499 – Co-Writing Pros & Cons

The Mythcreant Podcast

A writer can be a great thing, but would two writers be better? Three? Theoretically, there’s no limit to the number of authors you can combine, Voltron style. Though there may be practical limitations, depending on the project and how you approach writing. This week, we’re talking about co-writing, a practice that has driven some authors to success while baffling many others. What are the benefits of co-writing, and what are the downsides? And perhaps most importantly: who do we get angry at when a co-written story disappoints us?

Show Notes

• Sanderson Takes Over Wheel of Time
• This is How You Lose the Time War
• Sorcery and Cecilia
• The Expanse
• Warriors
• Animorphs
• The Long Earth
• Center Your Darling
• First Avatar Episode
• Starship Down
• Alan Smithee

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

[Intro Music]

Bunny: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…

Oren: Oren

Bunny: …and…

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: We’re talking about co-writing today, and I think really the only way to make sure that it’s truly co-writing is to trade off each sentence, and to have each sentence be roughly equal length. So I’ll start, and we’ll go in a circle. “The worm was having a good day.” Oren.

Oren: Yes, “…and the early bird was also there.” I think you all know what happens next.

Bunny: Uh-oh. Chris, you wanna conclude us?

Chris: “The worm ultimately had a very bad day.”

Bunny: Oh no. That was beautiful. That really teaches me something about loss and hardship. And stories taking unexpected directions.

So, I think co-writing, beyond playing an improv game, can be broadly defined as just when there are multiple people involved in creating a story. And that can take a lot of different forms, like obviously TV shows and games and stuff have writers’ rooms and teams, which might shift throughout the show’s runtime. And it might even get new creative directors. That sort of setup is also fairly hierarchical, so everyone’s writing towards the vision of one or two people who are the showrunners.

There’s also graphic novels, which I would argue are co-written, even if there’s only technically one writer, because the images have a big effect on how the story is told. So I think that’s also a kind of co-writing.

There’s also what happens when people trade off between books in a series, so, like, Wheel of Time started with one guy and ended with another guy. I don’t think that quite counts as co-writing, but it’s certainly still multiple people having inputs into the creative process.

Oren: If you’re a real weirdo, you get dice involved. [Bunny laughs] Then y’all sit around pretending to be wizards for an evening.

Bunny: I don’t know who would do that. That sounds weird. Disturbed behavior, very strange.

Oren: Big old nerds.

Bunny: They just sit around and co-write together for a couple hours every week. There’s also ghostwriting, which I don’t think really counts. If you do count it, that’s probably one of the main ways that co-writing happens with regard to novels. I feel like novels are the hardest thing to co-write simply because you can’t do things like assigning particular characters to a particular writer. There’s just so many words.

Oren: Au contraire, you definitely can. [laughing] It’s arguably less convenient. So depending on how you split the responsibilities, you can definitely have one person who is responsible for the dialogue of a character. Depending on the premise of the story, that can be easier or more difficult. If it’s something like This Is How You Lose the Time War it’s very easy, because that’s a series of letters.

Chris: Similar to Sorcery and Cecelia, two writers that were writing letters back and forth to each other is how they wrote the book.

Oren: But supposedly with, for example, The Expanse, which is written by two authors who go under a single pen name, supposedly Daniel Abraham was in charge of some characters more than others, and then Ty Franck had more influence on the other characters. Abraham in particular is noted for writing a lot of Miller, the detective, because that was based off of Abraham’s D&D character. It wasn’t actually D&D, but it was whatever roleplaying game they were playing as a setup for The Expanse. Now that doesn’t mean Abraham would write Miller’s line of dialogue and then he would turn the page and hand it to Franck, who would then write Holden’s dialogue. I’m not saying they did it that way.

Chris: You could probably have improv-ed chats to get ideas for how the conversation goes if you want.

Oren: And when it comes to ghostwriting, that is often a very squishy topic. Sometimes a ghostwriter is literally just told by a celebrity, “Write a book and put my name on it.” And then sometimes you have something more like the Animorphs ghostwriting. As the series went on, Applegate was busy and didn’t have time to do all of the writing herself. Supposedly, K. A. Applegate is already two people, like supposedly that also incorporated a lot of the work of her husband, and then they brought in more writers and Applegate would create outlines and then give those to the ghostwriters who would write dialogue and fill in description.

