Well, I’ve been in several critique groups, and I’ve worked on a number of collaborations, some of which were written with writers I was in a crit group with and some of which weren’t (and only one of which has seen publication for various reasons, the most common of which is that most of the others never got finished, but that’s another story). And I’m here to tell you that being in a writing group is nothing like collaborating with another writer. Not in any way, not at all.
In a writing group, you’re essentially getting extremely articulate, well-informed, critical reader-reactions. You can take them into account, or not, as you see fit, because it’s your book. You always have the last word, and you don’t have to explain why if you don’t want to.

In a collaboration, it’s not just your book. Somebody else’s name is going to be on the cover, too, and they have a stake in it. If they make a totally ridiculous and inappropriate suggestion, you have to take it seriously and talk them out of it; you can’t just ignore it.  

A writing group has neither ability, nor power, nor right, to rewrite your words. A collaborator does, to some extent. A writing group can object loudly and long to whatever you want to do, but at the end of the day, you can just say “Too bad, I’m doing it my way,” and there’s nothing they can do about it. A collaborator can, if they feel strongly enough, pull the plug on the entire project.
A writing group is: you make a cake, and you bring it in, and give everyone a piece of it, and they tell you that it needs more vanilla or nuts or something. You can decide for yourself whether Jack is really on to something with his suggestion, or whether he just always wants more nuts in everything, even cocktail sauce, so you can safely ignore that comment.

A collaboration is two cooks making the same cake. If it’s a good collaboration, one of you sifts the flour and baking powder together while the other one creams the butter and sugar, and you get done twice as fast; if it’s not so good, you get in each other’s way because you’re both trying to do the same thing at the same time, or you end up with a cake that has no sugar because you each thought the other one put it in. It’s a whole different thing from critiquing.

The one place I do see some overlap between collaborating and crit groups is this: in order for either to work, the author has to have a certain level of both trust and detachment.

Crit group members have to trust each other’s critical judgment and motivations, or at best it won’t be useful (because the writers will rightly ignore any advice they don’t trust). At worst, the group is likely to rip itself apart being competitive. Collaborators have to have an even deeper level of trust in each other’s judgment and abilities, because they need to be able to thrash things out without worrying that the other is going to pull the plug on the project if they disagree about a plot twist or the necessity for a particular incident or character.

A writer in a crit group has to be detached enough to realize that one isn’t required to rewrite one’s book according to the guidance of a committee, while also being detached enough from the work to realize that maybe it does need to have Chapter 6 deleted and some tweaking done to the characterization. Similarly, collaborators have to be detached enough from the work that they don’t see every change the other collaborator makes as a threat or an insult.

Collaboration, however, requires more flexibility than a crit group. If all six members of your crit group agree that the cake needs nuts, you can nod politely and ignore them without a second thought. If your collaborator insists on adding nuts, you have to either think about it seriously or have a cast-iron reason for not adding them (like “I have a nut allergy that will put me in the hospital with anaphylactic shock if I have them anywhere in my kitchen.”)

Another big advantage is that whatever you’ve just written has an immediate audience – your collaborator – who is just as excited about the material as you are. There is nothing quite so motivating as wanting to show off for someone you know is going to giggle and squeak and gasp in all the right places.

If you’re considering collaborating with someone, there are a number of things to remember:

1) If both of you don’t feel as if you’re doing 80% of the work, something’s probably off. If you’re the sort of person who’s going to track time, effort, and word count in some misguided attempt to make sure each of you contributes the same amount to the project, you are probably not well-suited to collaborating, and if feeling as if you’re doing 80% of the work is going to make you grumpy, you probably shouldn’t try it, either. Collaborations are not usually twice as much work as a solo novel, but they do involved more total work than a single-author book. This means that if you divide the total work of a collaboration in half, each author will be doing less work than if they wrote a solo book, but not 50% less. If you’re not prepared to feel as if you’re doing more than your share (and unwilling to recognize that your collaborator also feels this way, and that both of you are, in fact, doing more than you expected), you may wreck the project, and possibly the friendship.

2) Collaborations are a meshing of two different processes, as well as two different writing styles. A number of the folks I know who have done successful collaborations do not work the same way on their collaborations as they do on their solo stuff. Sometimes, both writers end up with a sort of half-and-half compromise style of working that they can both live with; sometimes they do it one person’s way rather than the other’s; and sometimes, the collaboration gets done in a way that neither person uses when writing on their own. Be prepared to be flexible.

