.

Speak to Your Own Experience
Instead of attacking your partner or assuming what they’re thinking, you can stick to your own experiences. “I was frustrated when I didn’t receive that chapter on time,” is much more likely to get a helpful response than “You don’t respect our agreements.” One makes an assumption about your partner’s intent, while the other speaks only to things about which you have firsthand knowledge. Likewise, when addressing your partner’s behavior, you can use words that recognize that you don’t have access to what’s going on in their mind. “You seem upset about . . .” will get you a lot further than a certain accusation about your partner’s inner thoughts.

Be Open to Your Partner’s Perspective
Chances are, your partner also has things that are bothering them, things they may not have addressed with you yet. Some of these things may be connected to the same things you’re experiencing, and others might be things that aren’t bothering you at all. Regardless, we need to enter conversations open to our partner’s ideas and perspective, not only when we’re brainstorming the work but also when we’re troubleshooting challenges.

If we want to be heard in our partnerships, we need to be equally willing to listen. If we want our partners to be receptive to our ideas, we need to be equally receptive to theirs.

Seek to Deescalate
If ultimatums and threats can escalate a conflict, then kind, understanding, patient words can have the opposite effect. If you notice anger is brewing and communication is devolving, take a moment to ask yourself what the most kind, helpful, and understanding response might be. How can you—without ignoring the conflict at hand—begin to deescalate the circumstances of the conversation so that communication can happen in a calm and clear manner? This starts with an intention; so many of the unhelpful communication strategies stoke the fires of conflict or burrow into the sands of avoidance. Instead, when we actively commit to fostering understanding and deescalating conflict, we can steer derailed conversations back onto a more productive course.

Address One Issue at a Time and Stay on Topic
When you begin to discuss a problem in your partnership, it’s tempting to pull out every single problem that has been bothering you and pile it on top of the heap. While we’re all uncomfortable, might as well be uncomfortable about everything at once, right?

Wrong. When we jump around from problem to problem, we risk confusing our partner or causing them to feel ambushed, which will make everyone less capable of handling the situation maturely and proposing intelligent solutions.

Beginning with one problem and resolving it will help to get that one problem solved in a calmer and more logical fashion. It might mean we need to have multiple conversations, but many conversations in which problems are solved are miles better than one conversation which only buries you deeper.

Have Your Partner’s Best Interests At Heart
Disputes with your partner should be about finding compromises and solutions that work for both of you, not about winning a debate. At all times, we should treat our partners as human beings with needs and desires that matter to us, whether they match up with our own or not. When you care as much about your partner getting what they want as you do about achieving your own goals, you’ll slow down, listen to their perspective, and be eager to find compromises that work for both of you.

Speak Up For Yourself
But definitely don’t give up everything you want in an attempt to make your partner happy! This, like silence and sugarcoating, will only do a disservice to your project and lead to more problems down the road. Your ideas are also important, and you deserve to be heard! When you are each valuing and listening to the other’s perspective, that’s where the magic happens, so be sure to speak up—kindly and clearly—so that your ideas and your needs don’t get lost.

Back to boundaries—it’s important that you respect yourself by clearly communicating what is and isn’t okay with you, and taking reasonable, non-threatening or relationship-leveraging steps to protect yourself, like ending a conversation that has gone off the rails to return to it at a later, safer time.

Keep Talking Until You Reach a Consensus
Part of the social contract in your partnership, particularly in an equal partnership structure, is that neither of you will try to end a conversation early as a means of trying to get your way. You might end the conversation for the moment so that everyone has time to think, calm down, or brainstorm new ideas. You certainly should have boundaries for when it’s time to give it up for the day and come back later. But no negotiation can be truly laid to bed until both people have agreed without being pressured, manipulated, or coerced.

In all conversations, it’s important that we remain flexible without being people-pleasing. If we’re too rigid, we’ll use manipulative tactics or giving up too soon. If we prioritize keeping the peace over finding a consensus, then the decisions we make as a partnership will be worse, and we will also feel worse about them. Decisions made under coercive circumstances or made quickly just to please our partner almost always come around to bite us later in the form of resentment, which will we address in chapter ten.

