[Janos]

I know some of you guys out there are authors so I've got a question for you. How do you write a book with someone else? I was killing time at a local bookstore and I picked up Good Omens written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett. I started wondering how two authors would write together, I mean, I've seen dozens of books by multiple authors.

It's been a few years since I had to write anything for school, and I never did write any fiction. But even my science papers, I'd have a general outline I'd try to follow but I'd still have to come up with the rest of the paper as I was writing it.

I can see how you'd draft up an outline together, but it would seem that fleshing out the rest of the story with two people would inevitably lead to conflicts. One person would see the characters going in direction A while the other would see them in direction B.

I imagine it would be especially hard with two very popular artists, kind of like the same thing you see in Academia. Two people with PhDs think that they know everything about a subject and get into big arguments about how things should be done.

It seems like trying to co-author a book would be something filled with conflict, but then again, I'm no writer so what do you guys think?

[Teresa Edgerton]

It happens all sorts of different ways. Sometimes a more famous author will write up the outline and a less known writer will work on the actual book. Sometimes two or more authors will exclusively work on different sections of a book (when the story is told from two or more different viewpoints for instance). Sometimes the collaborators will work on different sections and send their individual bits back and forth for editing and revision.

No doubt there are other ways of going about it, too.

I tried collaborating with another author once. But when he was eager to work on it I wasn't, and when I was interested he was too busy. I would have thought that was one of the advantages of a collaboration, but it didn't turn out that way.

[BLACK HAMMER]

Number one rule while writing with your partner... Make sure your on the same page.

[Radthorne]

One collaboration that I happen to know about involved Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper. Brenda told me that she and Larry worked together on the outline, then she would write the first draft, then he would re-write it (and, as she put it, make it infinitely better in the process, which is way too modest of her since she is really an excellent writer herself). This was an example of a more experienced writer working with one without quite the same publishing credentials.

I'm working with someone on a colloration right now, but in this instance I'm doing the artwork and the other person is doing the writing. I came up with the original story line, and we go back and forth on ideas and suggestions about where it ought to go. But there is no rancor here - one doesn't do this sort of thing unless you're already both pretty much on the same page. It's more a matter of, "What do you think of this?" "Well, enh... It's ok. But what about this?" "Oh, yeah, I do like that better. Let's go with that." You're both trying to make a good product, after all, with the idea that two heads are better than one.