Tag: communication

  • 6 good reasons and 3 bad reasons to write collaboratively

    (an extract from the forthcoming book, “How To Write A Collaborative Novel” by Heide Goody and Iain Grant) There are lots of reasons to collaborate. Indeed, to remangle a frequently mangled Shakespearean quote, some people are born to collaborate, some achieve collaboration and others have collaboration thrust upon them. Of the reasons that people give…

  • Testing the water – how do you know you’ve found the right collaborator?

    What do you do if you and a potential collaborator have found each other, but you’re not sure if you are ready to commit to working together? You write some test pieces. This might sound like a lot of hassle if you want to dive in and create the finished article, but if you imagine…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Digging to France

    In 1990, a consortium of companies from both France and the United Kingdom completed the Channel Tunnel, a 31 mile undersea rail link between the two countries. It was a major engineering feat (regarded by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World) and despite its ultimate success…

  • 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…