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Co-Authoring

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lividseras

lividseras

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Not sure if this is the right section but...

How exactly does co-authoring work. I've decided that my plot was too complicated to do by myself, so my best friend/cousin and I decided to write it together. She is amazing, though the idea was originally mine I want us to be considered equal. So if we were to send it in to a publisher or agent, how would we do that? ( I feel retarded asking, but any information you could give me about two people writing a book together and sending it in would be helpful.)

Haha i know this is worded weird, and I'm sorry.
 
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ChaosTitan

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Co-authors can be extremely tricky. There are many examples of it working and working well. There are also books we never see or hear about because the two people co-authoring just don't gel.

Something that's important to know from the outset is the division of work. Who writes what? Do you alternate by chapters? Do you alternate characters? Who edits? How do you decide on the voice? The plot twists?

A friend of mine tried to co-author once. The other writer flaked out constantly and left her with a heap of the work on her own shoulders. So before you jump into co-authoring with intent to sell, make sure you lay out the ground rules.

As for querying, you'd put both of your names in the query, instead of just yours.
 

AryaT92

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ChaosTitan said:
A friend of mine tried to co-author once. The other writer flaked out constantly and left her with a heap of the work on her own shoulders. So before you jump into co-authoring with intent to sell, make sure you lay out the ground rules.
Click to expand...
This was a problem I experienced personally. It is very hard to divide the work evenly, one person will ultimately do more than the other and this will cause problems.. In the end that person will feel bad splitting it 50 / 50 when he believes he did more work and is entitled to more. The other will often take it personally and react impulsively. Two stubborn friends and a finished MS that doesn't solely belong to you will get you nowhere.

I would be very careful with co-authoring, write out all the details before you start and don't let anything sit. If you sense a problem, call it out early on to avoid misleading the significant other.

Mind you my experience was when we were writing an anthology, [series of stories] possibly the easiest thing to work on as a group because we wrote it with different perspectives and it was a memoir so the characters were... ourselves. What we wrote was very easy to distinguish and even though we logically sorted out that we would cut the percents to be consistent with how much we wrote, page wise, it didn't work out.

Good luck!
 
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lividseras

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Yeah i realize it isnt going to be easy. I definately understand where your coming from. We also decided if there was a conflict to stop writing until it can either be forgotten or resolved. How it works is shes the female MC and im the Male MC. The book is in three parts, two of which we write on our own one is combined. I took on the role that is a bit more complicated, but i owe it to her for helping me. I don't mind splitting 50/50 because i love to write, and this story needs to be written. I dont know its weird i am in love with the plot, i get all excited when talking about it and i know i need to write it, and because she is my cousin and my best friend i chose her, because weve gone through alot growing up together, and if something like this affects our friendship... well then it must not have been a very strong friendship then. Otherwise i would not even think about co authoring for those very reasons.

I have read that before tricksterpython, (i found that site before this one actually, ive done alot of her excersizes when trying to figure out my plot it really helps.) Weve discussed all of it except the cover thing, im not too worried about it, if she wants her name first she can have it that way. Unless this works out amazingly, i dont see why we would write more than one book together. Sorry this is so long, trying to respond to all of you in one post. Okay, so we send the query in with both our names on it, anything else that is going to be different? I really dont know alot about agents or getting published in the first place i was just wondering the differences between two authors vs one.

Also this is random, but does anyone else have to log onto here constantly? I logged on here to check this, wrote the message went to post and it said i had to log in again! Its been doing this for the last three days.
 

AryaT92

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Select the remember me thing, maybe you disabled it on your first time?

No idea. It keeps me logged in for days sometimes.
 
michael_b

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Okay you've heard the negative aspects of writing with someone else, I'm here to say there are some really good things about writing with a co-author too. I've been writing with my partner, Auburnimp for going on five years now--both original and fanfic writing--and we both enjoy it. For one thing, we don't get stuck on plot elements, at least not for very long. We can brainstorm together and work past the problem pretty fast. We both have our characters that we write, but the world setting is mine since I created it and then asked her if she liked the sound of it and wanted to write it together. She liked the idea of a world where science and magic work together, so we started writing the series in 2007. We also write in my cyberpunk worldsetting, but it's harder for her since she's not as versed in scifi as I am.

We work well together, though like any two people we do have bad days where we argue, it's to be expected. But we enjoy writing in the two worlds we have in common and our readers really like our books as do a lot of reviewers so we're happy.
 
seeAlliwrite

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I've just co-authored a ms with someone (after having published nine of my own). There's no way I could have done this one on my own -- I really needed someone to bounce ideas off and encourage me to keep going. It worked really well for us, though the other writer involved writes very similarly to me (she is published in non-fiction and is a freelance mag writer, but not published in fiction yet).

We wrote a lengthy synopsis and three chapters, had interest from a publisher, did some revisions on the initial chapters and then wrote the rest and are now up to second revisions with the publisher. Hopefully it will be picked up. I think the most important thing we learnt was that there needs to be a strong plan in place, with a decent outline -- both of you need to know exactly where you're going at all times. We pretty much wrote between 5000 and 8000 words at a time and then would flick it back to the other person who would keep going.

I've heard lots of horror stories about co-authoring, but it came very easily to us... I know three sets of siblings who co-author and I've always wondered if it works so well for them because they must have a similar voice, being brought up in the same family.
 
lividseras

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michael_b said:
. For one thing, we don't get stuck on plot elements, at least not for very long. We can brainstorm together and work past the problem pretty fast. We both have our characters that we write
We work well together, though like any two people we do have bad days where we argue, it's to be expected. But we enjoy writing in the two worlds we have in common and our readers really like our books as do a lot of reviewers so we're happy.
Click to expand...

This sounds exactly like us. She is actually over today, and our plot is amazing. At least i like to think so, we are both in love with the idea and we have no problem agreeing with characters, we are doing a different approach to the book, there are sections and then a joint section and i think it will work out quite well, I am glad to hear the negative approach as it gives me something to think about but i am glad to hear the positive approach as that sounds just like us.
 
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