Heide Goody and Iain Grant are writing a book together as a collaborative project and are blogging about the process as they do. Heide has written the following post but do take a look at their site for more posts on how their writing is going.
If you’re a writer, then maybe you’ve thought of collaborative writing. Maybe you thought it would be fun, but wondered how it would work.
How can you work on something, especially a longer piece, and have the same visions in your minds?
How can the characters speak to you in the same way, or even look the same?
How would you tackle plotting, and make sure that your writing styles marry together?
Heide Goody and Iain Grant are trying to answer all of these questions and more. They both belong to Birmingham Writers Group and have decided to write a comic fantasy novel as a collaborative project, and to blog about it as they go.
What has been surprising or interesting so far?
Heide says: “The thing that has really blown me away is the excitement that it’s caused in the other members of Birmingham Writers Group. We’ve described some of the index card games on the blog, but it’s got to the point where there’s disappointment if we go to the pub after a meeting and we don’t get out the index cards.”
Iain says: “What’s really interesting is seeing how our writing styles crash, collide, gel and repel. The writing process is made up of so many things – ideas, plots, plans, scenes, words and phrases – and when we write alone we often don’t see the difference between these parts of process. Collaborative writing can mean taking someone else’s ideas, forming a plot around them, watching your partner drape them with characters and moods and then asking you to actually commit all these things to paper. I don’t know if it’s going to work. But it’ll be fun finding out.”