That was a lot of strategies, both positive and negative, and chances are you’re great at some of them and less so at others. Like with mutual respect, we would all love to work with (and be!) a partner who uses only helpful communication and avoids all destructive communication strategies at all times. Unfortunately, that person also does not exist. We all communicate with a mix of helpful and unhelpful strategies, with our own unique fingerprint of strengths and weaknesses.
The good news is that communication is a skill like any other, and you can change your behavior and do better in the future. Learning to communicate clearly and kindly will help you prevent a whole host of partnership issues, and will make those that can’t be prevented a whole lot more pleasant (and possible!) to work through.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.

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.

We talked about mutual respect somewhat in the last chapter, but it’s important enough to merit a chapter of its own. We’ve established that many collaboration contracts take it as a given that you each respect each other’s work. Otherwise, why would you work with this person? This is as true in a tiered partnership as it is in an equal one—if a senior co-writer has no respect for their partner’s work, they certainly should not have selected that person to work on one of their projects.

If you’ve decided to work with your partner, even after considering the questions in the last chapter, there must be a central respect that underpins your collaborative relationship. The question, then, is not whether your respect your partner in principle, but whether you respect them in practice.

It’s all too easy for partners in a collaboration to have theoretical respect for each other but fail to demonstrate that respect in their actions. Below are several ways in which creative partners ought to show respect to each other, and a summary of the things that might go wrong if either partner is failing to respect the other.

Creative Input
This is perhaps the most obvious but also one of the most important; each partner in any collaboration needs to respect the creative input of the other. That means that equal partners both voice their own ideas and continue discussing them until everyone is happy with the conclusion. Partners who dominate the conversation or insist on their own ideas are disrespecting their partner by failing to value their ideas. Partners who withhold their own ideas, rushing instead to agree with the other person, disrespect the collaboration process by withholding their own contributions from the shared space. Both problems will inevitably result in a product that is less than it could have been, and will probably also result in conflict, hurt feelings, and a partnership that doesn’t function as it should.

Respect might look slightly different in a tiered partnership, but it is no less important; one partner may have more power to make their ideas heard and reflected in the final product, but that only means they should be extra careful not to derail the collaboration process by being overbearing. An overbearing senior partner can silence their co-writer’s input, to the detriment of the product and the relationship alike.

To show respect for your partner’s creative input, listen to and value their ideas. In an equal partnership, be sure the book reflects the best of what you both bring to the table, and champion your partner’s ideas as strongly as you do your own. In a tiered partnership, senior partners should value their co-author’s unique contributions, and junior partners should seek to create a product that honors their co-author’s vision.

Process Differences
When one partner demands that their process is the only way they can work—telling the other partner that they must do it that way or not at all—that partner is demonstrating a lack of respect for their partner’s needs. No collaboration is going to proceed exactly like a solo work. Writers who insist that they can only write in One True Way are going to struggle with co-writing, because in a partnership each author needs to adapt somewhat to the needs of their partner, rather than only their own individual needs.

Partners should instead be sensitive to each other’s needs, and prepare to be as flexible as they can be to accommodate other ways of doing things. Sometimes this will mean trying new strategies and tactics, or working in ways that are not perfectly ideal for either of you. That’s okay! Most of the work that gets done in the world happens under less-than-ideal circumstances. Human beings, fortunately, are very capable of adaptation. The success of your partnership will depend not only on your ability to grow and change, but on your willingness to do so.

In some tiered partnerships, the junior partner may be entering into a pre-existing collaborative process; senior partners who frequently collaborate may have a set method by which they work with junior partners, and they may not be open to change. In these cases, the senior partner can show respect for the junior partner by being upfront about those expectations, so the junior partner can effectively evaluate whether they will be able to work within that framework before work begins. Senior partners can also show respect for their collaborators by making exceptions where appropriate and necessary, to the extent that they are able. If the partnership is healthy, junior partners should still be able to request adaptations to the process, even if not all adaptations can be accepted.

