Workshop on co-writing
Hi! We're zooey_glass04 and parenthetical, and for your January workshop we'll be talking about successful co-writing. We've written two long fics together for spn_j2_bigbang - Phoenix and Gravity Sings - and we also collaborate in a poetryverse (just don't let Sam and Dean hear you call them poems!)
We've had a lot of fun writing our fics together, and we're both pretty pleased with the results (although we'll have to let others judge the success of the finished product!). This workshop will explore some of the key issues we've encountered co-writing long fics, and will touch on some other ways of co-writing. If you'd like a bit more of an insight into our process, you can see a step-by-step example from a section of our fic Gravity Sings, which shows everything from the initial chat to the final text (and you can see the finished thing in the posted fic itself, of course). If you'd like to see an example of an entire co-writing session, you might also like to check out the transcript of the original chat in which we wrote this workshop. Please note that there are a few minor spoilers for S3 in here, just in case any of you are behind in your show watching.
Why co-write a fic?
There are probably as many reasons to co-write a fic as there are co-written fics, but here are a few of the main ones:
Usually co-writing partnerships arise fairly naturally, but if you're thinking about embarking on a big co-writing project, you might want to think about these issues:
The first time we co-wrote a fic, we sat down and said 'Right, let's get started!' Then we flailed around a bit as we realised we had no idea what co-writing actually entailed. In truth, there are lots of different ways of approaching co-written fic, and it's only by experimenting a little that you can find out what works for you. There are a whole host of different options which will be influenced by your practical situation, your writing styles, the type of fic you'd like to write, and so on. However, there are a few things you will probably need to think about no matter which option you choose, and we'll look at them below as we walk you through our co-writing process and talk about each stage.
Practicalities and technical tips
In some cases, how you collaborate will be determined by your choice of partner; obviously, if you're collaborating with someone who shares an apartment with you, you have entirely different options open to you than if you're working with someone on the other side of the world! Likewise, if your timezones are similar or at least allow you to communicate in real time via chat, it's far easier for you to collaborate in more depth than if you're forced to take a more round-robin approach via email or something similar.
Writing together in real time or separately both have their advantages and disadvantages. Writing in real time may place you under greater pressure simply in terms of finding time in both your schedules. On the other hand, it means you can communicate far more easily as you go along, and perhaps produce more seamless writing. If you don't write together in real time, it will probably be far easier to find time, but you will also have to put more thought and effort into making sure you communicate with each other.
Whether you are writing in real time or not, we can definitely recommend using an online document service such as Google Docs. Google Docs allows you to both collaborate on the same file at the same time, meaning you don't have to email documents back and forth or worry about harmonising changes at the end. You can both see what each other is writing at all times, and you can check the revision history to see what changes have been made.
In our case, we live in different countries, so all our collaboration happens online. We like to work in real time, so we write in chat. The nice thing about this is that you can see when the other person is in the middle of writing something, since most chat programmes will tell you if the other person has typed anything, and it means that everything is already written down. We've found that Google Talk is particularly handy for this, as unlike some of the other chat programmes we've used, it allows for quite a long block of text, and also lets you have italics and bold. If you use it in GMail, it's also very easy to keep track of all your fic conversations and to go back and look at discussions - we've been known to search our chat transcripts to check on particular details we've raised.
Another useful thing to do is to keep a file of notes on the most important issues - the plot outline, places and dates, etc. In addition to helping you keep track of everything, it can help you ensure you're both on the same page about key details.
Getting started
Before you get started, it's good to make sure you both have similar expectations and to work out the kind of writing you'd like to do. There are a few things you will probably want to think about before getting into the nitty-gritty of planning and writing your fic.
Before you get going on writing your fic, you'll need to decide on what the fic is going to be about! Sometimes co-writing might be a more freeform activity, where one person kicks off and you both ad-lib and see where it takes you. However, assuming you want a slightly more structured approach, then it pays to spend a fair amount of time tossing ideas about and planning the fic.
This is one of the really fun things about co-writing - brainstorming is a great way of coming up with ideas for plot. It's also one of the features which might make co-writing quite different from your usual writing process - whereas you might prefer not to plot in detail ahead of time when writing solo, having a bit of pre-planned structure is useful if you are coordinating two (or more) brains.
