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Collaboration - Is It Right For You?

© Dave Brandl

Writing, while fun to talk about at social gatherings, is generally a lonely craft. But working with another writer can be a blessing ... or a curse.

For a change of pace, you might try writing with a partner. It opens up new possibilities and offers a bit of built-in quality control at the same time.

Though I generally fly solo with my writing, I have co-written with others on occasions, with a variety of results.

Before you sharpen your pencils or fire up the PC, you should consider some things about your potential co-writer.

First off, it needs to be someone you feel comfortable enough with to be able to be honest ... about what gets written and about your own skills and limitations. My experience has shown that a pure 50/50 writing team rarely emerges.

What Gets Written

With one co-writer, we have worked on two screenplays and a stage play. The first project was a screenplay based on a book he'd written. A few years earlier, he had given the book to another scriptwriter, but wasn't happy about the resulting script. When I started on this project, I refused to look at that previous script, and instead, started by reading the book and putting on my adaptation glasses. I had permission from the original author to modify the story, characters, or whatever I saw fit in order to come up with a good script.

So, as I have written about in other articles, Original Works vs. Adaptations and Adapting Other Works for the Stage, I went about seeing what was the story that needed to be told, how much of the novel supported that story, and what were the essential characters and scenes.

After my first draft, we then exchanged the script back and forth, each making our separate edits, additions, and deletions, then sending the script back to the other until we arrived with a script we were both happy with.

In our pre-writing agreement (always a good idea having something written down so there are no confusions later), we agreed that whatever comes out of this script will be divided evenly. He supplied the story and characters, I adapted it to script form, then we both polished it, so it seemed reasonable.

In a stage play we're currently working on, after coming up with the basic outline of the show and the main characters, we each created an act, then swapped scripts with the other for consistency and editing. Again, going with a 50/50 split of whatever comes out of it.

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