You Need To Start Writing With Your Friends

by Sammi Grasso

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Growing up, it seemed that writing was a solitary practice. I’d heard of stories of writers who escaped into some undetermined forest or mountains and stayed there for weeks–months–YEARS at a time just focusing on honing their craft. They’d write poems about the trees and the bending of branches and the birds that flitted to and fro, topics that clearly were more interesting than whatever they had going on at home. Then, some ethereal being would touch down from the sky to bless them with immeasurable intelligence and wisdom with which to write their masterpiece. Finally, they would emerge from the trees not just a better writer, but a better person as well.

As an adult, this sounds insane. Unrealistic.

In school, writing is completed for a grade. You read a book, you write a paper, you get the grade and move on. Or if you’re like me, you obsess over the paper and when you don’t get the grade you want, you panic even more. When you’re writing for a grade in school, there is no opportunity for collaboration. Students participate in discussions, sure, or even workshops by giving suggestions for revisions or general reader reactions, but when it comes down to the act of collaborative writing itself, you don’t see it as often.

Collaborative writing is certainly not a new concept. In the 1980s, John Dewey’s philosophy on education reform included social reform. He proposed that engagement with curriculum should be a social and interactive process, and in that, collaborative writing began getting its traction. You’ll often find academic articles that have multiple authors. After all, tackling research on such an in-depth scale can be too much for one person. It’s better to work as a team to find the information and then build the article around it; but what about creative writing?

Strolling through the aisles in any bookstore, you’ll find singular authors on any piece of fiction or collection of poetry. Why? Why have we created an environment in which writers must write alone? Why do we not allow ourselves to ask for help when it comes to writing that is so much more expansive? This is not to say that there are no environments in which collaborative writing exists in the creative sphere. Children’s books are more common to have more than one author to them but by the time we reach Middle Grade to YA to Adult, we see less and less collaborative writing.

There are some avenues that have already built the foundations of collaborative writing, just not on the written page. Dungeons and Dragons, a popular Table-Top RolePlaying Game (TTRPG) runs on the principles of collaborative storytelling amongst Game Masters and players at the table to develop a fully realized world and the inner cultures within it. It is only a little ironic that this is exactly where I met my own writing partner.

Photo by Clint Bustrillos on Unsplash

​When I originally started discussing my work with my soon-to-be writing partner, it began as a springboard of ideas. I was struggling on a particular character, and he helped me develop him to a point where I felt more confident in his role within the story. Then things began to shift. We found ourselves working through the story together and throwing out what could happen between the characters. That’s when we started role-playing the characters through text.

Inspiration snowballed quickly from there and we began developing new worlds and new characters together as a team. We discovered that our upbringings were vastly different and we used our own personal experiences to inform how we approached our stories. We developed a trust that allowed for clear communication and I found myself learning so much about a completely different way of life, and he as well. Together, we worked to figure out how the worlds operated. We decided our character’s dynamics (who liked and who hated each other). We dreamed up who would fall in love and who would be the one to commit ultimate betrayals. What was most important, was that one person’s say never outweighed the other. All decisions were discussed and evaluated without judgement.

This was an important principle that we relied on as we developed our stories. I didn’t find it fair to have just one of us write the novel while the other sat around as some glorified editor, so we started digging into our pieces.  I approached him with the idea to start turning our little roleplays into actual books and he hesitated. Each of us had written our own works before, but this was crossing into a new territory. How do we write a book together?

We decided to try. One story we developed had a large cast of main characters: six in total. We discussed what form we wanted the novel to take and that led us to trying out a tandem read style. Each of us got the same amount of space to write as the characters we felt most comfortable with and it helped us develop a better sense of what the story should be about. When it came to writing our own sections, we had a few rules: the events of the chapter needed to be discussed prior to the actual writing of it (mind you, small details went undiscussed and added for some fun surprise moments during the reading portion), we didn’t comment on each other’s work until the chapter was finished or we invited the other to look at it, and we needed to agree or agree to a compromise on any major changes in plot or shift in focus.

Will this work for everybody? Maybe not, but it works for us, and I encourage all writers to find someone or a group of someones that you can have this relationship with. It must be built on trust and communication because writing is truly one of the most vulnerable arts. It offers deeper perspectives on events and characters that you never could have imagined. I used to spend hours sitting at my desk alone trying to work through plotholes and settings and magic systems all on my own, but now, I have someone that wants to create things with me. We want to build characters that connect to people in ways that we need and we see the world needs. It is in this process that my co-author and I have created characters that not only relate to one another, but build a foundation of recognizing humanity in others around us. It is our hope that others not only see themselves in us and our creations, but can look away from the page and see the connection waiting to be found around them.​