Time Commitment
Everyone has a different schedule, different life demands, and different priorities. You may have all the time in the world to devote to writing on your shared project, but your partner may not, and it’s important to be respectful of your partner’s availability and writing speed. A collaboration has to move forward at the speed of the slower partner. If you’re the speed demon in your partnership, you’ll need to adjust your expectations and be patient. If you’re dealing with a large mismatch in writing speeds, it can be beneficial for the speedier partner to have other projects ongoing, so they have something else to occupy them while they wait.
You can also respect your co-writer’s time by showing up on time to meetings, staying on task during planning sessions, and communicating about problems in a timely fashion rather than letting them fester and derail the writing process. Make sure to complete your own work on time. When you meet your mutually agreed-upon deadlines, you show respect for your partner by honoring your commitments. Of course, sometimes things happen and you won’t be able to meet your commitments. In those cases, it shows respect to your partner when you communicate about delays promptly and with clarity.

Life Circumstances
No two people have exactly the same set of challenges and circumstances, and it’s important to have respect for each other’s outside demands and work/life balance. One writer might have the ability to drop everything to meet a deadline, while another might have outside commitments that prevent them from doing so. Some partners may have only one creative project, while others may have many writing projects competing for their attention, each with their own set of demands and deadlines.
Life circumstances aren’t static—they can change either gradually or dramatically at any time during the duration of the partnership. Illness, disability, and bereavement are all circumstances that may, temporarily or permanently, alter a partner’s ability to meet their deadlines and complete projects. I personally have worked with multiple partners through a variety of life-changing health events—in the midst of a personal or family health crisis, it does no one any good for partners to place pressure on each other to be able to work through as if nothing had happened. Partners show respect for each other by remaining flexible and allowing the terms of the writing process to change to fit new and evolving circumstances.

When You’ve Lost Respect
I’ve talked about co-authorship beginning from a place of respect, but it’s possible that you didn’t have a choice in your partner. If you’re coming to writing collaboratively from a corporate setting or some other framework where you’ve been assigned a partner, you may not respect their work, or they may not respect yours. Perhaps neither of you begin with respect for each other. Perhaps you did choose your partner, but things have gone so poorly that you can’t remember why you chose to work with this person in the first place. You certainly wouldn’t choose to work with them knowing what you know now, but you also don’t feel ready to abandon the project.

What then?

In truth, I believe your project is doomed to be a very frustrating experience—and probably produce a less-than-optimal product—unless you can find some mutual respect. You’re not going to be able to listen to each other and find synergy—or even compromise—unless you can come to respect each other’s strengths and value what each of you brings to the table. You may think your assigned partner is a bad writer, or a bad communicator, or a bad project organizer. That might even be true! But unless they are in fact illiterate and unable to form a sentence, they have something to contribute. And even then, they might have some ideas to add that you didn’t think of yourself.

If you find yourself lacking in respect for your partner, I recommend you begin by accepting that you can’t change your partner; you can only change yourself. Continued efforts to get your partner to contribute more or differently or better are going to result in frustration for both of you until you step aside, consider what you could be doing to help the project go better, find respect for your partner whether they return that respect or not, and proceed in an intentional and kind manner.

To begin, make a list of your partner’s strengths. Every writer has them, and chances are as you’ve focused on all the reasons you don’t want to work with this person, you’ve let those weaknesses seem a lot bigger than the things the other person brings to the table. Be honest with yourself, and recognize the things that your partner does well, and what you appreciate about their work. Dig deep if you have to; somewhere down there are the seeds of mutual respect, and you have to nurture them if you want them to grow.

Take your time if you need to, but make a list of as many things you admire about your partner as you can think of. Then, when you’re done, make a list of your own strengths, the things you bring to the table. Resist the urge to frame this as comparative: you can note that you are excellent at organization without having to assert that you are better at organization than your partner. Even if its true, reminding yourself of your own perceived superiority is going to breed resentment, not respect.

