What are the best practices for collaboration? How do you write in an established intellectual property (IP)? How do you write a new story in an established world? We dive into working with an individual or a group. We hear stories from our hosts about how they have navigated creative endeavors with different types of collaboration.

Homework:

Grab something on your TBR (to be read) pile and pick a random paragraph from it. Use that as the opening for a short story.

Also prepare for our upcoming Deep Dive (starting in two episodes), by reading through Howard Tayler’s Schlock Mercenary.

Thing of the Week:

The Original by Brandon Sanderson and Mary Robinette Kowal

Mentioned Links:

Credits: Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, DongWon Song, Erin Roberts, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. It was produced by Emma Reynolds, recorded by Marshall Carr, Jr., and mastered by Alex Jackson.

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Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key Points: Partnerships with other people or other IP’s or groups. Even sequels and short stories set in established worlds need collaboration. Working in someone else’s IP or working with your past self. Fit into the existing continuity or play with it. Collaboration is not the same every time. With some IP work, the canon rules. In IP work, you don’t get to pick the audience. Get to know the audience, at least a little. Learn what kind of collaborator you are, and what type of collaborations you enjoy. Know who you are working with, too. Writing for a property you love may still be harder than writing your own thing. What do you do to make a collaboration work? First, accept that writing is egotistical, and collaboration requires you to let go of part of that ego and listen to other people. An effective tool is focusing on fiting your story within this framework. You’ve been picked for your personal voice, use it! Match their mechanics and aesthetics, but express your personal voice. What is intrinsic to the first part, what does the audience love, and how can I tell a new version of that? Collaborators sometimes see different things. Collaboration challenges you to think about the essence of the story you want to tell because you don’t have full control of all aspects. Collaboration can teach you new tools. Two writers working together works best when each one knows what they are bringing to the partnership. Each case is a little bit different. Sometimes you have to put your foot down if the collaboration is going towards something harmful, or a story that doesn’t need to be told in that way. This is a delicate process! Know where your line is.

[Season 18, Episode 29]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Working in Partnership.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you’re in a hurry.

[Howard] And we’re not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I’m Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I’m DongWon.

[Erin] I’m Erin.

[Dan] I’m Dan.

[Howard] I’m Howard.

[Dan] We are going to talk about working in partnership with other people or with other IP’s which can often be an entire group, rather than a single person. Part of this is collaboration. But this is also something that you often will find yourself doing with your own work when it’s time to go back and write a sequel to something or a short story set in a world that you or someone else has established. There are rules you have to follow in order to make sure that it stays true to the original thing. So this is something that all of us have done to varying degrees. So let me start by just kind of throwing this out as a general question. Why is it important, or rather, how is it different when you have to work within an established IP versus just creating something whole cloth?

[Mary Robinette] So, there are built-in constraints that you have to work towards. I’ve done this in a couple of different modes. I’ve done this in someone else’s IP for games. I collaborated with Brandon on the thing for The Original. But the thing that I’m doing right now is, that is, is basically collaborating with my past self. I’m writing the fourth book in the lady astronaut That series, and I have to fit it in between the novels that I have already written in the short stories that are farther down the timeline of this. As I was working on it, I had… Like, I worked out this whole outline, grabbed one of the short stories to reference a character name, and realized that it takes place two years after the end of this novel. So I could not have the ending that I was aiming for because it broke the rest of my canon.

[Howard] Kevin J. Anderson, who famously has written a number of Star Wars novels, was on the podcast and gave us what I considered the high water metaphor, which is Lando Calrissian and Han Solo in Return of the Jedi, when Lando Calrissian needs to take the Millennium Falcon and Han says, “Don’t scratch it.” Your job as a tie-in fiction writer, according to Kevin J. Anderson, is you need to take the Millennium Falcon, blow up the Death Star with it, bring it back to Han without scratching it. I love that metaphor so much.

[Mary Robinette] There’s a number of different things that I think that you’re thinking about with that. It’s the fitting into the existing continuity. So there’s a couple of different ways you can play with it. One is that you can… You could play that as Lando manages to do all of that without scratching it. The other is you can have this whole side quest of, oh, crap, I have, in fact, scratched it, now I have to clean it up before Han knows. So there’s a certain amount of gleeful playfulness that you can do where you’re like, “Hum. You told me that I can’t do this thing, but let me see if I can…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And still be respectful to the IP.