When we're brainstorming, we usually start by sketching out some of the big issues and unanswered questions in canon at the time we're writing. So, our last fic, which we started writing during the middle of Season 3, originated thusly:
This time we have:
#1 Dean's deal
#2 Possible non-humanness of Sam
#3 Increasing hardcoreness of Sam
#4 Oh shit oh shit this is hell, and the demons are here
Obviously you might not choose to set your fic during current canon at all - you might have decided to co-write an AU J2 space opera with a cast of dancing zombies - but laying out some of the main themes or ideas you want to consider is a good kicking-off point.
However you go about it, brainstorming is one of the areas where co-writing really comes into its own. Two heads are better than one, and you may find that together you come up with themes and plots you'd never have arrived at alone. Writing with another person also helps you muster up the courage to run with some of those more adventurous or unusual ideas, because you have the lovely experience of getting excited about them together and cheering each other on.
Writing the first draft
This is the hard part! But also the fun part. Before you plunge right in, there are a few technical details to consider. For example, what tense are you going to write in? Which POVs are you going to use in the fic - are you going to have POV sections for both Sam and Dean, or is it Impala POV all the way? Voice is also important - is your fic going to be a second-person epic, or does the third person fit your combined style better? These are all things which apply the moment you begin writing, so it's important to sort them out at the start.
Once you've taken the big decisions, you can finally start writing! Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. When writing solo, you probably find that you have a mental picture of the things you're writing about - what your original characters look like, the pattern of the motel wallpaper, the exact way Jared's leaning against the Impala. A lot of the time this is entirely subconscious, and even though many of these things are never mentioned explicitly in the fic itself, they still inform your writing. It's important to remember when co-writing that your partner also has their own mental assumptions, and they may not always coincide with yours! That's why we recommend discussing certain issues before beginning each scene:
Editing your draft is a much bigger part of the process when you're co-writing than it is when you're working solo, and you'll need to allow a lot more time than you're used to. All the sneaky little problems which appear in solo writing - switching POV, changing tense, inconsistency in how you spell your OC's name - are all even more likely to occur when there are two of you involved.
You're also likely to hit other problems - maybe the timescale of events is screwed up, or you changed your minds about the personality of an OC and need to go back and make her seem more consistent. In these cases, you'll probably want to discuss the options for edits, which means they take more time to deal with than when you're writing solo and can make executive decisions. (However, we should point out that sometimes having another person around makes these things take less time, since having someone to thrash things out with when you realise there's a major plothole can be very helpful!)
Another issue with co-writing is the question of how integrated your two voices are. Depending on how you approach it, you may have different feelings about this, but it's really important to us that the reader experiences our co-written fics as coherent and seamless pieces, and we spend a bit of time in the editing process smoothing over the edges so that it's not possible to tell who wrote what. (We like to think we succeed - certainly we can't remember by the end of it all exactly who wrote which lines!)
We found it more difficult to figure out how to divide the labour of editing than we did deciding on how to write it in the first place. How you choose to do it depends a lot on how you like to edit, how much time you have, and how obsessive you are! This is very personal, but we usually divide the chapters up between us and do as follows:
The final stages
Once you have your fic written and edited, then the co-writing process is almost over. Depending on your particular way of doing things, you might or might not want to have your fic betaed. Because we have an incredibly detailed and exhaustive editing process, we don't ask anyone to do a substantive beta - one of the nice things about co-writing is that a lot of the things you might normally do with your beta (such as debating ways to fix particular plot points) you do with your co-writer instead. However, it's always nice to have another pair of eyes - in our case, since we're both British, we have an Ameripicker / beta (the lovely aynslee) who makes sure Sam and Dean have jelly on their toast and jello with ice cream, and also spies out any stray errors or problems. Once she's worked her magic, we do one more round of editing together to make the necessary changes.
Then comes the moment of truth: posting! Posting a co-written fic can be a bit of a conundrum - whose journal is it going to be posted in? We resolved this issue by setting up a community specifically for our co-written fic, which was worthwhile for us as we knew we weren't likely to stop at one.
Depending on whether you're unbelievably anal extremely detail-oriented like us, you might want to factor in a little extra time in the posting stage to think about things like how the fic will be formatted, what icon you'd like to use with it, and so on. The saner of you might not feel too strongly about this, but it's worth bearing in mind that one or both of you might have particular feelings about the visual presentation of the fic. We've also found that the process of co-writing has made us feel that the resulting fic is particularly special, so we have spent more time than usual getting it to look exactly right.
Once it's up and posted, you can sit and share in the joy of a shiny, finished fic! We both tend to find that we are able to admire a co-written fic much more than our solo work, as it's more like looking at someone else's fic where you see all the shiny (whereas when we look at our own we often notice all the flaws - maybe this is partly our British heritage coming to the fore!)
