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tullycatI asked about cowriting on Twitter so here are my responses!
How do you broach the idea of a co-write with someone?
I've written with two other people (merryofsoul and popliar). When merryofsoul and I did my very first cowrite, I initially asked if she wanted to cowrite a fic for a mutual friend's birthday. I knew about half the fic was not something I could write (I didn't know wayv personalities) and she could, so we wrote 22k together. (Our second cowrite was also a birthday fic for a different mutual friend đ)
When I wrote with pop, we both kind of just were throwing around an idea and basically double dog daring each other to write 100 words. Neither of us are willing to have our bluff called so she did, I followed, and we kept going. I think once we wrote that first fic, we felt how much we clicked as cowriters and approaching every subsequent cowrite was much easier.
What ways have you cowritten/how does it differ with each fic?
When merryofsoul and I wrote what a heart wants, we divided it pretty cleanly into she would write wayv and I would write Jun/Yanan since I didn't know wayv and she didn't know Yanan. There were some spots here or there where I would write some narration/scene setting for her or she would write dialogue for me, since I think those play to our strengths. When we wrote How Beautiful It'd Be, we wrote on top of each other almost. It was very fluid; basically if one of us had something to add then we added it, even if the other person was in the middle of the sentence. When I reread the fic, it's hard for me to point to the parts I wrote.
For the first few cowrites with pop, we very much divided up the povs and stuck to our own POV. For waiting/wandering I wrote Jacob & Jaehyun, for Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast I wrote Sangyeon and Juyeon, etc. I think we usually tried to trade off povs so we didn't have to write two sections before handing it off, but it doesn't always work like that. Then we wrote realize/real eyes and (cat)fisher of men in a much different way. I wrote the intro to realize/real eyes and pop wrote the intro to (cat)fisher and then we swapped and the other person had to finish the fic however they wanted. We were both pretty tentative about giving the other person a fic they didn't know how to finish and kind of talked out what we were thinking, so I think we decided if we try it again, we'd let the other person go in with 0 knowledge and finish it. Lately we have also been writing in the same POV, which hasn't been too difficult since I think we both have a very similar characterization of Jacob and Jaehyun, the members we write the most.
Do you plan everything out beforehand or do you plot as you go?
I think for what a heart wants it was fairly planned out, since we needed our sections to match up and had to decide when each contestant would be eliminated.
When I write with pop we do NOT plot everything out beforehand đ When we get really excited about a cowrite we usually do a pretty loose chatfic session that usually gets the main structure down, and then we garden it out from there.
What do you enjoy about cowriting?
It's so incredibly nice to just hand back the doc to someone else and words just magically appear for you to read?? When people complain about how âthey don't want to write a fic they just want to read it,â but it also has to be exactly the fic they want to read, I feel like cowriting really scratches that itch for me. I trust my cowriters to tell the story I want to read/write, and then each time I read what they've written, it's a little gift of this story that I didn't have to write. It's such fun âyes, andâ improv, because even when we discuss what we think should happen in that scene, there's always some delightful little surprise in how someone else writes it that I would never think to write. I also love having two people to brainstorm, because they always know what you're stuck on. I also hate reading my own fics after I've posted them but I never feel that way with cowritesâenough of it isn't mine that it doesn't ick me to reread đĽ˛
How do you work out disagreements/mismatch?
I think you really have to vibe with who you're cowriting with before you even start, which then avoids a lot of these issues. If I can't chatfic out an idea with someone and feel like we are taking it in the same direction, I probably would not want to cowrite. So usually cowriting is like sharing the same brain cell, but the few times it's not, I think we just try to explain what we were both thinking and then try to compromise with what makes most sense for the story. Sometimes one of us will have a very strong idea of what should happen next and the other one says ok let's try that and see if we like it. I think sometimes I plot out further than pop does, so then I have to rein it in so that we're plotting and creating together. There are other times when it feels like we're gardening a lot and I have to check where the story is going and force us to set up guidelines for the next 3 scenes for my brain. I think a funnier mismatch is that pop likes to condense and I sketch out the emotional development solely by gut feeling so I'm always like âbut we need to talk about their feeeeelings!â I think we find a good balance in length even if we don't get it perfect each timeâour first cowrites were pretty condensed while we learned how to cowrite and our two most recent ones were maybe longer than they needed (but we were just having so much fun writing!!!)
What is your strength or weakness?
Hmmm within the context of cowriting I guess I focus a lot on the emotional arc and making sure the emotional beats are correctly lining up with plot beats? I think I am able to pull that thread throughout the fic even when we're figuring out plot details. With merryofsoul I also was good at setting scenes and moving things along in the fic. My weakness is that sometimes I get tripped up on something small and then get stuck until pop helps me out, and it's harder for me to just garden out a plot from nowhere. I can usually visualize the beats of the entire fic or I don't write it, so sometimes that holds me back from an idea. I also shy away from the action scenes usually :) but if we include any smut it's probably me writing it so it balances out, right? Also my obsession with word counts, but I'll put that in the editing section.
What is your partner's strength or weakness?