Once you have those lists, start with your own weaknesses. Again, be honest about your own failures and habits. This is where you’re going to find humility; it’s easy to be frustrated with your partner about their own failings while turning a blind eye to all the things that make you difficult to work with. We all have weaknesses—things that make us frustrating to deal with sometimes. I certainly have these traits, and you do, too. Taking some time to be honest with yourself will help you to have perspective on your partner’s traits that you find difficult. And, while you’re at it, if you find you’ve had a hard time making a list of things to admire about your partner, you might want to add “critical” or “judgmental” to the list of your own weaknesses.

Chances are after reading that last paragraph, you may be feeling judged by me! In fact, if I were to make a list of my own weaknesses, I would certainly list “critical” among them, so I’m certainly not judging you if that’s something you need to overcome for your partnership to flourish. Having a critical eye is an asset for a writer, but it becomes a problem when it gets aimed at your co-author rather than the work. We’ve all got things we need to work on about ourselves, and we will be a whole lot less frustrated (and more successful!) if we work on and recognize those things instead of focusing fruitlessly on changing the other person.

But does that mean that we need to accept the other person’s behavior wholesale? Absolutely not! Now that you’ve got your three lists, now and only now is it time for the fourth one; list the things that bother you about working with your partner. Go ahead and put down all the things that frustrate you, all the reasons you’re struggling to find respect for them.

Once you have that list, I would encourage you to consider if any of the items on it are truly terrible things to which you should not continue to subject yourself. I would never suggest that all weaknesses are things to be worked around or put up with. If among your partner’s weaknesses, you’ve listed anything that puts you or others in danger, anything that amounts to abuse or harassment, then you should do everything in your power to extricate yourself from that partnership. I think we can still find respect for people who have odious qualities. Every human being is a complex person worthy of a basic level of respect. But some things are deal-breakers in any working relationship, and if you see any of those extreme sorts of behaviors on your list, it’s time to find a path out, however hard that might be.
If you don’t, however, it’s time to put your problems in perspective. You’re not looking at terrible abuses, but you are looking at things that are bothering you, things that are standing in the way of your optimal co-creative process.

Take a good look at that list, and be honest about what’s really bothering you. Is everything on the list of equal weight? Or are there some things that you could safely ignore, as you would hope that your partner would overlook some of your own list of weaknesses? Try to focus on only the top one or two things that are really causing a problem. Then remind yourself that having weaknesses is human—you have a whole list of your own weaknesses to remind you of this, after all!—and that having weaknesses doesn’t make a person unworthy of respect.

Try to find that respect in yourself, and recognize that you’re dealing with a human being with feelings and goals of their own, and that, especially if you’re going to continue to work with each other, you need to get yourself into a place of baseline respect before you can move forward with the project.
Star for yourself those (maximum of) one or two things that are really bothering you about your co-writing relationship. Then go to your own list of weaknesses and star a couple of things that you want to work on, things that are really getting in the way of producing the best project you can, and your own enjoyment and fulfillment in the context of this partnership.

Now that you’ve found both respect and humility it’s time to move on to the second-most important aspect of your partnership.

It’s time to communicate.

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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.

When looking to form a specialized team, it’s wise to be careful about who you invite to contribute. Any co-writer will bring unique strengths and weaknesses to the table, but you won’t enjoy collaborating with literally everyone. Choosing a co-writer who doesn’t work well with you is bound to end in drama, hurt feelings and a whole lot of disappointment.

So what should you look for in a partner? Here are several benchmarks to consider. I’ll list them first, and then elaborate on each.

Do I respect this person? Do they respect me?
How do we communicate? Can I see myself bringing problems to this person and having a productive conversation that works toward solutions? How does this person respond in situations where we disagree?
Can this person take feedback on their work? How will I feel when they offer criticism of mine?
Does this person finish what they start? Do I trust them to stay committed for the duration of the project, however long that might be? Do I believe we are equally committed to working through challenges, roadblocks, and partnership struggles to see the project through?
How does this person’s experience level compare to mine? How will that affect the way we work together?
What are my goals for this project? Do they align with this person’s goals, both for this project and their writing in general?
How will I feel if this partnership doesn’t work out?

