₦airaland Forum

Divepen I am humbled. I don't often hear people describe me as great but you did. Thanks for counting me worthy of here.

More power to your elbow.

Thanks Divepen for this chance. I appreciate too other facilitators.


Pardon my lateness. It was fun all the way!!

Thank you all.

[continued]

* Figure out why you want to do a collaboration in the first place, and both of you sit down and work oup what each of you contributes

The ideal collaboration is one in which the story you're writing together is one neither of you could write alone. If one of you is a brilliant humour story-teller and the other is a good romance writer and you're doing a story on "HOW TO MAKE HER YOURS WITH ONE WINK" then you're heading in the right direction. If one of you has vast knowledge in politics and the other is equally proficient in all things terrorist, crime, homicide or detective stories and you're developing a political story that involves terrorism, assassination with well thought out tactics and strategy, you're right on the money.
If however, both of you are doing this because you think it will be easier than writing a whole book by yourself, get into a room, lock the door, get into a bed and stay there till you regain your senses.

However from my own experience here, the act of writing changes the vision and even with an outline you can end up in trouble. A friend here (on Nairaland) contacted me for a collaboration and I agreed. I had created a universe in whicha brilliant and smart orphaned kid through every trouble and attempts on his life eventually gets lucky at the end of the day. It was supposed to be an inspirational, romantic and humour thriller. My friend (who had no idea before) bought the idea and I wrote the outline and the first draft. Since we were supposed to post it here on Nairaland, my friend posted the first draft which I wrote, as his. I forgave him and wrote the second draft. He wrote the the third draft and it veered completely off what I had in mind. Not only did he change the universe, he changed the character and everything that had to do with my original outline and first draft. You can imagine how annoying that would have been. I did the usual forgiving and washed my hands clean off that collaboration. My friend and I connected in other ways other than literaure...lol!

If you've gone through this and you know how you want to divvy up the work and you've covered all your potential trouble spots and worked them out in advance and you still want to do the collaboration, you should do fine.

Remember that joint projects always take longer than you planned, always contain some suprises and rarely turn out the way you expected. They can be fun if you know this in advance and have already made allowances.

THANK YOU.

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT STORY COLLABORATIONS


Collaborative writing can be a pretty fun thing to do. It is when two, three or more writers come together on a common plot, setting,and in certain instances, characters to make a story. Now, we must understand that colaborative writing can be done in two ways;
1. The writers decide and agree on what the plot, characters and settings of thestory would be like. They share a common idea and allot a part of the story to work on each participating writer.
2. Each participating writer works pn the cue left by the preceeding writer. There is usually no planned agreement on any of the elements which makes up the story. This brings about disorderliness and poor alignment of events or introduction of obsolete characters which in turn makes reading and adequate followership cumbersome. For the purpose of this workshop, we will be focusing more on the first way of going about collaborative writing. I hope this makes a jolly good ride.

We shall be limiting our scope of observance and example citations to collaborative writing involving two writers. When we have a collaboration of two writers on a story, what we usually have is;

(i) Writer A Is known, Writer But isn't known or
(ii) Writer A isn't known, Writer But is known or
(iii) Writer A and Writer But are knows or
(iv) Writer A and Writer But are unknown.

Cases (i) and case (ii) are pretty much the same so we'll definitely dwell on these. Case (iii) is another scenario in which we'll dwell on for the purpose of the next point. Case (iv) is rarely ever the case.

Collaborative works do take place bweren't two underdogs but the question is "to what end?" One writer is usually the initiator of the idea while the other writer buys it. The initiator is most times an unknown writer inviting a well-known writer to boost the 'sale ' of the story (most probable reason) or a known writer featuring an unknown writer (for reasons subjective to the initiator in this case which is rare) or two known writers featuring each other (we can of course guess why this could be ) but two unknown writers? that's an almost dead on arrival Case. It might work out fine but the start will definitely be slow.
Now personally from experience and direct and indirect learning, here are some things you need to know and do in collaborative works.

* Always determine in advance who will do what and who will own what. If possible put this agreement into writing irrespective of whom you're writing with. Even your best friend. Here are some important tips to follow ;

- Who owns each character and what universe you have created for that character.
- What either of you may and may not do to characters owned by the other.
- Who writes the last word. Only one person can do this. Reach an agreement. It is important!
- How will you divide the work itself?
- What will happen to the universe and it's characters if one of you wants to drop out. Do you both have the perfect mastery, coordination of the characters and the universe created for them. The synergy of both of you must be in synchronization?
- How will you resolve differences if one of you does work that the other deems unacceptable, inappropriate, or simply wrong for the world?

* Write a good outline and stick with it.
This is important and it might seem not to be a big deal. You and your friend (a writer) share a vision. You've talked about it endlessly, you know who your characters are and what you want to do with them. It's alright if you don't have the whole story worked out but make sure the same idea flow in your heads. That's synergy in sync.

* Divide your workload clearly.

If one of you is going to write the even chapters and the other one is going to write the odds chapters, fine. If one of you is going to do the detective and criminal scenes while the other will do the romantic scenes, that's okay too. If you want to do all the scenes with Big Max and your friend wants to write from David Osho's point of view or Andy Cole, that also works. What you don't want is to be bopping along on chapter three and have your collaborator suddenly start having ducks because you've stepped on what he saw as his territory. No. We sure don't want that to happen.

Divepen why did you reschedule me? I was supposed to post tomorrow.