marenfic and I are currently working on one story (Come Undone) with another in the early planning stages.
We've gone through a couple of ways of writing. When we first talked about cowriting something we established (a) the characters involved and (b) the general plot. We laid out a specific outline for the first five or chapters with the rest of the story plotted, but not necessarily in specific detail.
It's obvious that Maren and I have different writing styles but I think in the story it's not quite so obvious who wrote what part because of the way we handle that. We started out with me writing Angel and Faith, and she would write Buffy and Will. I feel like I have a better Angel voice than Buffy voice and dude, Maren writes the best Buffy ever. It worked really well at first but the inevitable happened. We got stuck (or more specifically, I got stuck).
So we then moved to working on sections, no matter how if it was a 2,000-word piece or a paragraph and passing it to the other when we got stuck. I think it's helped the flow of the piece and our styles to merge in a more pleasing, less jarring way.
We put the story aside for a bit because of other ficathon commitments but *we* are going to finish it. However, we're not going to post any more chapters until it's completed because nothing is worse than a languishing WIP. :(
When it comes to plotting/outlining we do that over e-mail and IM chats (mostly IM chats). I have logs and logs of our conversations where we're just batting around ideas, expanding a sub-plot, etc. It's worked really well because we're both on the same page as to where the story is going, the characters' motivations, etc. Neither one is flying blind, so to speak.
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We've gone through a couple of ways of writing. When we first talked about cowriting something we established (a) the characters involved and (b) the general plot. We laid out a specific outline for the first five or chapters with the rest of the story plotted, but not necessarily in specific detail.
It's obvious that Maren and I have different writing styles but I think in the story it's not quite so obvious who wrote what part because of the way we handle that. We started out with me writing Angel and Faith, and she would write Buffy and Will. I feel like I have a better Angel voice than Buffy voice and dude, Maren writes the best Buffy ever. It worked really well at first but the inevitable happened. We got stuck (or more specifically, I got stuck).
So we then moved to working on sections, no matter how if it was a 2,000-word piece or a paragraph and passing it to the other when we got stuck. I think it's helped the flow of the piece and our styles to merge in a more pleasing, less jarring way.
We put the story aside for a bit because of other ficathon commitments but *we* are going to finish it. However, we're not going to post any more chapters until it's completed because nothing is worse than a languishing WIP. :(
When it comes to plotting/outlining we do that over e-mail and IM chats (mostly IM chats). I have logs and logs of our conversations where we're just batting around ideas, expanding a sub-plot, etc. It's worked really well because we're both on the same page as to where the story is going, the characters' motivations, etc. Neither one is flying blind, so to speak.
And that's our story of collaboration.