Shared universes and other types of co-writing
Of course, what we've looked at here has been only one of many types of co-writing. Role-playing could be seen as another. Round robins - where a number of authors take it in turns to write a section or chapter - are also a form of co-writing, though there is often little collaboration within each section.
Another form of co-writing of which we have personal experience is the idea of a 'shared universe' which we both write in. When writing our long collaborative fics, we've chosen to blend our voices to make a coherent whole. However, another great possibility when co-writing is that of utilising your separate voices. Our Pillow Book poetryverse works this way. It's a series of poems between Dean (written by Cal) and Sam (written by Zooey). The way we approach writing these is completely different to the process we've described above. Although the Pillow Book does have a narrative of sorts, we've never plotted it out at all. In fact, we never even discuss the poems. The 'verse started after Cal randomly wrote a couple of Dean poems - naturally, Sam needed to have his say, and the thing quickly spiralled out of control. The fun part about this kind of writing is that your separate pieces serve to inspire one another - this poem by Dean prompted this one by Sam, for example.
Obviously, this kind of co-writing doesn't require any of the planning and discussion that the 'blended' kind does, and it's really the lack of structure and the spontaneity of it which makes it fun. However, it's worth pointing out that it requires a certain comfort level between you and your co-writer, because it's a very elaborate way of playing in one another's sandboxes. But it's lots of fun playing around with different ways to work with someone else, and it sets you free to try something completely different. (Would either of us have ever set out to write a 100-part Wincest verse epic? I think not.)
Conclusion
Although the variety of different types and methods of co-writing means it's impossible for us to cover every possible scenario, we've tried to give fairly general advice which will be useful no matter what shape your collaboration takes. Writing with someone you trust is key, as is communicating throughout the entire process. But the most important thing is to have fun, and enjoy seeing what you can achieve together! For us, co-writing has been one of our most awesome fannish experiences. We'd definitely recommend giving it a try!
We'd love to hear about other people's co-writing experiences and tips, and we're also happy to answer any questions you might have - please do join in with the discussion in the comments to this post.
At the time of posting it is late in our timezones, so we may not get back to the discussion right away, but chances are you've heard plenty from us already!
We've had a lot of fun writing our fics together, and we're both pretty pleased with the results (although we'll have to let others judge the success of the finished product!). This workshop will explore some of the key issues we've encountered co-writing long fics, and will touch on some other ways of co-writing. If you'd like a bit more of an insight into our process, you can see a step-by-step example from a section of our fic Gravity Sings, which shows everything from the initial chat to the final text (and you can see the finished thing in the posted fic itself, of course). If you'd like to see an example of an entire co-writing session, you might also like to check out the transcript of the original chat in which we wrote this workshop. Please note that there are a few minor spoilers for S3 in here, just in case any of you are behind in your show watching.
Why co-write a fic?
There are probably as many reasons to co-write a fic as there are co-written fics, but here are a few of the main ones:
- It's fun! You're collaborating with someone who is likely a friend, working together to produce something awesome.
- It's motivating! If you struggle to force yourself to keep writing, having someone else facing the fic down with you can work wonders.
- It takes you in new directions! No matter how alike you and your co-writer are, you'll have different ideas and different strengths. Maybe one of you is better at evocative descriptions, and the other one brings snappy dialogue to the table. Co-writing is an opportunity for you to expand your horizons.
- It's inspiring! Brainstorming ideas makes it much easier for you to come up with a plot. Sometimes you'll go away and think about the fic separately, and when you come back and share your thoughts it feels fresh and new, and you generate even more ideas.
Usually co-writing partnerships arise fairly naturally, but if you're thinking about embarking on a big co-writing project, you might want to think about these issues:
- Do you like and trust your partner? You'll be spending a lot of time with them, and writing can be an emotional business, so it's nice to have some idea what you'll be getting into. You also need to be prepared to be honest with each other, and to take criticism - if something your partner has written doesn't work for you, you need to feel comfortable telling them so. Conversely, if they don't like something you have written, then you have to be willing to modify (or argue the case for keeping it) without getting upset. Inevitably, there has to be some give and take, and you need to resign yourself to the fact that sometimes you'll have to keep the description of Dean eating with his mouth full that you're not happy with, or lose the brilliant joke you had Jared make because your partner doesn't think it fits in the scene. We find that being vocal about the things we do like in each other's writing makes it easier to swallow the criticisms when they come.