Nowadays, the impression I get is that we would be more likely to just call that co-writing, and those authors would get their names on the books. It would be less common for that to be done in secret now. That’s just a feeling I’m getting from hearing people talk about it.

Chris: I get the sense that with an IP work where somebody is hired, a writer is hired to write a story in an existing franchise, publishers don’t necessarily want some people to know that this is an IP work. A lot of times a writer does get their name on those, but not necessarily, and it could be secretive, and they want all the books to be under the same pen name.

Bunny: Yeah. One of my favorite book series growing up as a kid, Warriors, was four people writing under the pen name Erin Hunter, and I have no idea how that work was split up. My little kid brain was not nearly developed enough to be like, “Yes, I bet this was written by writer number two, and this has the oeuvre of writer number three.”

Chris: I suspect that most IP books are more heavily supervised and edited. All the contracts are different, but I think there’s more likely to be an editor who goes in there and just makes changes on their own to make them fit whatever franchise it is.

Oren: And sometimes we are fortunate enough to have interviews and behind-the-scenes material where the writers tell us, and that’s how we know a lot about what was going on with The Expanse. We know that Ty Franck created the setting originally, and he was trying to pitch it as an MMO, which I have so many questions about how that was supposed to work. Do you mean like a space MMO, like they were supposed to fly the ships around, or are you imagining that they were like a people-scale MMO, and they would use ships to fast travel. That sounds really wild. And when that didn’t go anywhere, he ran it as a roleplaying game for a while. And as someone developing a setting for both prose and a roleplaying campaign, I can see that makes him smarter and more attractive.

[Everyone laughs]

Bunny: How clever and sexy of him to do such a thing.

Oren: I know, right? Just a really classy act. And then he brought Abraham on board, and that was when they decided to go the novel route, and they collaborated on different parts of the story, basically. And so we know that, because they’ve talked about it in interviews.

But then other times it’s a lot less clear. Like the Long Earth books are co-written by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett. We don’t know how they split those roles. As far as I know, neither of them ever said. There are some characters who are a lot more Pratchett than others, like Lobsang, the AI airship who believes he is a reincarnation of a Tibetan motorcycle repairman. That is just a Discworld character right there, let me tell you.

Chris: [laughing] It does speak to some of the liabilities of co-writing. It can be weird if the work is written in two completely different styles. And sometimes it’s fine. Again, if you have characters by different authors that can give them separate personalities, that makes them distinct, and separate voices, that makes them more realistic as characters. With something like that, I would be nervous about, is a story tonally unified. There is Pratchett doing his thing.

Oren: It worked fine in The Long Earth. The Long Earth had its problems, but I don’t think clashing writing styles was one of them. I did notice that the book felt less and less Pratchett as the series went on, which makes sense, his health was declining by then. I don’t imagine he had a lot of time for co-writing, so that part I was made a little sad by, but I don’t think there was any serious clashing.

I have noticed that in other books, for example, Good Omens, the book. It’s very noticeable that of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse three are entirely evil and have no redeeming characteristics. And then there’s Death, which is just Death from the Discworld novels and is almost a good guy. That always struck me as weird, right? It’s not like you couldn’t have Death be different than the others, but the book never gives any indication of why that would be. It’s just that’s how Pratchett likes to write Death. And I love that Death, so I’m not complaining too hard, but…

Chris: Sometimes writers divide up the works in different ways to try to mitigate the unevenness. Either you have one person do the entire first draft, and the other person do like a second pass, or they edit each other’s writing. Or as we said, if you have the idea that there’s two different viewpoint characters, they might naturally sound a little bit more different. Or two people writing to each other, two different authors will give each their own voice, so there are ways to mitigate the style unevenness, but sometimes that can take work to resolve.

Oren: Yeah, I have tried co-writing a couple of times. I’ve discovered I’m not good at it. I have not communicated well with the person I was writing with, and I would end up taking the story in a direction that they didn’t want it to go, and I didn’t talk about it to them enough. Then they would look at it and be like, “This is not at all what I wanted, and I’m so far into this I don’t feel like I can stop.” And then the project would fizzle.