Merryofsoul is very good at dialogue, as I said earlier, and infusing characters with a lot of heart and soul. Pop is very good at condensing, I've always loved how succinctly she can convey an emotion that I feel like would've taken me a paragraph to write. Her characters are so sweet but so funny. She's also a whiz at canon details and world building. Talking about popâs weaknesses is funnyâcan I say none? 𤣠Sometimes condensing is a double edged sword and I have to say I think we need to spend a few more words on this, but she's also said that to me. I think she is also much quicker to throw the draft into the world than me, which leads us to the next questionâŚ
How do you edit?
Genuinely can't remember how i edited for my cowrites with merryofsoul so I'll answer for my recent ones. If you take a quick look at my AO3 page you'll see that I post fics with some type of even/round word count. I try not to cut/add hundreds of words so if we post something that ends in ,000 it was probably close when we finished the draft. I admit it's a lot of obsessing over something that doesn't matter, so I might try to let it go next year. I think I'm more likely to do line edits, though I really try not to change much of what pop has written. We both edit as we write, though there are times when we'll read the other person's section and say âactually I think this part should be changed.â There are times when I know I've under-written a section and I tell pop to make edits, and other times when I think a section is decent and she says we should change something. There was definitely one section where pop said i don't think this works, so I rewrote it and what do you know, the rewrite was much better. It's a very gentle way to do concrit because it's not just my story.
How do you work with different timezones/and hours of availability?
Pop is in Australia and I am in the US, so I'm generally writing while she's at work and she writes while I'm asleep. When we're racing to the end of a fic, there have been times when I would hand the doc off to her, go to sleep, and then wake up, write, and have my next section ready when she wakes up. In terms of posting, we do aim to post the promo tweet around EST wakeful hours, which usually means pop posts and then goes right to sleep, so idk how she feels about that.
What technology do you use?
Discord to chat and google docs to write.
Final thoughts?
Cowriting is really fun and I've learned a lot!! I think sometimes I shy away from writing my super random ideas that no one will read, but when you cowrite it takes away the pressure of feeling like no one will read/appreciate what you've written, so I think my most off-the-wall fics are cowrites (Alice in wonderland au with a giant bunny suit, or falling in love with an AI, anyone?). Also it's so magical to post a 22k fic and only write 11k of it. Can that happen with all my fics?
what a heart wants
waiting/wandering
How Beautiful It'd Be
Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast
go home with the one you found
don't need no body (nobody but you)
realize/real eyes
(cat)fisher of men
marriage is a scam (so defraud me)
marry in haste, repent never
spoon meâno, not you
my curse, your contract, our castle
The Diner at the End of the Universe
How do you broach the idea of a co-write with someone?
I've written with two other people (merryofsoul and popliar). When merryofsoul and I did my very first cowrite, I initially asked if she wanted to cowrite a fic for a mutual friend's birthday. I knew about half the fic was not something I could write (I didn't know wayv personalities) and she could, so we wrote 22k together. (Our second cowrite was also a birthday fic for a different mutual friend đ)
When I wrote with pop, we both kind of just were throwing around an idea and basically double dog daring each other to write 100 words. Neither of us are willing to have our bluff called so she did, I followed, and we kept going. I think once we wrote that first fic, we felt how much we clicked as cowriters and approaching every subsequent cowrite was much easier.
What ways have you cowritten/how does it differ with each fic?
When merryofsoul and I wrote what a heart wants, we divided it pretty cleanly into she would write wayv and I would write Jun/Yanan since I didn't know wayv and she didn't know Yanan. There were some spots here or there where I would write some narration/scene setting for her or she would write dialogue for me, since I think those play to our strengths. When we wrote How Beautiful It'd Be, we wrote on top of each other almost. It was very fluid; basically if one of us had something to add then we added it, even if the other person was in the middle of the sentence. When I reread the fic, it's hard for me to point to the parts I wrote.
For the first few cowrites with pop, we very much divided up the povs and stuck to our own POV. For waiting/wandering I wrote Jacob & Jaehyun, for Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast I wrote Sangyeon and Juyeon, etc. I think we usually tried to trade off povs so we didn't have to write two sections before handing it off, but it doesn't always work like that. Then we wrote realize/real eyes and (cat)fisher of men in a much different way. I wrote the intro to realize/real eyes and pop wrote the intro to (cat)fisher and then we swapped and the other person had to finish the fic however they wanted. We were both pretty tentative about giving the other person a fic they didn't know how to finish and kind of talked out what we were thinking, so I think we decided if we try it again, we'd let the other person go in with 0 knowledge and finish it. Lately we have also been writing in the same POV, which hasn't been too difficult since I think we both have a very similar characterization of Jacob and Jaehyun, the members we write the most.
Do you plan everything out beforehand or do you plot as you go?
I think for what a heart wants it was fairly planned out, since we needed our sections to match up and had to decide when each contestant would be eliminated.
When I write with pop we do NOT plot everything out beforehand đ When we get really excited about a cowrite we usually do a pretty loose chatfic session that usually gets the main structure down, and then we garden it out from there.
What do you enjoy about cowriting?
