Co-Authoring Process Conflicts

[JessMahler]

Hey all,

I do most of m y writing these days with a partner, Raidon. Rai and I sync very well in terms of ideas for stories, how we approach characters, etc. But we have very different processes. We spent a good chunk of last week setting up an online project organizer, trying out different apps, etc., because while I'm happy working off of spreadsheets, she needs something more organized and (especially) visual.

On the flip side, the very 'visual' project organizers tends to make my head hurt.

We've managed to find an organizer we can both work with (Good Days, worth checking out if you're looking for a free set up), and then immediately ran into the same problem with world building!

TBC, I'm more amused than anything else at this point, we're testing out a world building thing and doing well finding options that will work for us.

I'm just curious if anyone else has run into this kind of problem and how you dealt with it?

There's very little discussion on collabing and how to make it work, and what I have seen tends to assume that if you can /write/ together, you are good, but the practice, I'm finding, is a lot more complicated.

 

[pmmg]

My advice is don't collab.

I could suggest project management ways to approach this, but I am not sure how they translate to the creative and non-business world. It would be along the lines of, discuss, assign roles and deadlines, and assess.

It could just be, you and your partner are not compatible in this way.

For world building, I had some interest in World Anvil as a place to build a word, but I did not go too deep into it, as they wanted money to keep it from being public.

 

[Finchbearer]

Tandem work? One of you produces one leg of the work, and then the other completes the next, then look at if your work can be merged or synced?

AELowan might be able to give some insight into collab work

 

[Penpilot]

Any time I've tried, it doesn't work. IMHO, I think there needs to be a hierarchy. There needs to be a boss, or at the very least a delineated set of responsibilities where someone has final say. I remember listening to a podcast with Tracey Hickman and Margaret Weis. They wrote the Dragonlance Chronicles together. If memory serves, Hickman tended to be the storyteller, the one with the wild ideas, and Weis wrote all the prose.

 

[JessMahler]

LOL! Okay. So, I'm not asking for advice. Just wanted to hear experiences from other folks who'd done collabs.

As I said, we work very well together, literally the only problem is we disagreed on 'do we use spread sheets or a fancy app like Asana or Trello'. We started working together in December have written well over 50,000 words together with no issues. We are life partners as well as writing partners and again we work /very/ well together. Sorry if I wasn't clear. I know collabing isn't for everyone, but believe me it is definitely for us.

We settled on Campfire for worldbuilding and GoodDay for project management. I find both of them annoying but dealable. Problem solved. I promise.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Welcome to Scribes! I'm part of a 3-woman collab and have collaborated with another writer for literally my entire adult life. It's the guys who go solo who impress me. My wife and I have been working together for over 30 years, and coming close to 10 years ago we brought our younger writing partner into the mix and it's been such a great ride so far.

 

[JessMahler]

Welcome to Scribes! I'm part of a 3-woman collab and have collaborated with another writer for literally my entire adult life. It's the guys who go solo who impress me. My wife and I have been working together for over 30 years, and coming close to 10 years ago we brought our younger writing partner into the mix and it's been such a great ride so far.

Thanks!

I've done some solo work, but now that I have a good collab going I'm not sure I could go back to it.

To be honest, I'm not sure why collabing has such a bad rep in fiction writing? It's taken as a given in so many arts -- song writing and script writing come immediately to mind. Yes, you need to find the right person to work with and know how to work together, but at least 90% of writers will tell you it's flat out impossible, don't bother trying.

 

[pmmg]

To be honest, I'm not sure why collabing has such a bad rep in fiction writing? It's taken as a given in so many arts -- song writing and script writing come immediately to mind. Yes, you need to find the right person to work with and know how to work together, but at least 90% of writers will tell you it's flat out impossible, don't bother trying.

For songwriters, there is both the poetry, and the putting it to music. That is two different skillsets. Script writing is a also dialong plus live action. These two things may lend themselves more to needing more than just writing skill.

I dont feel its an apples to apples comparison. If the great majority of writers have success in a solo process, and the great majority of song writers have success in a collaborative one, that ought to say something about the difference in the two mediums.

But...its not impossible. If you want to go down the path with another, nothing to stop you.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

I married into a musician family. Yeah, I know, I got a musician to talk about marriage and it worked! lol But no, I've seen a whole lot of collaboration on that side over the past few decades. My father-in-law (who was inducted into the Missouri Music Hall of Fame a few years ago! ) works with several song-writing partners, and he also works solo. They all bring something special to the project.

We do something a little similar. A lot of collabs have a hard time maintaining a cohesive voice, and it can be jarring jumping from one voice to the next. Some try to cover this by giving each writer a POV to focus on, but even then it can feel choppy. We skip this entirely. Instead of everyone doing some of everything, we pass out jobs and each of the three of us carries our share of weight. My job is to draft, and that's why no one can tell we're a collab just by reading. It's all my voice. But, we're also a very tight collab, and it could be difficult to make that work without living in each other's pockets.

 

[JessMahler]

The possible choppiness is one thing I worry about sometimes. I haven't noticed any, but then I'm not sure I would, with being too close to the story and all. No complaints yet, though.