Notes on Collaboration: How to Win in Your Goals Without Losing Your Friends

One of the most incredible adventures you can take in your hobby, side-gig, or business venture is to tackle it with another person.

It can also be one of the most trying.

For me, story-smithing with another person is thrilling—but in the past has been trying.

As with any new project, writing collaboratively can be a beautiful, hilarious, enriching process with so many benefits. It can introduce you to new styles and ideas. It provides a sounding board in the form of another intelligent human being—hopefully someone you trust. It sharpens plots, makes storylines more clever, and compels creativity. And, for certain, it will improve your copy. Four eyes and two brains are far better for clean, coherent, consistent writing that a single fallible human.

That said, tag-teaming a blog post or a novel can be demanding. In the worst cases, it can wound a friendship.

Most of my collaborative experience comes from writing projects with coauthors and team ventures in school or work venues. However, I’m confident the strategies are handy whatever the mission may be.

10 Guidelines for Collaboration of the Highest Quality

1. Respect. You don’t have to be friends, but you must think the best of the other. If you can’t get along well in daily life, you’re likely to crash and burn when trying to mix your creative juices into an irresistible cocktail.
2. Humility. When working through a project together, leave your egos at the door. Come to the page and the plot as partners. Unless you’re in agreement that one person is the master and the other the apprentice, the default—better spoken than left unspoken—is listening, diplomacy, and building each other up. Go looking for gold in your partner’s sieve. Come in believing the other person’s ideas are as valuable as yours.
3. Challenge. Respect and humility are essential, but the ability to challenge one another is important, too. Come with an open ear and mind, but be willing to push back. Like iron on iron, stories get sharper when they rub against genuine, curious questions. Call each other into more and better ideas to take your project to the next level.
4. Direction. Having an identical vision of the destination isn’t necessary. Have a compatible vision is. If one of you wants to go south and the other north, you’ll end up going nowhere—and maybe destroying the clutch. Something of a common vision—comparable storylines, genre overlap, matching themes, characters with aligning arcs—will get you a lot closer to a happy ending than riding two different wavelengths.
5. Drive. Just like having comparable vision and direction is important, having matching drive is enormously helpful. Your partnership probably won’t last long if one party puts in fifteen minutes a day while the other racks up a full day’s work. You don’t need to have identical workloads (though it helps), but you should have similar degrees of desire to invest in the project.
6. Commitment. Related to corresponding drive is corresponding commitment. Whether or not you have the same skill level or the same amount of hours per day, you must both express equal commitment to seeing the project succeed—and doing your part to make that happen. What’s worse than believing you’re both on totally pledged to the project, then your companion bails? Life happens. Schedules change. But starting with an equal commitment will take you far in dealing with the challenges and enjoying the successes of your work.
7. Agreement. No one’s saying you need a blood oath, but a written agreement might be a good idea, especially if it’s a big project with a potentially big payload. Some might be uncomfortable signing contracts with friends, but if this is your business, then treat your friend like a business partner. Agreements in writing shouldn’t be more binding than the good word of friends, but they can serve as helpful reminders.
8. Understanding. Go into a project with a strategy for work and the division of labor. Understand who is in charge of what. Have a good grasp of timeline. And, as noted earlier, both of you should share a decently clear picture of the destination. Understanding each other and the project at the start doesn’t mean you won’t hit unexpected roadblocks, but it will spare you the headache of figuring out how to handle them in the moment.
9. Equal Expectations. In the same way that you should share ideas about content, direction, and the division of labor, it’s essential to align your expectations about what to do with the end result. How will you split any income? How will you divide follow-up responsibilities? Marketing? PR? Accounting? Divide these responsibilities as equitably as you can—and compensate proportionally. But most importantly, however you divide them, decide up front so you know what to expect for both of you.
10. A Backdoor. Hopefully you’ll never need it, but there has to be a safe parachute in the event that one of you needs to jettison from the project. Sometimes irreconcilable conflicts arise. Creative differences are real, no matter how much time you spend planning and getting on the same bandwidth. That’s not ideal, but using the escape hatch, with proper warning and preparation, is an acceptable outcome. If all else fails, split ways professionally so you can stay together relationally. Your friendship is more important than this project. Never forget that.