Live To Write Another Day by Dean Orion (free ebooks for android .txt) 📕

if having a writing partner is one relationship too many in your life, you have my permission to stop reading this chapter right now and skip to the next one—or forever hold your peace!

Assuming I haven’t scared you away, let’s talk about those three things I just mentioned…

Trust, in this relationship, means that no idea is a bad idea—that you can throw anything out there no matter how lame it might sound, and there will never be any judgment about it on the part of the other writer. It means that this person will always have your back creatively.

Mutual respect means that you never trash each other’s work. I learned this lesson the hard way when a writer I was working with repeatedly deleted or radically rewrote scenes that I had written in our script without even thinking about discussing the changes with me first. You can imagine how that partnership turned out.

Commitment means always being willing to do what it takes to make the work better, and always seeing the job through until it’s done. This is the toughest one of all, because as I’ve already mentioned, the story never stops being told. So no script is really ever done—which means, like parents, once you conceive and give birth to these mind children, they connect the two of you forever.

 What You Need to Give Up

When you enter into this relationship, the first thing you have to be willing to give up is creative ownership of the work. When you work with a writing partner, there is no draft just for you. In fact, there is no you anymore. You are now we. So every idea, every outline, every script, right from the very outset, is only fifty percent yours, creatively speaking. (To be clear, I’m not in any way referring to ownership in the financial sense here. Obviously that’s an entirely different conversation.)

The second thing you have to be willing to give up is creative autonomy. Since fifty percent of the work belongs to you and the other fifty percent belongs to your partner, you are only one of two votes that determine every creative decision that must be made on its behalf. So everything must be discussed at some point and negotiated if necessary, which can sometimes be a sticky business.

Most significantly, you also have to be willing to give up your own voice, as does your partner, for the sake of this third, entirely unique creature that is the product of your collaboration. This may seem like a scary proposition, effectively losing your identity as an individual writer (and make no mistake, that’s exactly what it is), but in my experience, this melding of voices is actually one of the coolest aspects of writing with partners—the fact that you’re creating something that would never be the same if it were written by any two other people.

 What You Gain

Here are the big advantages to writing with a partner. First of all, you get a second brain, and who couldn’t use one of those, right? Just think about all those painstaking hours you need to spend tuning in the radio, carving out characters that are properly motivated, endlessly structuring and restructuring. Now you don’t have to figure out all that stuff on your own. Half the answers are your partner’s responsibility.

Plus, now you have a reliable sounding board to help work through all the rough patches, a person who’s as knee-deep in the story as you are and equally invested in making it work.

You’re now also working with someone who is not only responsible for half the ideas, but half the workload as well. In reality, nothing ever shakes out exactly even, but if there’s good communication between the parties, clearly defined expectations, and a sincere work ethic, you’ll be well on your way to doing some great things together.

 The Partner Process

Like the process you create for yourself, the process you develop with a writing partner needs to emerge organically over time. Almost all of the collaborations that I’ve had with other writers have begun with simple conversations, sometimes accidentally, where we both found ourselves intrigued by a specific idea or a mutual area of interest. In some cases, one of us may have already written down some notes on the subject or done some high-level brainstorming, but generally it’s best to pretty much start from scratch.

That first conversation usually turns into a series of conversations, during which time we also separately do a little homework. This research period tends to be less intense than the one I described earlier, because in addition to sharing the workload, the knowledge gap also seems to close a lot faster when two people bring their life experiences and their collective energy to the table as opposed to just one.

When we get to the Concept Document phase, my preference is to continue working together in the same room, possibly with a white board, while we further define all the high-level aspects of the story. Then one of us can go off and transcribe the notes and begin to write up the document, which we can then pass back and forth, editing until we’re happy with it.

At this point, it is still preferable to be in the same room so we can work on the structure and lay the foundation for the outline together. Otherwise, one partner tends to do more of the heavy lifting on the story than the other, which skews the creative equation a little too much in one person’s favor. (Not that you can’t make it work either way. I just find it a little more effective to do this work in person.) Then, once you reach the outline phase, you can pretty much work in separate locations the rest of the way, again passing documents back and forth until you’re satisfied with them.

When writing the actual script, I’ve found that the best way to ensure that each of your voices is being fairly represented is to write no more