Chris: I think that’s the number one downside. We talk to a lot of writers about trying to make their stories cohesive, and we talk to them about “find out your darling,” and “center your darling,” and make everything about that, and it’s just really easy for two different writers to have two different darlings and to try to put the story in two different directions, because they care about different things. And so I think for co-writing to work well, you really need writers that have–either are very determined to make it work [laughing], because they’re like, both famous, this is a great opportunity. But in a lot of cases, co-writers with just very similar tastes.

Like Sorcery and Cecelia, one of the reasons it works well, even though it’s got what are basically two different viewpoints in different locations, because that gives them an excuse to write letters to each other, is that they’re both cute little regency romances, fantasy regency romances. Both of the authors are into that, when a reader reads them, if you like one, you’re more likely to like the other, and it gives the whole book a more unified feel despite the fact that each writer has their own playground to work in. Whereas if you try to work with somebody who just likes different things in their books, it’s gonna be a lot harder.

Bunny: And even when everyone’s aligned on the goal and the story and where we’re going with it, and so on and so forth, there can still be little blips where someone has a strange amount of passion for one particular small thing that doesn’t quite fit what everyone else is going for.

So like right now I’m writing a script for a game with two other people, and we’ve had a couple of cases. So what we’ve done is essentially divvy up all of the characters in the game between us. And whenever we write a scene with our character and then another person’s character, usually one of the characters is leading the scene. And so that’ll probably be the person who writes the first draft of it, and then they just add “this is what I want to convey” type of dialogue for the other person’s characters. So you’ll write your character’s dialogue and the serious tone of the scene, and then you want the response from their character to have the gist of like, “Oh no, that’s awful! Frowny face, frowny face.” So you write that, and then later they’ll come back through and replace that with dialogue in that character’s actual voice.

Chris: Have you ever had a circumstance where somebody came in and saw that and was like, “Yeah, I actually think my character would react in a different way,” and that created problems? Or did you all outline together closely enough that hasn’t been an issue?

Bunny: We did a lot of outlining and brainstorming together, so I don’t think we’ve had that be a huge issue. I’m trying to think…we’ve had instances where we get attached to our various NPCs and want them to have bigger roles than they should in the story.

Chris: [laughing] I have also encountered this, where somebody else who was just like helping me a little bit fell in love with the character that was supposed to be a random side character and wanted to give him, like, all the candy.

Bunny: Right, in this game, people will be clicking through this dialogue. We don’t want it to get too long. People are gonna be like, “Why does this random bug guy have deep and tragic backstory about the main character’s brother?” And then we’ll have to go in and talk about that and see if we really wanna center this character more, or whether this is just going to confuse the player.

Oren: Mind your own business, that’s why.

Bunny: [laughing] Sit down. Let me talk about the bug guy’s trauma, star-crossed lovers. So we’ve outlined and stuck together closely enough, I think our main strength, and the thing that’s made this particular co-writing experience work so well, is that we all communicate a lot, and I think that is probably the most important thing when you’re co-writing, on an interpersonal level. Like, the cohesion part, obviously that’s important, but that’s a problem of the script. Getting the script out there, you’ve gotta communicate. There is no way to co-write if everyone’s not on the same page.

Oren: Yeah. That’s why my attempts at it have all failed. By the same token, I also think that just my temperament with writing makes co-writing difficult for me, because I’ve also tried the other way where we all have access to the same document, and we can see it as it’s being written. And I hated it so much. When I’m actually writing, getting the words out is hard, and having to constantly worry, like, “Oh man, am I gonna have to delete this because my co-writer didn’t like it? Oh, no. Now I can’t write at all.” Now, obviously, that’s not a problem for a lot of people, so I’m not suggesting that’s a general issue with it, but certainly it was for me.

Chris: I mean, for me, the opposite can be a concern. This experience is not fun because I’m stressing about the fact that I want to change what the other person has written. And it’s one thing if they, for instance, hired me as an editor, because I’m there to give them feedback. But I also know as an editor that their vision is the most important, and all of my suggestions are in service to their vision for the story. They are the creative here. But when you’re co-writing, and you’re like, “Okay, that plot point seems a little contrived to me, and I’d like to change this, and other things, I think I would like this to just be a little different,” then every single point you would have to explain to the other person why you don’t like their version.

