averytree

I saw 4xaroundthesun respond to this fic writing asks meme from tumblr so I also decided to answer the questions that I found most interesting!

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On twitter, tullycat was asking people questions about co-writing fanfiction. I think around a third of all the fic I've written has been co-written so I decided to answer the questions in longer format here.

How do you broach the idea of a co-write with someone?
Usually, I co-write with friends I know pretty well, so the topic generally comes up a few times before we actually get started. An exception to this was when I asked shinysherlock kind of out of the blue if she wanted to do podtogether with me; this is a challenge where a writer and podficcer collaborate to create something uniquely suited to audio. We’d known each other in fandom for many years, but had never talked about working together before. But we were both kind of new to BTS fandom and didn’t know that many other BTS people yet. She said yes and we made a Podtogether project I am really proud of; and then we started writing a fic together that we are still working on 2.5 years and 140K later…

What ways have you cowritten/how does it differ with each fic?
With my main co-written project, The Same Sky with Shiny, we divided up the cast. Shiny writes the older 5 members, and I write the younger two plus an OC. It’s a BIG story, a sci-fi set in the Firefly universe which spans about 8 years and multiple planets, and it took a long time for all the characters to meet. So for a long time we were writing plots that were converging but relatively slowly. Very recently all of the characters finally ended up in the same location for the very first time so now we are working more closely together and writing alternating scenes.

For a shorter co-written project, Anyway Here’s (Animate) Wonderwall written with Stifledlaughter, we also picked two different characters and wrote alternating scenes in each of our character’s POVs.

I also co-wrote a long fic that I orphaned. I don’t want to talk about the story, but I will say I am still very good friends with the author. I wrote the majority of the story but my friend filled in all of the sex scenes for me because I didn’t feel comfortable writing them at the time, lol. And I have co-written on original fiction as well.

Do you plan everything out beforehand or do you plot as you go?
For a long project, I need a plan. Shiny and I made a huge chronological document of everything that happened, so we could keep the timelines straight. But the project I did with Stifledlaughter was only 7K, so we barely planned. She added a scene to the doc, I would read what she wrote and add more, and so on back and forth.

What do you enjoy about cowriting?
It’s really fun to have someone else as excited about the story as you are! It’s really helpful to brainstorm with someone else. It’s nice that you have kind of a built in beta, as the other person will surely read over your sections. It’s really fun to write with friends!

How do you work out disagreements/mismatch?
I’ve been really lucky with my writing partners, and never had any really big conflicts. The hardest section Shiny and I ran into was when I got farther ahead in the plot than her, and so I started to write some scenes with her characters– but I wasn’t doing the characterization quite the same so those sections ended up needing pretty heavy edits/rewrites. I felt bad because I had written ahead hoping to save her some work, and instead probably made more work for her. But it was a useful learning experience, and I haven’t written ahead like that since then.

What is your strength or weakness?
I am good at action and plot. I like writing fight scenes, chases, scuffles, and humor. I tend to see a scene very clearly in my head and I’m able to describe the blocking and movement well. I love writing detailed settings. I am much less good at describing emotions, and the rich internal life of a character. I often have to go through a draft and add in things about what the character is FEELING to what they are DOING. Even two years ago, I was also pretty bad at writing a really distinctive character voice, but I think I’ve improved a lot after writing over 100K of fic in like 18 months.

What is your partners strength or weakness?
Shiny is so much better at writing emotion than I am! Her characters are very rich internally. I’ve learned a lot from working on a big story with her for years. She’s also way better at writing flirting, attraction, and sexy scenes. Thank god, because she took care of most of those for our big story! She’s such an experienced writer I don’t think she has any major weaknesses, though I will say I am better at remembering the timeline and random consistency details off the top of my head. But double-checking that kind of stuff is very easy. She also writes a very good heist.

How do you edit?
In Same Sky we each read over each other’s sections and add comments and suggestions, and so far we’ve had all the chapters read by a beta as well.

How do you work with different timezones/and hours of availability?
Luckily, we are in the same timezone and actually live close enough we can visit in person! But we started our story during covid, so we did most of all our early work together over the internet. We are in a writing discord together which has dedicated writing times on Wednesday and Sunday mornings, and we commit to showing up to at least one of those, if not both, every week. We also will write other times as well, but those are the times we are both consistently online every week to chat, edit together, make decisions, and be writing at the same time.

When I was working with Stifledlaughter on the shorter project, we just let each other know via discord when we’d finished another new scene in the doc, and the other person would take a look and write when they had time. We were writing that story as a gift and on a deadline, so we had incentive to keep the story moving.

What technology do you use?
Shiny and I write in google docs, so we can both edit. We are mutuals on pretty much every social media. But we do most of our “story talking” in gchat.

Final thoughts?
Co-writing is great! I highly recommend everyone try it at least once. Even if a story doesn’t get finished for whatever reason, I learn so much from everyone I’ve ever written with. It’s helped me get less precious over my words and ideas, and better at quickly folding another person’s ideas into my own. I’ve been really lucky with writing partners, and I hope if you try it you are too <3