How to Write with Friends

Have you ever written a story? One you poured your heart and soul into. It's your baby; you spent hours laboring over the characters and the plot, writing and re-writing, and now you're not going to let anyone touch it. For some writers, their manuscript is the Holy Grail and you better treat it as such, or else.

Now imagine having to share that process, and results, with someone else. In the middle of the story, you want the plot to go one way, and that someone else wants it to go another way. What do you do?

When, heaven forbid, someone else wants to kill your character, who you brought to life, and gave a personality, made them laugh and cry, and dance and fall, what do you do?

Or how about when you've written that perfect scene. It's clearly not going to get any better because you've already brought it to its zenith, but now someone comes along and dares to say, "it's not quite good enough." How do you keep from pulling your hair out?

Tip #1: Be gracious.

Yes, you're going to have different ideas than your fellow writer. Yes, you're going to think the story should go one way, and they, another. That's okay. Just remember it's not the end of the world. Hear each other out, discus you options, and maybe find a compromise. Be willing to admit their idea is actually better than yours.

Tip #2: Bounce ideas off of each other.

If you have an incomplete idea, see what your friend can add to it. They might have the perfect ingredient for your half baked idea that came to you while you were in the shower. And chances are you'll be able to help them in the same way when they have an idea that just doesn't seem to quite work.

Tip #3: Delegate a certain kind of scene to one person.

Now, we all know that you are simply marvelous at writing those side splitting comic relief scenes. But maybe you're a little weak on the hard core fight scenes. With any luck, your writing partner will take it all in stride and whip out an amazing fight scene that's on par with your comic one. From here on out you can breath easier, and let them handle the battles that always stressed you out.

Tip #4: Use each others strengths.

This lines up closely with my last tip, but I'm talking about more than a certain kind of scene. There are different kinds of writers. Different methods; what works for one person may be wrong for you. It's called diversity, and believe it or not it's a good thing. Now, let's take a look at just a few different writer types.

1) The child writer. I'm not talking about a children's book author. The child writer just writes and gets everything out in one big swoop. They typically don't go back and edit what they just wrote or check for spelling errors or grammar problems.

2) The editor. The editor can have a hard time moving past a simple sentence. They've worked and reworked that one sentence and it still doesn't sound perfect, so how could they even dream of moving on?

3) The writer who is always coming up with new ideas. In fact they have so many ideas they're excited about they jump from one story to the next with out finishing any of them.

All of these are good and important, and you might have some traits from more than one. The important this is, we all have different strengths and can help each other out when we work together.

Tip #5: Communicate clearly.

You may be saying, "Well, duh! That's the whole point of writing!" But I'm not talking about just communicating through your writing. If you're going to make writing with someone else work well, you've got to communication clearly with that person what your ideas are, what your strengths are, and how to give (and receive) and good critique.

All in all, just be decent humans. You may even find that writing with others is quite enjoyable.