co-authors

[melodypottersnape]

I've always been curious. How does coauthoring work. Are coauthors friends who know eachother and plan a fanfic together and write every page togerther. Does one of them do a chapter and the other do the next one? Does one write a the fanfic and send it to the other to expand and to change some things about it? I've seen some of these and I've always wondered how they get created.

[Kitty279]

Even though we never posted it (it was a RtB and the purge started before we were far enough into the story to post), I did write a lot with another author.

Initially, we actually meet because she commented on a review I left for someone else, we got to PM, and then she asked me if I wanted to help with the fic she had already started. So you see, you don't always have to be friends beforehand (though we have become good friends over the last two and a half years). If you start something completely new, I guess you will have to have some idea what to write.

The practical side took a bit of thinking, but we found an easy solution: Instead of sending emails back and forth and losing track of what was the newest version, one of us opened a Google doc and gave the other access. You just need a Google account; if you don't have already one, you can use any email, you don't need a gmail address. Then we could work at a chapter at the same time and even chat in the sidebar about what we were doing. It can be a bit weird when the text moves without you doing anything, but it's the best way to make sure that both have the newest version.

Over time, we found another problem: The doc showed who had changed it last; so, A changed something and B had to re-read everything. Not very practical, particularly when it was just correcting a typo. So, we found a way around it: The 'approved' text is black. Each of us chose one colour and made all additions and changes in her own colour. When the other came, she scrolled through the chapter and looked at all coloured parts, approved of them and changed them to black. Or, if she disagreed, she could always leave a comment on it in her own colour if the first one wasn't online and leave it as it was until we had worked out how to deal with the part. If both were online, we discussed it in the sidebar and solved the problem directly. No coloured parts meant that the change was just a correction that doesn't have to be approved.

For a while, a third one was included, and then we extended that: A wrote, B read and put her initials in her colours behind it, and C did read, removed the initials and turned black.

It was actually fun, we often had the case that one started a sentence, paused while thinking how to put it, and the other finished the sentence. And usually with exact what the first one had tried to put into words I can only recommend that way of writing together.

[melodypottersnape]

That sounds pretty neat. I was always trying to figure out how authors did it because it always seemed very impractical.

[Kitty279]

It was great, really. Only problem was that we sometimes forgot the story because we were chatting in the sidebar too much But even that one was useful to discuss if option A or B would now work better.

About 10 years ago, I tried something like that with another friend, and that was much harder because back then we didn't have the technical possibilities we have now. We finally found a way that works a bit like a thread in a forum, but it wasn't perfect. Besides, we still had to copy the posts into a Word document. Of one thing I am pretty certain - the method of one writing a chapter, emailing it, the second going over it, emailing it, the first reading the changes and changing them again etc. etc. would drive one crazy. How do you keep track of what was the most recent version? In the email body itself it's not very practical, and sending the story document as attachment can get confusing, too. Now, we considered these options in the beginning and then decided that Google docs would be *the* method.

Maybe some do it that way, I can only tell you how we did it, but I felt that our way worked very well. When you count the beta, we had at times four people from four countries and four time zones on three continents in the same document, and even then each could work to her heart's content.