Sometimes you just have to duck from your co-writer

I'm working on a book with a friend and I realized that there are some times when, God love her, all I can do is duck. I'm sure that she could say the same about me too.

The other day I got a chance to work on the novel and was moving along adding some things to the story, which required I altered a bit of her writing to let us reference the stuff that we were adding to the story.

Let's just sum it up in saying that she was having a bad writing day and yelled at me. Thankfully neither one of us were stupid enough to get into such a project with someone that we could not yell at, so I just ducked my head below keyboard level and waited out whatever I had done.

It did reinforce a major point in collaborative writing, however, and that is that if you plan to work on a novel with someone - make sure that it is someone who you know you can fight with. I don't mean just disagreements on where to take the story, I mean we both agree that we could never have done this project if we did not have near ten years of hell and high water under our friendship and knew already that we are fairly well inseparable.

I will say that there is nothing so exciting as being able to discuss your ideas and have them brought to life by the ideas of a co-author. To have someone offer you a muse they have made and then have that muse come to life for everyone that has seen it in writing.

Co-writing can be one of the greatest thrills of writing, but you need to remember that sometimes you are just going to have to duck and cover if your co-writer has an off day.