I Have a Question About 'Ownership'

If I were you, I'd be thinking about a written agreement explicitly laying out what each of you can and can't use, and any conditions (eg. must give the other person credit) contingent on them.

Ah, welcome to the world of "collaborative" writing. It is absolutely up to you both if you decide you want to have an "open" world. H.P. Lovecraft did this when he created the Cthulhu reality---offering authors far and wide the opportunity to create new monsters and have them become part of the real. If you published it, the new creature was added to the reality for future writers to use.

However, in your case, it's more of a "closed" reality. You have to decide whether you both want to use it, or if you want to flip a coin and have one or the other back off. I had to make this decision with my current co-author (before we were co-authors and just beta readers for each other.) My book, in her reality, got accepted for publication. But what did that make her? Well, unless we both got the same publisher, Publisher #1 was going to have a "claim" on that reality that the unpublished author would struggle to fight against.

We solved our issue by deciding that both of us would be co-authors on both books, and have kept it that way ever since. We share 50/50 the money, and the credit for all books, no matter who is the "primary author." The secondary author (in sort of a beta reader position) can make changes or suggestions, which the primary author may accept, or not.

In other words, pretty much what you're doing now.

But once money starts rolling in, money starts rolling OUT too. So you often have to have the same attorney, the same accountant and the same agent. It's not required by any means, but does make things easier. I think Uncle Jim, dragonjax and December Quinn (along with several others here) also collaborate on some projects (but not on all) so maybe they'd like to weigh in on how they work their joint deals. I'll ping them and see if they can stop over.

Have a written contract with your partner, spelling out in great detail exactly what you both understand. Are your characters share-and-share-alike? Say so. Does your friend get cover credit, or a Special Thanks To in the acknowledgments? Write it down. Same with your friend's works. Do you get credit? Do you share income? Put it down in detail. Figure every angle.

Assume that you and your pal are Best Of Buddies and totally honest and upfront -- but that one second after your first best-seller comes out, a bus will hop the curb, nail your friend, and everything goes to her wicked third cousin, who hates you, doesn't have a literary or artistic bone in his body, and has a string of lawyer on retainer. And this person wants every dime of income from the book, plus your house, plus your car.

That's when you'll need to pull out that nice signed and notarized piece of paper. The one that spells out in painful detail exactly what you're giving to one another in return for what consideration, who owns what, who needs to give permission for what, what permissions have been given, and ... well, it might help to get a lawyer involved now. Because that wicked third cousin is sure-enough going to on the day that he claims he owns it all.

Yeah, my critique partner and I co-wrote a couple of books together, but the issue of using any of those characters without each other never came up; it honestly wouldn't have occurred to either of us to do so (but then, we sold those books as well, so we're contractually bound to our publisher not to use those worlds or those characters elsewhere).

My advice is basically the same as everyone else's: get a detailed legal agreement. She's already informed you she's essentially taking her characters with her, so I assume you can do the same, but it's best to have it all spelled out, even down to things like street names and shared backstory events.

I would suggest writing together as an option though, or creating your own characters and world. This--splitting the characters--honestly seems to me like the sort of thing that can create a lot of trouble later on. Of course it may not, but I'd want to avoid even the possibility.

JMO. Good luck!

What Jim said. Hope for the best, but plan for the worst, because you never know what may happen. Try to keep a sense of humor, but get the legal document that spells everything out. And hopefully, you'll never need it.

Hi, thought I'd just pop in with a stupid question here.
Can't you just change their names, aren't characters really just a name?

I know that the whole fun with characters is their personalities, but theres a lot of characters from different writers which share a lot of personality traits.

My thought is that if you and your friend starts writing on your own your characters will be changed throughout the story. Like real people are formed by the events in their lives, fictional characters will be formed by the story their in. So when your both finished with your stories you may not still have the same characters.