SHE WROTE: PRO Bootcamp on Collaboration 4

Lesson 4: The Business of Collaborating


*JENNY:* It's really important to treat the collaboration as a business partnership, not just something fun you're trying with another writer. You need a formal, legal partnership agreement, and you need it up front because once the book is done, it's too late to start deciding who gets what. Think of it as a pre-nup for your book and your partnership.

Bob:* Even though publishing is a handshake business, that's all fine and well until things go to crap. Then everyone scrambles to find the contracts. I know. I've been there. Even with an agent, you've really got to stay on top of your contracts and make sure you have copies of everything. A bad agent can really screw up contracts. I've been there also. A collaboration requires two levels of contracts. The collaboration agreement and then the book contract.

Jenny:* Once you have your agreement in place, start thinking of yourselves as a single entity. Everything you do, you decide on together. Decide who speaks for the team in different situations and remember that "speaking for the team" does not mean "making decisions for the team."

Bob:* This is true. Early on Jenny did most of the speaking for the team because we were working with her agent and her editor. But I had to learn they were now my agent and my editor. We still have problems with that at times, but I'm getting better at it. It's a slow process. We play to our strengths here also, though. For example, I'm doing more of the work on arranging things like flights and conferences because I can organize that stuff better. Jenny is more focused on dealing with the personal contacts she's made over the years.

Jenny:* And keep your solo careers going. Collaboration, like all relationships, is fraught with emotional baggage and outside influences. You really don't know how long the collab will last. So you have to plan for two things: This collaboration is going to last forever so it needs a really strong foundation and a lot of nurturing. This collaboration is going to end with this book so I need to keep my solo career strong and thriving. If you can keep both of those in your head, you'll be okay.

Bob:* You never know what's going to happen. Even with a solo writing career you need a back-up plan. I 'failed' as a solo writer several times but had a back up writing career going under various pen names so I was able to stay alive in the business. I think a big mistake many novice writers make is thinking they have it made. You never have it made. Jenny and I are probably working harder than we ever have right now.
You're never ok. You've got to keep pushing. Study the lives of those who have succeeded in the entertainment business, because that's what being an author is. Watch Inside the Actor's Studio and shows like that. Get rid of the mindset of the Overnight Success. If DON'T LOOK DOWN breaks out, I'll be an overnight success after 33 books and sixteen years. And even then will still be just at the beginning of really pushing it hard to make it even further. In a way, I'll have just begun. But it is a lot of fun also. Sometimes we get too gloom and doom. I'd rather be doing this than anything else.


Day Four questions and comments
"Jenny and Bob:
The high spots in forty years of teaching school are etched clearly in my mind: the expressions of awe on my students faces when they "got it," and the lessons meant more than a mere grade to them. I only wish you could see my face as I follow the lessons in your class, because I believe you'd realize how much this class means to me. Thank you.

Jenny: You're welcome. And we're surprised. Did we say anything to deserve that, Bob?

Bob: Uh.. Probably not.


"Hi, Bob and Jenny, Thank you both for taking time out of your busy schedules to teach this class. It's very eye-opening! I can't wait to read the book, after hearing so much about the process. You say you decide who's writing the scene based on who the POV-character is for that scene. Do you ever realize during the editing process that need to change the POV character? Do you just hand the whole scene over to the other person and let them hack away at it? Or do they re-write the whole scene more or less from scratch? Or are you so good at your outlining that this never comes up?! (And if so, when are you teaching a plotting-without-missteps class?!)"

Jenny: Sure there were times we realized a scene was in the wrong POV and handed it over to the other partner. It was actually pretty easy because the dialogue was already there, all the other person had to do was strip out the first character's POV insights and rewrite it with the other character's insights. As for outlining, we sort of staggered through Don't Look Down learning the collaborative process, or at least how it works for us. We're doing better with Agnes and the Hitman, but it's really important to keep the process fluid. This is helped tremendously because Bob's mantra is, "I can fix anything," so every time I take a sharp left turn in the plot, he sighs, and then makes everything fit the new path. The real key, which we have learned through many missteps, is to talk things through as we write the scenes. I drive Bob crazy saying, "But why would she leave the room? Why wouldn't she just shoot him? I'd shoot him," but then Bob knows that he has to get why she'd leave the room on the page. Or Bob will say, "Why is she mad at him? He didn't do anything," and I know that while every woman who reads the book will know EXACTLY why she's mad at him, the men won't, and I have to make that clearer. So usually by the time we've drafted a scene a couple of times, we've both got the dynamics of it down, and
at that point either one of us can write it with just a little tweaking of the other character's voice by the other partner.
Although I still don't know why she doesn't just shoot him.

Bob: Well we've dropped a POV character in Agnes. We were going to do four POV characters in Agnes but we dropped one when we realized she just wasn't working. And in DLD Tyler, the third POV character, got cut back a LOT. He was about a fourth of the book initially, sort of this peeping Tom, and he kept getting cut back more and
more. And another big problem was, because you need conflict in every scene, and he was alone, we had to make him have conflict. So we gave Pepper the binoculars.


"Along the same lines... I know that when I write, there are scenes that I'm really looking forward to-- the first meeting between my main characters, the black moment, the happy resolution, etc. Do you ever argue over who gets to write a certain scene? Or is it always obvious that it needs to be from a certain POV?"

Jenny: I think the key there is that we look forward to writing different scenes. There's a scene in Don't Look Down in which the heroine is stuck at a party for her five-year-old niece and she's wearing a Wonder Woman costume, and during the party the rest of the book's cast shows up one by one and take her outside to discuss whatever trauma they're having that they want her to fix. I loved writing that scene but Bob would rather be dragged through a hedge backwards than try that one; way too much talking in there. On the other hand, there are a couple of great scenes where the hero and the bad guy face each other down in the dark like old time Western heroes. I not only couldn't write those scenes, I wouldn't want to, I don't get that whole "Feeling lucky, punk?" thing, but Bob wrote the hell out of them. And I love READING them, they're great scenes, and Bob says he likes the Wonder Woman party scene, too, we like each other's scenes. We just don't want to write them. And
then there are the sex scenes which both of us screamed about writing and then we each ended up writing one that we wanted to write. I think Bob wanted to write his. I told him he had to, so I'm sure he was all for it.

Bob: I loved reading the Wonderwear party scene Jenny wrote. It's my favorite scene in the book, Well, after the Althea seduction scene I wrote. And the climactic High Noon scene I wrote. Just joking. But it's really such a great emotional scene. We each brought our strengths to the table and respected them.
I really wanted to kill some people in the sex scenes because I was so used to doing it. And have the gator eat more people. Poor Moot. She was hungry and had little Moots to feed.