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.
When at last you’ve finished a draft of your book, you have every right to feel accomplished. That was a huge amount of work! You not only drafted a novel, but you managed to navigate all the partnership challenges that come with writing a book with another person. Good for you! Pat yourselves on the back. Celebrate! You deserve it.
Your work, however, is not yet over. Unfortunately, what you have now is probably one variety of mess or another, and you still have to revise it before it will reach its fullest potential. Your revisions might include structural changes, removing content, writing new content, line edits (on the sentence level), and continuity edits (to make sure your story and prose are consistent). There is a lot to coordinate and a lot of work to divide at this stage, so you’ll want to use your best communication skills as you work to address the problems in your manuscript together.
Discussing Revisions
As with all other steps of the process, it’s important to communicate during the revision process. When you’re preparing to revise, what do you see as the weaknesses in the work you’ve done? What do you think needs to be done to make the book the best version of itself it can be?
You may already have some ideas of what a better, revised draft would look like, and possibly your partner does, too. Those ideas might be different from each other. You might be attached to aspects of the work that your partner thinks are not working, and your partner might want to change things you love as well.
It’s time, once again, to communicate. Sit down with your partner and work through what needs to be done. It’s possible you’ll both need to read the book and develop ideas about what needs to be fixed. It’s possible you already know a lot of what needs to be done. Maybe you need to re-outline pieces of the book. Maybe you want to break out your outlining tools and make a list of what’s currently in the book, so you can visualize the pieces that need to move around.
As with other stages of the writing process, you’re absolutely going to need to remain flexible. Remember that this book isn’t only your work—it’s a mix of your work and your partner’s. The final product needs to reflect both of your visions for what it can be. This means it’s still healthy to see your first draft as a collection of possibilities, some of which will remain in the final work, and others of which will need to change. If either you or your partner decide to rigidly insist that any particular element remain the same, you are no longer collaborating. You are now digging trenches where you should be building a bridge. It’s okay to advocate for the parts of the book you love, but that needs to be balanced with listening to your partner and making sure you understand their ideas and vision. As you did in the pre-writing process, seek to incorporate both of your ideas, and seek for new ideas that satisfy the why behind both of your visions. When you find changes you’re both happy with, you’ll be moving the book toward its full potential, and enjoying the best benefits collaboration has to offer.
Making Changes
Like with drafting, you’ll need to decide how you want to divide the work of revision. Let’s discuss some common ways of dividing revision, and some things to consider about each method.
One Writer Makes All the Changes
It’s possible one of you will do all the revision, particularly if the other one did all the drafting—if both writers agree, this can be a valid way to divide an equal partnership, particularly if the draft is rough and requires a lot of revision work. In a tiered partnership, it’s possible that the junior partner is responsible for both the drafting and the revision, with the senior partner offering notes on what they would like to see changed as revision progresses.
When one writer makes all the changes, less coordination is required, but the writer who isn’t revising should have significant input at the planning stages of revision. If they didn’t write the draft and don’t have input in the revisions, the book isn’t really a collaboration, but a single-author book being published under two names. It’s possible that in some tiered, work-for-hire scenarios this is the case. But unless this is your specific contractual arrangement, the revising writer needs to make sure to take their partner’s input into account.
You Each Revise Your Own Words
If you divided the drafting work by viewpoint, it’s possible to divide the revision work the same way; once you’ve discussed a revision plan, you can each go over your own words and revise them. I have never written a book this way, but writers who are sensitive to having their words changed without their specific consent might be more comfortable revising in this manner.
One way to organize this is to revise in sections, with one writer revising a section they wrote and then providing it to their partner to review, and then that partner revising their next section to match. This method allows you to retain control over your own words but also be aware of the revision work your partner is doing as you progress through the book.
Full Pass Revisions
This is the way I’ve most commonly revised with a partner: after discussing revisions as a team, one partner takes the draft and does a full pass over it. Then the other partner takes the book and does a pass themselves. This can be especially helpful if you’re worried about homogenizing voice at this stage. It also allows each writer to have input in the revision without having to look over each others’ shoulders as you work.
You’ll want to be sure both writers are comfortable with this method; some people will be more sensitive to having their words revised by their partner than others. But if you use this method, you can choose to divide up the work according to your strengths, with each writer doing the passes with which they are the most comfortable.
Play to Your Strengths
In revision, it can be doubly beneficial to play to your strengths. In many of my collaborations, I do the first revision, in which we move pieces of the plot around and stitch them back together in a more dramatic and coherent fashion.
I love this kind of revision. To me, it’s like a big puzzle, and it’s satisfying to get all the pieces to click into place. I often go through and color code existing elements so I can visualize the existing plot structure and then move through making sure the elements are all set up and paid off in a dramatic and satisfactory manner.
I do that revision because I love it, and I’m good at it. Most of my co-writers have been all too happy to hand that draft over to me, because it’s not their favorite part of the process. (Maybe someday someone will fight me for it, but that day has not yet arrived.)
However, hand me a draft full of line edits—the picky little details that remove excess words and rearrange sentences for flow and clarity—and you will very quickly find me whining and complaining that I’d rather poke out my own eyes than have to fiddle with one more sentence. I hate microrevision. I get so bored cutting words out of sentences, rearranging sentences so they’re in an optimal order in a paragraph. I can do it, and it obviously needs to be done, but it doesn’t engage my brain in a way that I like.
So I am always so happy when I’m working with someone who enjoys that kind of detail work. I will do the large-scale content revision all day if it means I can pass the fiddly word stuff off to someone else. When you lean into these opposing strengths and each take the parts that you most enjoy, both your work and your partnership become stronger.
