Red Room Where the Writers Are

Writing is a lonely and difficult business. When you're all alone with a computer in the middle of the night and you can't decide if your character should get married or throw herself under a double-decker bus, it would be nice to have someone to ask. When you're pretty sure that what you've just written is either the worst rubbish any mind ever conceived or a stroke of Shakespearian genius, you might feel the need for a second opinion. When you know exactly how the screenplay starts and how it ends but you're missing that teensy part called "the middle," the thought may well cross your mind that what you need is-a collaborator!

Lots of writers work with collaborators. From screenwriting comedy teams to textbook authors, writing is not always best done alone, wallowing in self-pity. And so, many innocent, doe-eyed writers enter into collaboration, without thoroughly considering the consequences of this monumental decision. If your writing is important to you, you must make sure that the collaboration is right for you. And yet, for writers considering collaboration, or already working within that tricky relationship, there has been no recipe for success. There has been no guide that explains everything you should know about collaboration, and more. Until now. 

Although the primary focus of this guide is on collaborations between writers, most of the information can also be applied to other types of collaborations and partnerships. 

This handbook is designed to take you from your initial desire for a collaborator all the way through every pitfall and every success. The rules for collaboration turn out to be very similar to the basic design for good relationships. That's why this book is set up with a guiding metaphor. Think of yourself as single-or perhaps you're already there. (Perhaps you wish you were, but that's a different story.) This manual takes the bachelor or bachelorette-the solo writer-and leads you from dating (meeting collaborators), to the wedding (who else is invited?), through the honeymoon phase, (working together well), to the sometimes-inevitable divorce (uh-oh). 

And it all starts with... desire.