[Howard] The back-and-forth that I got to have with Doug Seacat when I was writing tie-in fiction with Privateer Press. We were talking about coal technology and magic. I told him, “Hey, are you aware of coal tar?” He said, “What’s coal tar?” I said, “Well, it’s a 19th-century thing that was a byproduct of coal processing. It’s a mild acid that got used in medicine all the time.” He said, “I didn’t even know about that. Well, it’s going into the book.” So… That level of the partnership for me was so much fun because I got to reach into Doug’s head and find out what they’d said and then see if I could add things to the universe. He paid me a very high compliment at the end and said, “I love what you did with the technology inside this war jack. We haven’t had anybody actually try to describe how one of these works, and you just went for it.” I’m like, “Yeah, I stared at pictures of railroad engines for hours, but this was fun.”

[Mary Robinette] The other thing that I want to say is that I think understanding that collaboration is not going to be the same way every time.

[Right]

[Mary Robinette] So, Brandon and I have collaborated on a thing, and Dan and Brandon have collaborated. Both of these are audio… Things that were intended for audio. Our collaboration processes were completely different. With me, Brandon handed me a script… Or, not a script, an outline and a world Bible. I sat down and we had a little bit of back-and-forth, fleshing out the outline where I turned it into scenes that made sense to me. Then I started writing it. In the process of writing it, I would hit these worldbuilding things, which is the thing that Brandon is known for, that made no sense at all…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Because what he realized in that process was that so much of his worldbuilding was figuring it out as he was going. So we had to have a lot of back-and-forth about that, and jettisoning those things that had been planned and plotted that didn’t actually make sense once we actually got in there. Whereas Dan was given this very blank slate, which we talked about in the first episode in this series.

[Dan] Yeah. The Dark One novel was similar to what you got. He gave me an outline, but actually very little if any worldbuilding of how the secondary world… It’s a portal fantasy… How does that actually function. The collaboration for this process was just, “Hey, this would be cool to do this podcast story. Do it. It has to explain how this character in’s up in prison.” That was the entire thing that I had to work with.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think, I have a number of clients who do a lot of IP work. Right? I have clients who have written for Bioware and Blizzard and Marvel and Star Wars. Right? Some huge brands. It is always fascinating to me seeing how that process works when there is decades sometimes of canon, and canon that’s incredibly important to the fan base. Right? So, if you play with the worldbuilding of Dragon Age, you’re going to have a lot of conversations around that. Now, the problem is, there’s an asymmetry here, because you’re dealing with a big corporation who is trying to develop a videogame, make movies, make TV shows, in parallel with what you’re doing, so it’s also trying to hit a moving target with people who are very busy. So sometimes as the writer, when you’re coming into this, you need to find a way to manage your time and sort of protect your time, so that you’re not spending… You’re not doing revision after revision after revision chasing a moving target of what the current canon and what the current lore is. Working… Doing that kind of work for hire work can be incredibly rewarding, financially, and it can be really fun to write in these universes, but it is a particular skill that’s almost a management skill as much as it is a craft skill of finding a way to fit into that world.