Of course, there may be parts you both like, or most unfortunately, parts neither of you want to do. In an equal partnership, try to divide these things as evenly as possible so everyone has something they enjoy doing and only has to do some of what they hate. Nothing can ever be entirely equal, and it’s unwise to try to measure these things exactly, but if the burden of all their least favorite parts of the job falls to one person, you may create a breeding ground for resentment.
As you communicate about the workload, therefore, you need to be honest about how the process is working for you so that you don’t fall into the trap of doing work you resent. A conversation when things start to go wrong may not be super pleasant, but it’s a thousand times more pleasant than the conversation will be after you’ve let things go wrong repeatedly over a long period of time.
Exercise Trust
As important as it is to communicate, it’s also going to be vital that you trust your partner when it’s their turn to revise, particularly if you are revising each other’s words. You can absolutely save a version of the draft before they make changes in case either of you wants to refer to the way things were before. (James and I did this with each revision on every chapter for The Bollywood Lovers’ Club, which came out to a lot of copies of each draft.) If you want to, you can track changes or use compare docs to look at what changed. But you need to allow your co-writer to make the changes they believe are necessary and treat their new iteration as a new and valid draft. If you’re constantly policing what they’re allowed to change, looking over their shoulder fretting over what might be lost, or comparing what they did to the previous draft with nostalgia for the way it used to be, you’re only going to get in the way of improving your work.
Instead, when your partner has finished a revision, try to look at the new draft with new eyes. Evaluate how it’s working, not in comparison to how it was before (unless it’s a favorable comparison!), but based on how it’s working now. There may still be problems! It’s very common for books to go through multiple drafts. There may be a few things you liked that got cut, and you may want to go back and see if there’s a way to salvage a couple of things that got left on the cutting room floor. But, in general, it’s more productive to look forward, rather than stressing about what was lost. The term “kill your darlings” (meaning let go of the things you love about your work that just aren’t working) is just as applicable in co-writing, though in this case, sometimes you need to allow your partner do the euthanizing on your behalf.
For example, when I go in to move the pieces of a book around to improve its structure, I usually have a conversation with my partner beforehand about what I’m going to do to the book. But I don’t always know precisely what I’m going to do to the book before I dig into it. My brain processes the problems in the book as I work, so sometimes I’m up to my elbows in revision before I really know how I’m going to solve all the problems. It would be lovely if I could explain beforehand exactly what I’m going to do. But I can’t, always. That’s just the way my brain works.
This requires a measure of trust on the part of my co-writers. They have to believe that I’m going to do good things to the work, and not fear unduly that I’m going to destroy it. We can keep a copy of the original, of course, in case there’s something I cut that they want to reclaim. After the fact, I always bring them a list of the problems I found and the ways that I solved them, if they’re interested in knowing what I did. With some of my co-writers, I might text in the middle and fill them in about what I’m finding and how it’s going. If I run into problems I don’t quite know how to solve, or I’m fiddling between two options and I’m not sure which would be best, I might stop and have a conversation before I continue. But sometimes I need a little bit of trust that I won’t destroy anything great about the book, and it’s helpful when my co-writers extend that trust to me and let me do my thing.
Value Your Partner’s Work—and Your Own
When you’re revising, be careful not to be harsher on the work of one partner over the other. If you rip up your partners’ sections but leave yours mostly untouched, chances are you’ll be writing some of your partner’s contributions out of the work without giving a critical enough eye to your own.
I generally have the opposite problem—I have no problem ripping up my own work, but I tend to go easier on things my partner wrote. I’m never sure how my own work would read to someone who didn’t write it, but I am the first reader of my partners’ work, so if it worked for me, sometimes I want to defend it rather than critically interrogate how it could be better. This is true especially when it comes to incorporating feedback from my critique group; I have no problem hearing when my own work isn’t working, but when my partner’s work is criticized, I tend to get defensive.
This is unhelpful. My work has problems, and my partner’s work also inevitably has problems, and I need to be receptive to feedback about both. This has caused me problems before—when Brandon gave me his partial draft of Bastille, I recognized that he’d been having some problems with the plot and cut several chapters of his words. When I sent my work to him to review, he told me I hadn’t gone far enough, and I needed to cut some more. I chalked that up to Brandon being harder on his words than was necessary—after all, I liked what he had written. Then, when feedback came from our editor and beta readers, they agreed with Brandon. I had to cut that material after all: I was too enamored of what he’d written when the words weren’t jiving with the structure of the rest of the book.
In truth, when my partners and I both contributed to a draft and didn’t divide it by viewpoint, by the time we’re a few revisions in, I’ve often forgotten who wrote which line originally. (This sometimes leads to the unfortunate situation where I compliment a line, only to be told in no uncertain terms by my partner that I wrote it.) The book changes shape in revision and my perception of the book changes with it. I stop thinking about who wrote what and instead focus on how the book works as it is right now and as a whole, which is a much more helpful perspective than worrying about what my co-writer might be doing to my words.
Tone, Style, and Voice
Revision is another opportunity to match tone, style, and voice to make sure what was written by two writers reads like it was written by one. If you are revising over your partner’s words as if they are your own, you should never seek to eliminate their voice, since that would take some of the partnership magic out of the work. But you can absolutely homogenize the voice a bit. When you fiddle with your partner’s word choice, making it sound a bit less like them, and a bit more like you, the work as a whole will begin to sound more like the collective you. A third voice entirely: your partnership voice. One that neither of you would truly replicate writing alone.
And that is partnership magic incarnate.