When you’re collaborating, you have to be willing to adapt to your collaborator (and vice versa) in terms of working methods, as well as stuff like plot and characters. If one writer normally works in huge bursts of activity with long fallow gaps between, and the other is a three-pages-a-day plodder, they may want to think twice about a collaboration method that means they have to switch off every time a scene, chapter, or POV character changes. If one writer is a “can’t talk about it in advance” sort and the other isn’t, you’ll have to experiment to figure out whether the one who usually can talk isn’t allowed to do it at all (which can kill the project if they’re a must-talk sort of writer), or whether the two of you can talk to each other but not to anyone else, or whether the must-talk writer can talk to anyone but their collaborator.

3) The whole point of a collaboration is that it’s something both of you are doing. I’ve known several promising collaborations that collapsed because one of the writers got so invested in his/her characters or plot twists that they absolutely refused to let the other writer change or invent anything. In a collaboration, no matter how much you love a character, plot twist, idea, style, chapter, prologue, background detail, etc., you are not the one in charge. You can argue, beg, plead, whine, and blackmail to get your collaborator to agree to take the story where you want it to go, but in the end, you both have to agree. There’s no point in winning the argument if it results in your collaborator being totally blocked because they just don’t think it would happen that way. If you can’t agree, you may need to take your lovely shiny plot/character/idea/whatever and turn it into your own solo book.

4) Collaborations are jointly owned. This means that unless you have a written agreement that spells out contingencies, each of you owns half the project, and neither of you can legally do anything with it (or with the characters, setting, elements of background, etc.) without the other’s permission. Much of the time, this is not important…but when it does become important, it is absolutely vital. And if you can’t manage to work out a basic agreement that says either of you can/can’t write about the world/characters without the other’s permission, and that if one of you dies, the other one gets full ownership/gets to make artistic and business decisions/can’t touch it again, then you probably aren’t going to manage a successful collaboration.

This is not about not trusting your collaborator. It’s about protecting both of you. People die; they get Alzheimer’s; they lose interest; they go haring off after possibly-brilliant but incompatible alternatives (“Why don’t we change everything to stream-of-consciousness and make this into a pastiche of Ulysses?”). I’ve known several authors who’ve had to abandon months or even years of work because they didn’t bother making a written agreement, and others who’ve avoided serious potential problems because they had it all spelled out in advance.

Most of the failed collaborations I’ve observed or been involved in have failed for artistic, rather than monetary, reasons. One writer lost interest, or discovered that they couldn’t slow down/speed up to the other writer’s working speed, or got so fascinated by a character or plot twist that they wanted to make it the center of the story (and in at least one case, they went off and did so, with the erstwhile collaborator’s blessing). Or one writer discovered that he/she was so invested in her/his vision of the story or characters or background that he/she couldn’t let the collaborator contribute or make changes.

5) Not all collaborations go to completion. Based on my experience, most of them don’t. It’s OK to start one that’s supposed to be strictly for fun (that’s how Kate and Cecy got going, after all. We didn’t know it was a book until after we finished; we thought we were just having a whale of a good time.)

Which brings me to the last point: if you are not having big fun, collaborating may not be worth the aggravation. And it will be aggravating at times – when your partner is late with their next draft, when she doesn’t have time to meet and work out that little plot-problem you need to settle, when he wants you to meet at an inconvenient time, when they are excited and you’re feeling worn down (or vice versa). It can be fun anyway. If it isn’t, it’s OK to talk it over with your partner and agree to stop.

Similarly, there lots of different methods for collaborating. One that works well for a lot of people is “I write my characters; you write your characters,” in which each writer comes up with some characters, they decide mutually on which ones will be the central viewpoints, and then they work out (in advance or as they go along) which scenes will be from which viewpoint. The writer who has that character writes the scene.

Another one is to have one viewpoint character, and switch writers at the end of every scene or chapter. I heard once that this is how Fred Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth worked, with one writer spending his chapter getting the hero into a terrible fix and leaving him on a cliffhanger, and the other writer then having to write him out of the mess. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would certainly explain the plot-pattern in some of their collaborations.

I’ve also known collaborations where one writer does one type of writing – all the dialog, say – and the other puts in all the action or the narrative. This works really really well when each writer is playing to a particularly strong point, but it requires a whole lot of trust in each other.

Yet another collaboration style is the one where one writer does the prep work and a detailed outline, the second writer comes up with a first draft, and the first writer does the rewrite and polish. This is especially common in the sort of commercial collaboration wherein a publisher matches up a new, up-and-coming writer with one who’s more experienced and who has a large following, in hopes of boosting the newer writer’s audience, but there are other collaborative partnerships that just naturally fall into this pattern.