Bunny: I think, Oren, you make a good point about the temperament that you have to get to successfully co-write. Whatever temperament you have towards writing, there’s no good or bad necessarily, but I feel like there are better and worse temperaments to bring to a co-writing scenario. You cannot be defensive, for example, when it comes to co-writing. You’re gonna have eyes on your work constantly, and depending on the amount of co-writers, like you’re always going to be reading each other’s work and giving feedback and rewriting.

Like, we just got out essentially the third draft of our script to our next round of beta readers. We were supposed to have it done earlier this week, and then we just kept bouncing it back and forth with like, “I’ve resolved these comments and I made some comments on your comments. Could you take a look at that?” “I made some comments on your comments, and added a few things here and there. Could you take a look and review that?” And you gotta be willing to do that quite a lot.

Chris: It also brings up the question of when is co-writing faster, and when is it slower? Faster writing could potentially be a huge benefit, because prolific writers definitely have a big career advantage. And it’s not just because they have more books to sell, because you could be like, well, I have more books to sell, but now we have to split the profits between two people. But I think just putting out stories more often helps writers keep the attention of their fans, and build a reputation, and all of those things that are beyond having twice as many books to sell. So that’s a big benefit if you can put out books more fast by working with somebody. But if you’re going back and forth a lot and everything has to be coordinated, do you ever feel like it’s just really slow?

Bunny: I feel like the pace that this is going at, because this is a game project, and we’re part of a pretty big team, and we’re all doing this as a portfolio project–we’ve been pretty regimented with schedules and stuff because we have a producer, and she’s been pretty on top of things. She’s actually one of the other writers.

We’re pretty lucky in that regard, but I think if it were just us three writers, we would be bouncing it back and forth for eternity. Being like, “I’ve commented on your comments.” “I’ve commented on your comments.” “I’ve made some more comments,” like that sort of thing. It probably would’ve been faster if one of us had been the only one writing it, but I don’t think we would’ve had as interesting of a product.

Oren: It definitely helps if you have one person who can be in charge of saying, “Okay, we’ve debated this enough. We have to make a decision.”

Bunny: That was what was happening last night, when I finally got the scripts out. I was like, “All right, I’m locking this. Resolve the comments. Some of these lines we’re still not happy with, we can revise them later. We need to stay on schedule.” This project is lined up into “sprints,” which are just sections of time with specific goals in them. That helps keep things on track. But obviously not every set of co-writers will have that sort of thing.

Oren: Closest I’ve ever come to make anything like this work is co-GMing a campaign. The most successful I’ve ever been at it is when there were too many players for one GM to handle, and so we split them into multiple tables that people would occasionally switch between, and that was fun. That worked. The campaign was more chaotic than normal because we sometimes had to revise things. The GMs communicated ahead of time and tried to have some basic ideas of what was going to happen. But it’s roleplaying games, right? Stuff happens in real time. You don’t plan the story a hundred percent. So sometimes the two tables would diverge a bit, and then we’d have to see if we could bring them back together, or if we just had to roll some stuff back.

Bunny: That sounds far more complicated than the current co-writing thing I’m doing, because at least there aren’t a dozen wild card act player characters.

Oren: But the upside is that with roleplaying games, the standards are a lot lower. [everyone laughs] You know, with roleplaying games, my players will accept a lot of contrivances as long as I make their play, their characters, feel cool. And that’s not necessarily the case with an audience for a written work or for a video game.

Chris: You understand the story is gonna be less polished, but what you get is a customized story that’s for you.

Oren: The one that did not work at all was when we once tried to have two GMs for the same table. Not saying no one could make that work, but it did not suit us.

Bunny: How did you even try to make that work?

Oren: The original idea was one person would handle NPCs, or combat, or whatever, but one of the reasons it didn’t work was that we didn’t communicate very well on what our delineation of tasks was.

Chris: It was back to the communication.

Oren: It was both of our faults. I started doing more and more, and that was on me, because I was taking up more space, but I was doing that because they had decided to do less, because they saw that I was doing more.

Bunny: It’s like any group project.