- Do you have similar ideas about how co-writing will work? We'll be talking about this more below, but making sure you're both on the same page about what you're doing is a good plan.
- Do you know each other's writing style? The great thing about collaborating is that it brings something new to your writing, but if there are features about your partner's writing that really irk you, then you'll have problems. We had been betaing each other's solo fics for about a year before we started co-writing, so we knew each other's writing quirks and ways of thinking pretty well. We're both quite obsessive when it comes to grammar, punctuation and spelling, so it was great knowing that we meshed in that respect. We also have a pretty good knowledge of each other's kinks, squicks and peculiarities, which meant we were both in our comfort zones.
The first time we co-wrote a fic, we sat down and said 'Right, let's get started!' Then we flailed around a bit as we realised we had no idea what co-writing actually entailed. In truth, there are lots of different ways of approaching co-written fic, and it's only by experimenting a little that you can find out what works for you. There are a whole host of different options which will be influenced by your practical situation, your writing styles, the type of fic you'd like to write, and so on. However, there are a few things you will probably need to think about no matter which option you choose, and we'll look at them below as we walk you through our co-writing process and talk about each stage.
Practicalities and technical tips
In some cases, how you collaborate will be determined by your choice of partner; obviously, if you're collaborating with someone who shares an apartment with you, you have entirely different options open to you than if you're working with someone on the other side of the world! Likewise, if your timezones are similar or at least allow you to communicate in real time via chat, it's far easier for you to collaborate in more depth than if you're forced to take a more round-robin approach via email or something similar.
Writing together in real time or separately both have their advantages and disadvantages. Writing in real time may place you under greater pressure simply in terms of finding time in both your schedules. On the other hand, it means you can communicate far more easily as you go along, and perhaps produce more seamless writing. If you don't write together in real time, it will probably be far easier to find time, but you will also have to put more thought and effort into making sure you communicate with each other.
Whether you are writing in real time or not, we can definitely recommend using an online document service such as Google Docs. Google Docs allows you to both collaborate on the same file at the same time, meaning you don't have to email documents back and forth or worry about harmonising changes at the end. You can both see what each other is writing at all times, and you can check the revision history to see what changes have been made.
In our case, we live in different countries, so all our collaboration happens online. We like to work in real time, so we write in chat. The nice thing about this is that you can see when the other person is in the middle of writing something, since most chat programmes will tell you if the other person has typed anything, and it means that everything is already written down. We've found that Google Talk is particularly handy for this, as unlike some of the other chat programmes we've used, it allows for quite a long block of text, and also lets you have italics and bold. If you use it in GMail, it's also very easy to keep track of all your fic conversations and to go back and look at discussions - we've been known to search our chat transcripts to check on particular details we've raised.
Another useful thing to do is to keep a file of notes on the most important issues - the plot outline, places and dates, etc. In addition to helping you keep track of everything, it can help you ensure you're both on the same page about key details.
Getting started
Before you get started, it's good to make sure you both have similar expectations and to work out the kind of writing you'd like to do. There are a few things you will probably want to think about before getting into the nitty-gritty of planning and writing your fic.
- How will the writing be shared? Some people like to make quite a clear divide between the two writers - for example, each writer might write the POV of a different character. We like it to be quite flexible - usually one person writes for a little bit, and then when they break off, the other person takes over.
- What sort of length are you anticipating, and what's the timescale for the fic? You might not want to be rigid about this - sometimes it's more fun to just start and see where you end up - but you want to be sure that you're not anticipating a snappy one-shot while your partner is envisaging a 100,000 word epic. Likewise, if you would like the collaboration to stretch out over several months, while your partner is thinking it would be fun to spend one weekend writing together, you'll run into problems.
- Are there particular genres or elements you want to write or avoid? A lot of this comes under the next section, 'Brainstorming and plotting', but it can be helpful to have some basic things in mind before you start. SPN or J2? Wincest or definitely no slash at all? A porn epic or a meaty casefile fic? You'll have noticed by now that our constant theme is be sure you're both coming to it with the same expectations (even if your only expectation is 'anything goes'!)
Before you get going on writing your fic, you'll need to decide on what the fic is going to be about! Sometimes co-writing might be a more freeform activity, where one person kicks off and you both ad-lib and see where it takes you. However, assuming you want a slightly more structured approach, then it pays to spend a fair amount of time tossing ideas about and planning the fic.
