Tag: Collaborative writing

  • Sewing the pieces together

    Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, 1931 Charles Dickens died in 1870, leaving his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. His readers, who had followed the story of Drood, his Uncle Jasper and the Landless siblings, were left with an unfinished story abounding with unanswered questions. Who killed Edwin Drood? Who was the Dick Datchery…

  • How did we avoid these collaborative writing pitfalls?

    Empirical Study on Collaborative Writing: What do co-authors do, use, and like? Sylvie Noël & Jean-Marc Robert I came across this interesting paper about the co-authoring of documents. Most of the research is about collaborative writing in the workplace or in academia, but it’s full of interesting things. I’m not going to reproduce what it says, you…

  • Collaboration: Can two people write with one voice?

    A writing collaboration can take many forms. One partner might be the ideas person and the other the writer. Or one might be the writer and the other the editor. Or each author might write separate story strands which are then woven together once complete. These are perfectly fine methods of collaboration but, in them,…

  • Feedback from Birmingham Writers’ Group

    We had feedback this week on two of the chapters we’ve written for the Clovenhoof novel. To make life interesting, these were chapters three and six, as we decided it made more sense to start in the middle. We’re still happy with that decision, as Iain has just written the beginning, and felt it came…

  • Research: It’s a damn odd job but someone’s got to do it.

    Writing requires research. The adage ‘write what you know’ holds very true but I agree with those who say that, in this day and age when information is so easy to find, the adage ‘know what you write’ is truer. It is perfectly possible to write short stories, articles and novels without any research. The…

  • Foodie Fun

    Fish and Chips, foodie style I am starting work on a new chapter. Clovenhoof (our earth-bound Satan) is having a dinner party. His own favourite food is Findus Crispy Pancakes, but he’s been persuaded, in part by his desire to impress a woman and also by his own inclination to show off, to take on…

  • End of Year Round-up

      Statistics Blog entries made          42 Total words written for manuscript        28973 Pubs used for planning 3 Tellings-off from old ladies          1 Church services disrupted            1 Copies of Birmingham A-Z defaced 1 Bored children made to endure planning sessions 2 Index cards used for fun planning games              numerous Thoughts on the process so far Heide…

  • **Competition** YOU can be a star in our novel!

    We can tell from the stats that we have lots of traffic on our blog.  Lurkers, who aren’t speaking up. That’s fine, we’re happy with lurkers. But we’d love to know who you are. That’s why we’re offering a unique incentive. Everyone who leaves comments on the blog will be put into a draw when…

  • Doing it in Public

      How much privacy do we need or want?   When we started using Dropbox our productivity soared. Instead of emailing ideas back and forth, we could easily create and share them in documents. Once we started writing in earnest, it raised a question. Writers are nosey people, it’s a given. To be a creator…

  • From Ideas to Planning to Prose

    We’ve been blogging at Idle Hands for exactly one month, one week and one day, charting our attempts to write a collaborative comic fantasy novel about Satan’s days in retirements on earth. We’re now in the process of writing some actual prose. This comes as a bit of a surprise to me because I usually…