And there’s the one where both writers are in the same room, with one looking over the other’s shoulder, switching places whenever the one at the computer gets stuck or the one watching can’t stand it any more. It doesn’t seem to be common (since it requires both writers to be in the same place), but I know at least one set of roommates who work this way, and I’ve seen several folks do this to produce short stories while at a convention.

There is no one right way to collaborate with someone; there is only what works for a given pair of collaborators. I’ve worked on several, and each of them was different. For the Kate and Cecy books, Caroline wrote Kate (and later Thomas), and I wrote Cecy (and later James); we didn’t talk much about plot and the only editing of each other’s writing we did was for typos and consistency. Because they were in letter format, we were essentially doing the “you write your characters, I’ll write mine” method, plus the switch-writers/viewpoints-at-the-end-of-each-chapter method. The big advantage of working like this was that there was never any problem with the characters all sounding alike, or with one of us not really “getting” the other’s characters well enough to write them from the inside.

For two other collaborations (each with a different author), we picked a viewpoint character, then one of us wrote until we got stuck (which was sometimes in mid-sentence); then we handed it off to the other person. The next writer would go over the previous writer’s work, editing and making changes, then go on until they got stuck, whereupon they’d hand it back.  The editing-and-revision pass kept the viewpoint character’s characterization and the overall style remarkably consistent, even though, as I said, sometimes we switched writers in mid-chapter, mid-scene, or mid-sentence.

Another collaboration I worked on involved you-write-your-characters-I’ll-write-mine, but with lots and lots of joint plot-planninig and a lot more editing of each other’s chapters than Caroline and I did.

In each case, I don’t think the results would have been nearly as good if we hadn’t worked the way we did. Trying to write Kate and Cecy with lots of plot-planning and each of us editing the other would have a) killed the books dead (Caroline is the sort of writer who cannot discuss her work in advance of writing it without killing it), and b) probably smoothed out the voice and style more than was appropriate for an epistolary novel. Trying to write a single-viewpoint collaboration without editing each other would likely have made it lumpy and inconsistent in style, voice, and quite possible stuff-that-happens (also, in both cases, there really wasn’t anybody else either of us wanted to write. It was that character’s story, and nobody else’s).

All of the successful collaborations I’m familiar with have been ones in which both of the writers were having a tremendously good time. The Fun Quotient isn’t a guarantee that the project will get finished, much less reach professional publication - I’ve had loads of fun working on each and every collaboration, but the three Kate and Cecy books. are the only ones that ended up published, and only one of the others made it to any sort of ending.

Since this post got awfully long, I’m splitting it into two parts. So more random thoughts about collaborating next time.

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Pat said, “You’re going to kill me.”

That’s the way I remember my first encounter with THE MISLAID MAGICIAN. Pat Wrede and I were just finishing up with page proofs for THE GRAND TOUR – quite an undertaking, given that going over the changes involved conference calls with Pat, me, and Karrie Oswald, our Harcourt editor.

Pat and I were meeting for lunch. Pat’s warning accompanied a handful of pages. It was a letter to Kate from Cecy, and it became the opening of THE MISLAID MAGICIAN.

Pat rarely tells me things like “You’re going to kill me,” so I paid close attention as I read. It didn’t make me want to kill her. Far from it. It made me want to run home and write Kate’s reply to Cecy. So I did. And we were off.

As Pat has said in a previous post, the differences between our working styles made THE MISLAID MAGICIAN much more difficult to write than either of the other books. Although I thoroughly enjoyed tuning my internal receiver back to Radio Kate (and even more to Thomas, as we included letters from Thomas and James in this book), I had only a dim idea of what my half of the plot was going to be. I knew I wanted to include Drina. All else was mist.

My hat is off to Pat for cming so far out of her comfort zone to work with me so we could get the book done in a timely way.

We’d had a template for SORCERY AND CECELIA, and we had the map of Europe for THE GRAND TOUR. But we were completely on our own for THE MISLAID MAGICIAN. We had three advantages working for us, though.

The first advantage was returning to the epistolary style, writing letters back and forth between the characters. That was fun for us, and I think the reader can tell. The second advantage was the calendar. Pat constructed one when we were working on THE GRAND TOUR so that journeys would not conflict. For THE MISLAID MAGICIAN, she added moon phases and made it into a terrific tool for making sure the letters from four enthusiastic correspondents were posted at proper intervals and arrived no sooner than they ought to. The third and most vital advantage was our new editor, Kathy Dawson. She has a keen eye for detail and the instinct for the right word to a degree rare even among professional editors.