This is one of the really fun things about co-writing - brainstorming is a great way of coming up with ideas for plot. It's also one of the features which might make co-writing quite different from your usual writing process - whereas you might prefer not to plot in detail ahead of time when writing solo, having a bit of pre-planned structure is useful if you are coordinating two (or more) brains.
When we're brainstorming, we usually start by sketching out some of the big issues and unanswered questions in canon at the time we're writing. So, our last fic, which we started writing during the middle of Season 3, originated thusly:
This time we have:
#1 Dean's deal
#2 Possible non-humanness of Sam
#3 Increasing hardcoreness of Sam
#4 Oh shit oh shit this is hell, and the demons are here
Obviously you might not choose to set your fic during current canon at all - you might have decided to co-write an AU J2 space opera with a cast of dancing zombies - but laying out some of the main themes or ideas you want to consider is a good kicking-off point.
However you go about it, brainstorming is one of the areas where co-writing really comes into its own. Two heads are better than one, and you may find that together you come up with themes and plots you'd never have arrived at alone. Writing with another person also helps you muster up the courage to run with some of those more adventurous or unusual ideas, because you have the lovely experience of getting excited about them together and cheering each other on.
Writing the first draft
This is the hard part! But also the fun part. Before you plunge right in, there are a few technical details to consider. For example, what tense are you going to write in? Which POVs are you going to use in the fic - are you going to have POV sections for both Sam and Dean, or is it Impala POV all the way? Voice is also important - is your fic going to be a second-person epic, or does the third person fit your combined style better? These are all things which apply the moment you begin writing, so it's important to sort them out at the start.
Once you've taken the big decisions, you can finally start writing! Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. When writing solo, you probably find that you have a mental picture of the things you're writing about - what your original characters look like, the pattern of the motel wallpaper, the exact way Jared's leaning against the Impala. A lot of the time this is entirely subconscious, and even though many of these things are never mentioned explicitly in the fic itself, they still inform your writing. It's important to remember when co-writing that your partner also has their own mental assumptions, and they may not always coincide with yours! That's why we recommend discussing certain issues before beginning each scene:
- Whose POV will the scene be in, if you've agreed on having more than one POV in the fic as a whole? The first time we co-wrote together, a significant proportion of the editing work we had to do afterwards was due to us not having figured this out in advance.
- The setting for the scene - where and when is it taking place? There are few things more disconcerting than discovering you've been picturing the boys sitting together in the Impala having lunch while your partner had thought they were back at the motel getting ready for bed.
- What is going to happen in the scene? Of course you don't need to agree on every detail, and often it's best just to see where things take you. But usually a scene has to fulfill a specific function - this is where Jared's trailer is invaded by the dancing zombies! This is where the Impala has a flashback which reveals Dean is in fact a robot! - and that at least should be agreed on in advance. It's much easier to write something which reads smoothly if you are both trying to go in the same direction.
- Are there particular parts of the scene which one of you desperately wants to write? For instance, Cal has been known to beg to be allowed to make a character set a table on fire. Or your different writing styles may be better suited to different parts of the scene - if one of you is awesome at description and setting scenes, for example, then play to those strengths! It's also a good idea to agree on who is going to start, or you may find you're both waiting for the other - or alternatively, that you've both written an opener and are left with two versions that need to be merged.
Editing your draft is a much bigger part of the process when you're co-writing than it is when you're working solo, and you'll need to allow a lot more time than you're used to. All the sneaky little problems which appear in solo writing - switching POV, changing tense, inconsistency in how you spell your OC's name - are all even more likely to occur when there are two of you involved.
You're also likely to hit other problems - maybe the timescale of events is screwed up, or you changed your minds about the personality of an OC and need to go back and make her seem more consistent. In these cases, you'll probably want to discuss the options for edits, which means they take more time to deal with than when you're writing solo and can make executive decisions. (However, we should point out that sometimes having another person around makes these things take less time, since having someone to thrash things out with when you realise there's a major plothole can be very helpful!)
Another issue with co-writing is the question of how integrated your two voices are. Depending on how you approach it, you may have different feelings about this, but it's really important to us that the reader experiences our co-written fics as coherent and seamless pieces, and we spend a bit of time in the editing process smoothing over the edges so that it's not possible to tell who wrote what. (We like to think we succeed - certainly we can't remember by the end of it all exactly who wrote which lines!)