[Erin] I think that’s so important… Two things that you said that I love. One is that you don’t get to pick the audience. That’s, I think, the biggest thing in working in intellectual-property work, IP work, is that the audience for this work has been determined for you, and often times has been built up for a long time. So you may be able to play with the world and with what you’re doing, but ultimately… When you write a novel, you might think, “Here’s the audience that I want for it.” But if you’re writing for a game, it’s these gamers. So you need to know a little bit… I think it’s always wise to get to know the audience a bit. You don’t necessarily have to pander to them, but it’s good to know what the expectations are coming in, what people sort of want from this property or from this world, so that you have a sense that you’re playing to the strengths of it as opposed to fighting it, which is never a good thing to do. I would say the second thing is, if you do a lot of collaborative work, is learning the type of collaborator that you are and the type of collaborations that you enjoy. Because not everything is going to be your cup of tea. Sometimes you don’t like working with, like, big multinational companies because ultimately they hold a lot more control. You might consider like more of a one-on-one collaboration like Mary Robinette was talking about. I love writers’ rooms, where your getting together with a group of people to create something and you’re doing a lot of the generative work together. Then going off and writing and coming back to see how it went. Just because it plays to things that I think are really fun. Sometimes you don’t know these things until you do it. But if you’ve collaborated on anything in your life, a school project…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] A grocery list, like, a vacation, you know a bit about yourself when you work with other people. You can then try to use that and build on it when you collaborate in a creative space.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think it’s really important to not only know who your audience is, but who you’re working with. Right? Because I’ve seen writers go into collaboration with some of these big IP that have a fan base that may not always be the easiest to work with. Especially if they’re fem, especially if they’re queer or a writer of color, they can get a lot of pushback in a way that can be very unpleasant. Coming up, I have Mark Ashiro is collaborating with Rick Riordan. One of the things that collaboration was specifically because Rick did not feel like he was in a position to write these queer characters. So he wanted to find a queer writer to take that on. It was a thing that Mark and I looked at very carefully in terms of how is Mark being positioned to the fans and in what way. I mean, we could not have a more wonderful partner than Rick on this. Then he and his team have taken absolute care to make sure that Mark is seen as a full collaborator and is front and center in the fans’ eyes. So, knowing that we had that backup going in really changed the calculus for us of, like, is this a thing… Or, like, how do we approach this, what do we need to do to make sure that, like, we’re going to navigate this well. Right? The book’s coming out soon. Fans are really excited, we’re really excited, I think it’s going to be a really beautiful partnership.

[Dan] Yeah. This is such an important thing to consider. Especially, remembering back to my days trying to break into this, where I was like, “I will take anything.” But also if you let me write for a property that I love, that’s even more exciting to me. It is often so much harder than just writing your own thing. I sat down, back when Star Wars kind of ramped up its new slate of novels a few years ago, I sat down with Claudia Gray who’s been writing a ton of Star Wars stuff, and said, “Tell me everything, I would love to work in this.” By the end of that conversation, I was like, “Absolutely not.”

[Chuckles]

[Dan] “This is not for me.” I love Star Wars, but this process that you go through that produces very good books and the people who do it enjoy it is definitely something that I would not have enjoyed. So you do need to pay attention to who you’re going to be working with, what their process is going to be like, how much do you love the property. Given the same opportunity to write for Star Trek, I would absolutely say yes, because it’s more of a personal connection for me. But there a lot of extra considerations when you get into this kind of work. Let’s pause now, and when we come back, we want to talk more about how this collaboration works.

[Mary Robinette] I wrote a story with Brandon Sanderson called The Original. This story is about a woman who wakes up and discovers that her husband has been murdered, and, more than that, that she is a clone, and her original murdered him. She’s been given a period of time in which to track down her original and bring her to justice. It is science fiction, it’s immersive, but it is audio. It is specifically written for audio. It was a lot of fun to write. So, if you’re interested in someone who’s doing a lot of self reflection out of force, this is something you might want to pick up. It’s called The Original. That is by me, Mary Robinette Kowal and Brandon Sanderson.

[Dan] All right. So, how do we do this? We’ve talked about a lot of the perils of collaboration, and a lot of the benefits that you can get. Specifically, how is it different? What do you need to do in a collaboration to make it work?

[Howard] I want to start by saying that there is nothing is inherently egotistical as writing a novel that you expect other people to read. That’s good. It is an inherently egotistical act, and I accept that. I accept that and I embrace that. It’s important to accept and embrace that, because the moment you’re collaborating, you have to recognize that at least a little bit of that ego you gotta let go of it. You have to let go of that and learn to listen to other people over the voice of your inner artist who is shouting for the things that you want. This may sound like a 101 level technique, but I’m here to tell you, the world is the place that it is because it ain’t a 101 level technique.

[Mary Robinette] So, along those lines, one of the things that I have found to be a very effective tool is to think about, there’s your goal. You have to tell a story for someone else in this world, or in your own world. But that you want to bring… You can fit your story, the story that you want to tell, within this framework. There’s a reason that they picked you to tell this is opposed to someone else. That is your personal voice. So I’m going to draw… Take a brief sidestep to draw out the distinction in voice. There’s three types. There’s mechanical, there’s aesthetic, and there’s personal. If I use puppets as a metaphor, which I’m very fond of doing. When we say mechanical, it’s like what kind of puppet is it. When we say mechanics in writing, it’s like third person, first person, game, YA, whatever you’re doing mechanically. That can be taught, that can be mimicked. Aesthetic, what does that puppet look like, what does it sound like. Those can be taught and mimicked. Personal… If you loan the same puppet to two different puppeteers, it looks like a different character. Which is why everyone freaked out when Kermit’s original puppeteer, Jim Henson, died and Steve Whitmire took over, even though it’s clearly the same puppet. So it’s matching mechanic and aesthetic. So when you are coming in, you want to make sure that you’re matching their mechanics and their aesthetics, but recognize that your personal voice is part of why you were hired. So your ideas, your personal experience, those things are going to express themselves in the fiction, and that has value. At the same time, you’re also going to have to make decisions about which pieces of your personality you are sharing with them, and which pieces you are retaining, and which pieces you’re willing to say, “You know what, we can overwrite that,” because it is getting in the way of my paycheck and the things that you want me to do.