Oren: So it was both of our faults that time, but it just didn’t work. I just ended up becoming the sole GM. It’s not impossible, but it certainly didn’t work for me.

Chris: I’m sure that you can also have a beneficial partnership by having people who are a little bit more specialist in what skills they take on. Like one person who likes to perhaps discovery-write that first draft, and another person who loves to have a draft to start with and wants to revise it and make it reflect their own vision, that would be a potential partnership. Or if somebody really likes the story, and somebody else is more into the prose and the wordcraft. I think there’s a lot of potential for that kind of thing. But I do think with those kinds of partnerships, it means that both people have to be ready to let go of the other area. [laughing] It seems like the biggest obstacle in many cases, besides communication, is if people have different visions for the story, it’s gonna be hard for them to both be happy with it.

Bunny: If you’re doing anything in a non-hierarchical structure, like any co-writing that’s not that TV writer’s room example where you’re all following the direction of a creative lead or whatever…

Chris: Or an IP work where you have the author that’s hiring people to fill out their outlines or something like that.

Bunny: Exactly, like an IP work. Everyone has some level of creative control, and that means you’re gonna be doing a lot of compromises. Everyone’s going to need to have a level of accountability. Gets complicated very quick.

Chris: Do you think that’s why in something like Sorcery and Cecelia, which two writers, they were just having fun over a summer and then decided to take all of their fun letters and make it into a book, giving them each their own playground where they had their own set of characters, but it was only cohesive because they were doing something very similar.

Oren: Probably wouldn’t have worked if one of them was living in, like, a steampunk dystopia. [Bunny laughs]

Chris: After they were done, they did bring them together and decide to make some revisions. But if I understand, it was largely improvised, and they would do things like come from the countryside to London, or London to the countryside, which is the location of the two protagonists.

Oren: One of the things that’s funny about TV shows is because so much of the writing is done in a very team environment, and there are a lot of hands on the script over time, it’s very difficult to tell who came up with specific lines and whose story goes with who.

Chris: Yeah. I wanna know who from the Avatar live-action show was writing those terrible dialogue lines.

Oren: What if we front-loaded all of the exposition?

Chris: To me, it felt like some other person came in, and was like, “No, we need exposition here,” and deleted somebody’s perfectly good dialogue line to put in something terrible. [laughing] That’s what it felt like. I don’t know if that’s what was happening.

Oren: I listened to an interview once with one of the writers of the Deep Space Nine episode “Starship Down,” which is an episode about the Defiant getting damaged and flying around inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, doing like a whole submarine parallel. One of the two people who was credited as a writer on that episode, the way he tells it is that they wrote their script and originally it was actually underwater. It was literally submarine stuff. It was accepted, and then it was almost completely rewritten, and almost none of their original script is in the episode, but they’re still credited as the writers. [Bunny laughs] And assuming that story is true, then we just have no idea who wrote that.

Chris: Yeah. It sounds like with TV shows, it can get political which person is credited, and can be sometimes a little arbitrary.

Oren: It certainly has a lot to do with your ability to make more money later. The more writing credits you have, the easier it is to get a job, et cetera, et cetera.

Bunny: Yeah, a lot of things are just black boxes, which is weird because we’re used to thinking of media as having only one author in general, but there’s a whole, dare I say, an ontology of authorship that you could get into. You could argue that plays are coauthored, simply because reading a play and seeing it are two different things. And just as the illustrator of a graphic novel contributes to the story, the actors of a play also do. It’s a weird and difficult thing, authorship.

Oren: Yeah, but I need someone to form a parasocial relationship with. [Bunny laughs] Can’t do that with a diffused group of creatives, each of whom has donated a small but vital component to the piece. What do I look like? Some kind of epitome of the human spirit? No.

Bunny: [laughing] When I take something they write personally, who do I write my email to?

Oren: I need the hate mail address.

Bunny: I need Alan Smithee.

Oren: Okay, so now that we’ve covered that the most important part of authorship is who we send hate mail to, I think we’ll go ahead and end this episode for today.

Chris: If you would like to help us co-write more episodes, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.

Oren: Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons, who while not technically co-writers, definitely make the show possible. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.

[Outro Music]

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.