I Feel Like I’m Narrating a Health Informational

Best friends, or kissing cousins?
by Olivander

Valentine’s Day is coming up, which means that websites lately have been awash with a vomitous mass of pink and white, like the bastard love children of a whirly gig, a typewriter, and slutty cotton candy machine. Not that I’ve ever seen such a love match outside of a few drunken hallucinations, mind you, but I’m a writer, and I’ve got a very good imagination. I also have really awesome Google-Fu, but I promise not to subject you to any more diabetic coma-inducing sweetness than is absolutely necessary today.

But at the same time, it’s Valentine’s Day. And I write romances. So you’re going to have to deal with me talking about relationships this month. Or, rather, one very specific, very special relationship.

Your co-author and you.

Working with a co-author is a unique experience. When the pair of you match up well, strengths meet weaknesses and a beautiful synergy happens, allowing a story to emerge that neither one of you could have come up with on your own. There’s an element of surprise lurking around every pass of the manuscript back and forth, keeping the experience fun, fresh and exhilarating, all while still operating with the polite fiction that you, the writer, have some sort of control over your plot and characters.

Of course, when you don’t match up, it can be pretty epically bad. From incompatible writing styles to conflicting visions of the story, not being on the same wavelength as your writing partner can be catastrophic for the story. You need to communicate, cooperate, and leave the egos behind. Heavens, do you ever need to leave the egos behind. I mean, self-confidence is one thing, but it’s too easy to take it from that to:




I have been just dying to use a clip with John Barrowman. Anyway.

I’ve been fortunate with my co-author. Jenny and I are very close, and have a degree of trust in each other that makes it easy for her to tell me when I just don’t make sense in my exposition. Or when I’m abusing homophones that I know to use properly but my fingers just haven’t gotten the blasted memo yet. Likewise, I can tell her when her punctuation is all over the place and tease out more description from her.

We’re a team, the two of us, and we keep each other going, keep writing together even when our day jobs have drained us of every last ounce of energy. When the words don’t want to come out in any order fit for public consumption, we work together to scheme and plot – we have a massive pile of plot ideas to cherry-pick from, just from our habit of bouncing ideas off each other. And she helps me.

Working with Jenny makes me more focused, helps me to block out the distractions a little better because it’s for shorter bursts of time. And my writing has grown by leaps and bounds, getting tighter and neater for working with someone else and being so acutely aware that ambiguity will only lead to the scene getting derailed. While I like to think that I’d have gotten better on my own, eventually, I know damn well that it was the push and pull we have between us that hurried the process along.

If you have ever found that happy place with your co-author, that Zen state of being where you achieve balance and harmony between the two of you, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.

I guess that’s one of the perks to being such good friends for the better part of a decade. That, and I get to blame all the editorial mistakes on her. *ducks*

How about you? Have you ever worked with a co-author? If so, how did it work out, and would you ever do it again?

And no, you can’t have mine. She’s made of awesome and I never was very good at sharing.

(Jenny would also like me to add that I was only allowed to use the above video in this post once I assured her that no, I wasn’t trying to tell her something.)

See you next month, when I will hopefully have found a way to get my co-author to help me write my blog posts, too (did anyone else just hear an indelicate snort?).

Love,

Elizabeth
http://www.UrbanSilver.net