The Art of Collaboration – Ubi Style

It started in first year; an unfortunate little incident with an Anthropology professor who thought we'd "over-collaborated" on a take-home exam, even though we were allowed to share our research notes and work in groups of two to four students.

The poor man. We marched up to his office, actually I think I marched and Susan followed muttering something along the lines of: "Are you sure this is a good idea?" It wasn't, but I was nineteen-years-old and so full of icy indignation, it didn't matter. Lucky for me, Susan had honed her soft sell into rapier-sharp perfection. We walked out of that office forty minutes later with a B+. And the rest is, as they say, history.

If you've been following The Pragmatic Writer, you already know that ours is a long-distance collaboration. We haven't lived in the same city, let alone the same country, since the day we graduated but we have, over the years, developed a writing method that works for us.

Here's the skinny:

We get together, usually on the phone, to discuss what we're going to do, which one of us is going to write what, and when we're going to deliver. Once that's done, we establish deadlines which allow for our other commitments, and then we meet those deadlines!

In the case of The Mad Hacker, it was one chapter at a time organized along these lines:

Partner A writes the first draft and sends it along to Partner B. B gives it a read, does a line edit and perhaps makes a few minor revisions before sending it back to A, adding any additional comments in the margins. While A takes it through another draft, B works ahead on chapter two, and the whole process is repeated until the manuscript is finished.

The same holds true for any magazine articles we write, although one of us usually takes the "point position" and then we send drafts back and forth until we're satisfied with the final product. Scriptwriting is slightly different again. Susan is better at setting the scene while dialogue seems to be my forte, so we play to our strengths and the end result is a stronger script than we might otherwise have had.

Query letters and pitch documents are polished until they shine and, as with everything we write, carry both our signatures. We even take turns listing our names in reverse order from one document to the next.

And should only one of us be available to take a call or attend a meeting, the pronoun we use is "we". "Susan and I would like to...." or "We think we can deliver the next draft..." has become as instinctive as breathing.

On that note, I'm going to ship this draft off to Susan who will, of course, add her two-cents' worth!

Watch this space for further details on the "art of collaboration".

f & f Anne