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Collaborative Writing Workshop
During Birmingham’s Artsfest, which is the UK’s largest free arts festival, Iain and I ran a Collaborative Writing Workshop. We were housed in the Council House, so we enjoyed some gentle background music from a guitarist performing in Victoria Square. The participants who turned up had a variety of expectations. Some were writers that we…
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All Good Things Come To An End
At some point, any collaboration must come to an end. Your novel is published and is selling and you’ve done everything you reasonably can to help promote the book and those sales. What happens next? Perhaps the first thing to do is take the time to evaluate the success of the collaboration. Actually, no, the…
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Should collaborative writers self-publish?
There’s a lot of information out there about the pros and cons of self-publishing your novel versus taking your novel to publication through the traditional route. I would, however, like to discuss it here and then reflect on the implications it specifically has for the collaborative writer. Advantages of self-publishing 1. Control This is the…
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Do collaborative writers need a pre-nuptial agreement?
It rarely does one good to be pessimistic but the tangled and seemingly endless relationship that is collaborative writing is even more complicated than I might have suggested in other blogs. The road to publishing success is not evenly paved and there are legal, technical and even moral potholes to negotiate. I’m not going to…
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When is a novelist’s job complete?
Yes, when is a novelist’s job complete? That’s a tricky, almost unanswerable question, up there with ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ or Bishop Berkeley’s old chestnut about the tree falling and no one being around to hear it. It’s an important question and doubly important for collaborators because you need to know…
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What type of writer are you?
Maybe you found someone that you’re thinking of collaborating with? Can you be sure that you both approach things the same way? Try our fun quiz and see how your scores stack up! Question 1 – how often do you write? A: Daily. I sometimes find myself writing when common sense says that I should…
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Five habits of successful writing partners
Iain and I have been writing collaboratively for nearly a year now. We’ve written fiction and non fiction. We’ve planned, plotted and edited a LOT of words during that time. Clovenhoof, our novel is now very close to publication. We’ve learned a thing or two about how to play nicely together. Here are some top…
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Communication Tools
It is probably worth considering how much of a debt collaborative writing of the type we’ve been discussing owes to modern communications technology. Heide and I live twenty-three miles apart. Without word processing, e-mail, video conferencing and web-based file sharing, we would not be able to collaborate on fiction in the way we have. That…
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Novel writing processes
You and your collaborator(s) may have devised a setting, some characters and the plot of your story but this represents only the beginning of the creative process for collaborative writers. At some point, you are going to need to tackle the meat of your writing project, that is, the actual writing of chapters, scenes or…
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Plotting your novel collaboratively
Before being written down, all stories are plotted out. Some writers plot in enormous detail, generating more words in plans and background text than in the finished work of fiction. PG Wodehouse wrote pages and pages of preparatory notes, sometimes greater in length than the novel he was to later write. Others plan lightly, perhaps…