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.…
Blog Archives
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…
Posted in 2012, Reflections Tagged with: Collaborative writing, electronic publishing, finishing a novel, unexpected results of collaboration
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…
Posted in 2012, Writing Tagged with: agents, artwork, Collaborative writing, electronic publishing, Fifty Shades of Grey, JRR Tolkien
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…
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…
Posted in 2012, Writing Tagged with: Bishop Berkeley, Collaborative writing, editing, finishing a novel
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…
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…
Posted in 2012, How-to's, Writing Tagged with: Collaborative writing, communication, index cards, shock tactics
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,…
Posted in 2012, Reflections, Writing Tagged with: Collaborative writing, communication, dropbox, software, support, unexpected results
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…
Posted in 2012, How-to's, Writing Tagged with: Ben Elton, Collaborative writing, continuity, editing, ideas, JL Borges, plot, Richard Curtis
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…
Posted in 2012, How-to's, Writing Tagged with: Collaborative writing, genre, high concept, index cards, Life of Pi, PG Wodehouse, planning, plot
