: Re: How to share the work, if writing fiction in a team? How should one split up the work between two people? Should one write the even-numbered chapters and the other the odd-numbered? Does each

@Cugini967

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I think it depends on the people, what they're good at, and who came up with what.

I've been co-writing as a hobby for the last six years, and in the last year started co-writing seriously. My writing partner isn't great with prose, and his characters can be a little flat, but he's got the most amazing ability to grab interesting ideas out of the air, and he has an instinctive ability to throw in really effective plot hooks. I tend to focus heavily on twisting existing elements into complications and intrigue, and I love character development and plot structure.

We'll write the first draft together on google docs, while chatting about the work on Skype. He'll do about two thirds of the brain-storming and solution-fetching. Some characters are 'mine' (he can't write them), some are his, some are shared. I tend to write a few paragraphs where my characters are acting or talking, then he'll do the same, with some liberties for simultaneous action. Sometimes one of us writes a few pages alone. The POV sometimes gets wonky, and there are style changes, and the prose isn't great. The point of this stage is to get a nicely proportioned skeleton in place.

Then I go in for the rewrite, rewrite everything alone, give his characters more depth, fill in scenes I feel need to be in the story, and occasionally cry to my cowriter to get me out of plot-holes. Once I finish, I'll polish excessively until I'm dragged away, and he'll go through the manuscript and pick out prose problems. (Along with a slew of other people making edits.)

This is a self-published venture, so once that's done with I'll use my multimedia degree to lay out the book in InDesign, then convert into HTML with regular expressions for the e-book version. I also paint the covers, though I may step down from that eventually. We split the proceeds unevenly in my favor, with a written contract saying that if our duties shift, we'll renegotiate.

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