Let’s talk through each of these and how they might affect your decision to work with (or not work with!) your prospective partner.

Mutual Respect
I’m going to cover mutual respect in depth in chapter six, but I’ll say a few words about it here. Mutual respect is so important that many co-writing contracts begin with some variation of “whereas both parties respect the work of the other.” It’s not a contractual obligation that you respect each other so much as a contractual presupposition. A prerequisite. An assumption.

There’s good reason for that. If you don’t respect the work of your co-author, how are you going to feel about their contributions to your shared work? If they don’t respect your work, how are they going to respond to yours?

Any co-writing relationship is built on the basic assumption that you both have strengths to offer and that those strengths are invaluable to the partnership. We also all have weaknesses, and finding humility and the ability to admit when we’re wrong will be instrumental in any collaborative endeavor.

Communication
There are thousands of decisions that go into writing and marketing a novel, and when you’re working with a partner, you’ll need to communicate about all of them. Even if you divide the responsibilities, you’ll still need to communicate about what that division of labor will be, and about your individual progress as you work.

For that reason, it’s worth looking at how you communicate. In your existing relationship, do you feel comfortable bringing problems to this person? How do you witness them treating others when they experience conflict? A good rule of thumb is that people will treat you the way you see them treat others; if your co-writer has a habit of gossiping to you about problems they have with other people but never seems to address those problems with the people directly involved, that’s a huge red flag, and should give you pause about entering into a business relationship.

Likewise, think about how you’ve witnessed this person handle disagreements with others. Some people are direct communicators; they’ll tell you exactly what they think, no matter what it is. Other people are indirect communicators; they’ll try to gently suggest a problem without stating it outright. Both can cause communication problems: direct communicators tend to step on toes and hurt feelings, while indirect communicators may mask issues, never fully admitting there’s a problem until it becomes enormous and difficult to solve.

Based on what you know of this person, how do you feel about their ability to handle disagreements as they come up? How do you feel about their communication style? Do you have confidence that you will be able to foster an environment where everyone can be heard? If the answer is no, you will want think twice about partnering with that person.

Writing and publishing can be stressful, so it’s very likely that you and your partner are going to see both the best and the worst of each other. There have been moments in all of my partnerships where I’ve had to deal with my partners’ worst traits, and they have certainly all had to deal with mine. Think about what you know about your prospective partner’s worst behavior, and ask yourself if you can handle working with that. Be honest! Even if someone is the world’s best partner ninety-five percent of the time, if you’re unable to handle working with them the other five percent, the partnership isn’t going to function.

Feedback
Likewise, how does this person take feedback? When you give them suggestions about their work, are they defensive or receptive? We’ve talked about how you’ll need to leave your ego at the door—do you think this person is capable of setting their ego aside to listen to your input?

The truth is, not all writers are equally good at taking feedback. We can’t control our emotional response to it, but we can control how we express that emotional response to others. Your partner doesn’t need to love being told that their work needs, well, more work, but if you can’t imagine them taking it well and being receptive to necessary changes, you are likely to run into problems sooner rather than later.

Commitment
Here’s a hard truth: more people begin to write books than finish them. If you want to finish a co-authored book, you need a partner with good work habits. Have they ever finished a book-length project before? Do they stick with projects all the way through, or do they wander when the shine wears off? Do they endure through challenges, or do they give up on projects as soon as the going gets hard?

One of the benefits of collaboration is social pressure—some people stick with projects much better when they know someone is counting on them, so their ability to finish solo projects may not be entirely indicative of their ability to commit to a collaboration. But it’s still something to consider, as you don’t want to invest your heart and soul in a book only to have your partner wander away when the first act is done. In fact, this is the most common problem I hear about when I’m approached for collaboration advice at events: my partner was really excited in the beginning, but now they’ve wandered away. Do some thinking about your partner’s track record (and your own!) before you begin, so you can prepare yourself for what to expect.

Comparative Experience
If you wait to find someone who has your exact same level of experience, you may be waiting for a long time. Even in an equal partnership, experience levels may vary, and this can be a good thing! Partners with less experience can receive significant mentorship while still holding an equal stake in the project—but it’s still worth considering if your prospective partner has enough experience.