It's so incredibly nice to just hand back the doc to someone else and words just magically appear for you to read?? When people complain about how âthey don't want to write a fic they just want to read it,â but it also has to be exactly the fic they want to read, I feel like cowriting really scratches that itch for me. I trust my cowriters to tell the story I want to read/write, and then each time I read what they've written, it's a little gift of this story that I didn't have to write. It's such fun âyes, andâ improv, because even when we discuss what we think should happen in that scene, there's always some delightful little surprise in how someone else writes it that I would never think to write. I also love having two people to brainstorm, because they always know what you're stuck on. I also hate reading my own fics after I've posted them but I never feel that way with cowritesâenough of it isn't mine that it doesn't ick me to reread đĽ˛
How do you work out disagreements/mismatch?
I think you really have to vibe with who you're cowriting with before you even start, which then avoids a lot of these issues. If I can't chatfic out an idea with someone and feel like we are taking it in the same direction, I probably would not want to cowrite. So usually cowriting is like sharing the same brain cell, but the few times it's not, I think we just try to explain what we were both thinking and then try to compromise with what makes most sense for the story. Sometimes one of us will have a very strong idea of what should happen next and the other one says ok let's try that and see if we like it. I think sometimes I plot out further than pop does, so then I have to rein it in so that we're plotting and creating together. There are other times when it feels like we're gardening a lot and I have to check where the story is going and force us to set up guidelines for the next 3 scenes for my brain. I think a funnier mismatch is that pop likes to condense and I sketch out the emotional development solely by gut feeling so I'm always like âbut we need to talk about their feeeeelings!â I think we find a good balance in length even if we don't get it perfect each timeâour first cowrites were pretty condensed while we learned how to cowrite and our two most recent ones were maybe longer than they needed (but we were just having so much fun writing!!!)
What is your strength or weakness?
Hmmm within the context of cowriting I guess I focus a lot on the emotional arc and making sure the emotional beats are correctly lining up with plot beats? I think I am able to pull that thread throughout the fic even when we're figuring out plot details. With merryofsoul I also was good at setting scenes and moving things along in the fic. My weakness is that sometimes I get tripped up on something small and then get stuck until pop helps me out, and it's harder for me to just garden out a plot from nowhere. I can usually visualize the beats of the entire fic or I don't write it, so sometimes that holds me back from an idea. I also shy away from the action scenes usually :) but if we include any smut it's probably me writing it so it balances out, right? Also my obsession with word counts, but I'll put that in the editing section.
What is your partner's strength or weakness?
Merryofsoul is very good at dialogue, as I said earlier, and infusing characters with a lot of heart and soul. Pop is very good at condensing, I've always loved how succinctly she can convey an emotion that I feel like would've taken me a paragraph to write. Her characters are so sweet but so funny. She's also a whiz at canon details and world building. Talking about popâs weaknesses is funnyâcan I say none? 𤣠Sometimes condensing is a double edged sword and I have to say I think we need to spend a few more words on this, but she's also said that to me. I think she is also much quicker to throw the draft into the world than me, which leads us to the next questionâŚ
How do you edit?
Genuinely can't remember how i edited for my cowrites with merryofsoul so I'll answer for my recent ones. If you take a quick look at my AO3 page you'll see that I post fics with some type of even/round word count. I try not to cut/add hundreds of words so if we post something that ends in ,000 it was probably close when we finished the draft. I admit it's a lot of obsessing over something that doesn't matter, so I might try to let it go next year. I think I'm more likely to do line edits, though I really try not to change much of what pop has written. We both edit as we write, though there are times when we'll read the other person's section and say âactually I think this part should be changed.â There are times when I know I've under-written a section and I tell pop to make edits, and other times when I think a section is decent and she says we should change something. There was definitely one section where pop said i don't think this works, so I rewrote it and what do you know, the rewrite was much better. It's a very gentle way to do concrit because it's not just my story.
How do you work with different timezones/and hours of availability?
Pop is in Australia and I am in the US, so I'm generally writing while she's at work and she writes while I'm asleep. When we're racing to the end of a fic, there have been times when I would hand the doc off to her, go to sleep, and then wake up, write, and have my next section ready when she wakes up. In terms of posting, we do aim to post the promo tweet around EST wakeful hours, which usually means pop posts and then goes right to sleep, so idk how she feels about that.
What technology do you use?
Discord to chat and google docs to write.
Final thoughts?
Cowriting is really fun and I've learned a lot!! I think sometimes I shy away from writing my super random ideas that no one will read, but when you cowrite it takes away the pressure of feeling like no one will read/appreciate what you've written, so I think my most off-the-wall fics are cowrites (Alice in wonderland au with a giant bunny suit, or falling in love with an AI, anyone?). Also it's so magical to post a 22k fic and only write 11k of it. Can that happen with all my fics?
what a heart wants
waiting/wandering
How Beautiful It'd Be
Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast
go home with the one you found
don't need no body (nobody but you)
realize/real eyes
(cat)fisher of men
marriage is a scam (so defraud me)
marry in haste, repent never
spoon meâno, not you
my curse, your contract, our castle
The Diner at the End of the Universe
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Date: 2022-12-29 08:47 pm (UTC)