We found it more difficult to figure out how to divide the labour of editing than we did deciding on how to write it in the first place. How you choose to do it depends a lot on how you like to edit, how much time you have, and how obsessive you are! This is very personal, but we usually divide the chapters up between us and do as follows:
- Each person will go through the chapters they've been allotted and make edits. Uncontroversial things like typos and minor slippages in tense we usually fix right away. For everything else, we leave comments pointing out the issue and (usually) suggesting a way of fixing it.
- We swap chapters, and each go through the other person's edits, leaving comments responding to the things they've pointed out, and adding comments on anything they've missed.
- We then get together and go through each chapter together, looking at each comment and deciding what to do about it. Often this part involves quite a lot of discussion and more writing - some edits require quite major changes.
The final stages
Once you have your fic written and edited, then the co-writing process is almost over. Depending on your particular way of doing things, you might or might not want to have your fic betaed. Because we have an incredibly detailed and exhaustive editing process, we don't ask anyone to do a substantive beta - one of the nice things about co-writing is that a lot of the things you might normally do with your beta (such as debating ways to fix particular plot points) you do with your co-writer instead. However, it's always nice to have another pair of eyes - in our case, since we're both British, we have an Ameripicker / beta (the lovely aynslee) who makes sure Sam and Dean have jelly on their toast and jello with ice cream, and also spies out any stray errors or problems. Once she's worked her magic, we do one more round of editing together to make the necessary changes.
Then comes the moment of truth: posting! Posting a co-written fic can be a bit of a conundrum - whose journal is it going to be posted in? We resolved this issue by setting up a community specifically for our co-written fic, which was worthwhile for us as we knew we weren't likely to stop at one.
Depending on whether you're unbelievably anal extremely detail-oriented like us, you might want to factor in a little extra time in the posting stage to think about things like how the fic will be formatted, what icon you'd like to use with it, and so on. The saner of you might not feel too strongly about this, but it's worth bearing in mind that one or both of you might have particular feelings about the visual presentation of the fic. We've also found that the process of co-writing has made us feel that the resulting fic is particularly special, so we have spent more time than usual getting it to look exactly right.
Once it's up and posted, you can sit and share in the joy of a shiny, finished fic! We both tend to find that we are able to admire a co-written fic much more than our solo work, as it's more like looking at someone else's fic where you see all the shiny (whereas when we look at our own we often notice all the flaws - maybe this is partly our British heritage coming to the fore!)
Shared universes and other types of co-writing
Of course, what we've looked at here has been only one of many types of co-writing. Role-playing could be seen as another. Round robins - where a number of authors take it in turns to write a section or chapter - are also a form of co-writing, though there is often little collaboration within each section.
Another form of co-writing of which we have personal experience is the idea of a 'shared universe' which we both write in. When writing our long collaborative fics, we've chosen to blend our voices to make a coherent whole. However, another great possibility when co-writing is that of utilising your separate voices. Our Pillow Book poetryverse works this way. It's a series of poems between Dean (written by Cal) and Sam (written by Zooey). The way we approach writing these is completely different to the process we've described above. Although the Pillow Book does have a narrative of sorts, we've never plotted it out at all. In fact, we never even discuss the poems. The 'verse started after Cal randomly wrote a couple of Dean poems - naturally, Sam needed to have his say, and the thing quickly spiralled out of control. The fun part about this kind of writing is that your separate pieces serve to inspire one another - this poem by Dean prompted this one by Sam, for example.
Obviously, this kind of co-writing doesn't require any of the planning and discussion that the 'blended' kind does, and it's really the lack of structure and the spontaneity of it which makes it fun. However, it's worth pointing out that it requires a certain comfort level between you and your co-writer, because it's a very elaborate way of playing in one another's sandboxes. But it's lots of fun playing around with different ways to work with someone else, and it sets you free to try something completely different. (Would either of us have ever set out to write a 100-part Wincest verse epic? I think not.)
Conclusion
Although the variety of different types and methods of co-writing means it's impossible for us to cover every possible scenario, we've tried to give fairly general advice which will be useful no matter what shape your collaboration takes. Writing with someone you trust is key, as is communicating throughout the entire process. But the most important thing is to have fun, and enjoy seeing what you can achieve together! For us, co-writing has been one of our most awesome fannish experiences. We'd definitely recommend giving it a try!
We'd love to hear about other people's co-writing experiences and tips, and we're also happy to answer any questions you might have - please do join in with the discussion in the comments to this post.
At the time of posting it is late in our timezones, so we may not get back to the discussion right away, but chances are you've heard plenty from us already!