Personally, I won’t collaborate on a novel with a partner who has never finished one on their own. I’ve written over fifty books, and most of my co-authors have not. That’s fine, but I want to know that they have the basic skills required to finish a novel; I want to spend my time developing this book, not teaching my partner how to write a book in the first place.

Likewise, if you are the less experienced partner, you might want to consider if you have enough experience to feel confident collaborating. Don’t underestimate your own ability to contribute, but also make sure you feel comfortable in your own skills before you begin working with a partner.

If you’ve never finished a book and your partner is similarly inexperienced, that could be fine! You’ll learn together. But I recommend taking a minute to consider your relative experience and how that might change what you expect out of the partnership.

Goals and Ambition
It’s also good to compare your individual career goals. A driven partner who is looking to make a career as an author can absolutely engage in a fun project with a writer who isn’t interested in anything more than a good time, but it’s important to be aware of that going in, so everyone can adjust their expectations.

What are your hopes for the project, and how do they compare to your partner’s? Do you want to publish, and if so, how? Will you seek representation? Do you want to submit the project to publishers? (More on this in chapter eighteen.) Are you hoping to continue working together, creating a series or brand that will sustain your career?

None of these things are required—there’s nothing wrong with writing books for fun! But you want to be on the same page when it comes to future plans. And if one of you sees this project as a lifetime endeavor while the other just wants to write one book for fun and move on to the next thing, you might want to consider whether this partnership is going to meet either of your needs in the long run.

What if it doesn’t work out?
Finally, consider how you will feel if the partnership doesn’t work out. This is especially important when it comes to equal partnerships between friends. Writing books with friends can be a wonderful experience. But when work issues begin to bleed into the friendship, it can also cause stress and hurt feelings.
Even the best suited partnerships sometimes fall apart. Even the most experienced writers sometimes have collaborations that don’t work out. Thinking through the potential consequences of failure ahead of time will help you decide if it’s a risk you’re willing to take, and make some plans for how you might handle the worst if it happened.

If your partner bailed on the project, would you be able to separate your feelings about the work from your personal feelings toward them? How would you feel if your partner (however legitimate their reason) dropped out of the project, and you had to abandon the book halfway through? How would you feel about never getting to finish this book?

Nobody’s Perfect
Obviously, we would all love to work with a partner who always shows an ideal level of respect, communicates clearly and kindly at all times, has complementary experience and ambition to our own, loves to have their work critiqued, is overjoyed at new suggestions, is perfectly committed, and sees every task through to the end. This person, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. Or if they do, I certainly have never worked with them—and I’m not providing that to my co-writers, either!

So it’s not really a question of whether your partner embodies all these traits like a paragon of collaboration. They are going to have flaws. You are going to experience mismatches. You and your partner are both going to be better at some skills than others—and sometimes you may both suck at the same things! The question is, can you live with the differences? Can you work with your partner’s foibles and feel safe and happy while doing so?

If not, it doesn’t mean your prospective partner is a terrible person. It’s not a judgment of their moral fiber. It just means you’re not well suited to make a partnership work, and that’s okay.

There are no ideal partners. There are things about me that are obnoxious to deal with, and I’ve discussed projects with partners who ultimately decided that working with me wasn’t for them. This may happen to you, or you may be the one deciding that this particular collaboration isn’t a good fit. That’s okay. Everyone can still be friends (and if you can’t, you’re definitely better off not working together!)
But what if you’re already in a partnership . . . and it’s not going well? You don’t want to walk away from the project, but there are things that bother you, and you’re not sure how to handle them.

Over the next several chapters we’ll talk about using some of the principles we’ve discussed here to make bad situations better, and good partnerships great. It’s okay if you and your partner aren’t perfect—or even good—at communication or respect or taking feedback—the good news is, you can change, you can learn, and you can grow.

Want to read more? In It Together, has all the advice you’ll need for successful co-writing, including stories and bonus chapters not found on the blog.