It’s been my privilege to work with Kathy Dawson again. She’s now at Dial Books. She edited MAGIC BELOW STAIRS, the middle-grade novel I have coming out from Dial in Summer 2010. The protagonist is Frederick, a servant boy in the household of Kate and Thomas. The book is set immediately after THE GRAND TOUR and the arrival of their first child plays a role in the plot. It is not epistolary, just a straight narrative, and it only concerns my characters, not Pat’s. But thanks to Pat’s gracious approval, it does take place in the same world as the Kate and Cecy books (my half of it anyway), and Thomas is an important character in the book. (Kate’s there too, I hasten to add.)

In the years since we finished THE MISLAID MAGICIAN, both Pat and I have been up to our eyebrows in independent projects. We have no plans to write another Kate and Cecy book. But I have to admit, while I was  writing this, I started wondering. Maybe someday I will hear Pat say,  “You’re going to kill me.” If I ever do, I will pay close attention.

Well, for starters, “getting a sequel” isn’t quite the right phrase. The first Kate and Cecy book, Sorcery and Cecelia, was put out by Ace/Berkley, who were not all that thrilled about the book at the time and most definitely did not want a sequel. So the book pretty much died, the first time around. Fast forward ten years…and the book has not only refused to die completely, but people are bidding over $100 on ebay for copies. Of a paperback.

So Caroline and I went to our agents and said, “What can we do with this?” And our agents said, “It’ll be easier to sell if there’s a sequel.” So we started writing the sequel, and sold it as a two-for with the possibility of a third.

The hard part about writing it was that The Grand Tour was so different from Sorcery and Cecelia. The structure of the sequel was pretty well locked in by the first book, both in terms of the alternating viewpoints and in terms of the setting – I suppose we could have skipped the story of the trip, but it would really have felt like cheating. And since the characters were all in the same place, we couldn’t have them write letters to each other, the way they had in the first book. We had to come up with an alternate conceit.

Also, Sorcery and Cecelia had the basic Regency Romance novel to use as a template for both plot and incidents. With The Grand Tour, we didn’t have a model to riff on. Most Romances don’t have sequels, and if they do, the “sequel” is really about other characters who were minor players in the original book, and the original couple(s) are treated as minor characters in the sequel. We wanted to keep writing about Kate and Cecy.

But the real problem with the sequel was that Sorcery and Cecelia was incredibly easy to write because we weren’t writing a book. We were playing a game. It ended up becoming a book, but we didn’t actually know that until the last few letters, and by then we were on the downhill run to the end. But we knew from the get-go that The Grand Tour was no game…and it made a difference. With Sorcery and Cecelia, we were perfectly happy to throw things in pretty much at random and see what happened, because the story didn’t have to come to any sort of conclusion (most of the other letter games that either of us have played just kind of ran out of steam after a while, usually in mid-plot). The Grand Tour needed to be going somewhere, which made us both a lot more self-conscious about what we were having happen.

The other big problem was that Caroline’s and my writing processes are almost pure opposites. She’s the sort of writer who can’t talk abut work-in-process; I’m the sort who likes to talk about it all the time to anyone who will listen. She doesn’t do plot outlines; I do (and then ignore them…but that, too, wasn’t as possible with this book because if I strayed too far from the sketchy plan we’d come up with, I’d throw her off). She generally underwrites in the first draft and then expands it in the second; I’m a rolling reviser, fixing previous scenes and chapters as I go forward, so by the time I’m finished with the “first draft” it usually doesn’t need more than a few tweaks. And so on.

Working out the plot and the “escalation” was fairly easy, compared to all that. Especially since, as I said, we didn’t have a template to riff on. About all we knew was that we did not want to do the thing you see in so many long-running TV shows, where they string out the romantic tension for years, then let the couple get together, then immediately try to regain the romantic tension by making the couple have a major misunderstanding or disagreement. Given that we were not doing that, we had to come up with something else to hang the plot on. Which we did, but it took a while.

So I’d say that in Sorcery and Cecelia, we paid more attention to the emotional/romantic plot as the main storyline, while the adventure part was more just the vehicle for making it happen. In The Grand Tour, we reversed that to some extent. Note that this is my analysis long after the fact, and not anything we consciously decided or verbalized at the time. It also doesn’t have a lot to do with the reader’s experience of the books. And Caroline has her own take on things, which obviously isn’t always the same as mine.