[Dan] Another consideration here when you… One of the things that you mentioned was the story you want to tell. I think that that’s such a big part of this. One of the things we said at the beginning was even when you write a sequel, you are essentially in collaboration with yourself. It is interesting to me to look at sequels or second seasons of the show and realize, “Oh, this creator misunderstood what the audience loved about the first thing.” Right? One of the examples I like to use for this is The Temple of Doom, the second Indiana Jones movie. What Spielberg and Lucas loved about the first one, and what they were trying to do, is not necessarily what the audience took away from that first one. The things that the audience loved were not… About Raiders of the Lost Ark… Kind of weren’t present in the second one as much. That was a case of them identifying different things than the audience did in terms of this is what I’m going to continue, this is how I’m going to keep this story going. You can see the same thing with season two of Heroes, people developing superpowers. What the creators thought we all loved about that and therefore what they focused on in season two was people coming together and forming a super team. Whereas the audience was like, “No, we already saw that. We want to see the team do something together now.” Because what the audience kind of pulled out of season one was, “Oh, I love these characters, and I want to see them continue to grow along this path.” Rather than I want to see them walk the same path over again. So identifying what it is that really makes this click, and how can I give you more of that while being different, is part of not only writing a sequel, but also writing an episode of a TV show, writing a short story set in a larger world. What is intrinsic to this, what does the audience love about it, and how can I tell my own new version of that?

[Erin] I think one of the challenges and excitements of working in collaboration is that you may feel differently about that than a collaborator does. You may believe, like, that the audience is getting character and they may believe, no, the audience is really into the tension of it. So, sometimes you do have to set aside, especially if you’re working with a collaborator that has more positional power, like, they’re a big company, and ultimately you’re not going to convince Marvel that they are wrong about the character. They’re going to tell you, “It’s this,” and you’re going to have to work with it. But I think that that’s actually some of the most fun of it, and why I enjoy collaborating, is figuring out what are the mechanics and aesthetics that I need to fit my personal voice to, and how can I still make things that are core to me as a storyteller come through in this different format. Sort of like when we were talking about writing in a different format, when you’re using someone else’s mechanics and aesthetics, it is its own, like, sort of genre of writing. Figuring out how to tweak things and say things differently, but still get the core through, is so important. I remember Mary Robinette several episodes ago, you talked about, I think, essence and form.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] Which I always say as essence and expression. It’s, you change the expression, but the essence is there. I think what it challenges you to do is think about what is the essence of the story that you’re trying to tell in a way that you might not when you have full control over all aspects of the storytelling.

[Dan] I understood this principle you’re talking about in a completely different way when I took the time to look at my favorite X file episodes and realized they were all by the same writer. There was something that that writer was putting into the stories, that essence, that personality, that intimate connection to what was going on, that I responded to. It’s one of my favorite shows, I like most of the episodes. But these four or five in particular spoke to me in a very unique way, because it was that singular author’s voice coming through.

[Mary Robinette] This is a thing that we have to do in puppet theater a lot, that… They say it takes 5 to 10 years to establish a company, and during that time, you have to do names, like Pinocchio, Snow Queen. So the goal is to figure out how to do the story that you want to tell while still having the audience feel like they came out of the theater seeing Pinocchio. It comes down to figuring out, okay, what are the markers, what are the things that are important in these stories? Like, I know that in The Calculating Stars, and this is part of what I get from reading the five and four star reviews, when I’m in the right frame of mind, is that people like seeing women in STEM, they like seeing someone who’s dealing with anxiety, they like a happily married couple, and they want to be in space. Like, I have to make sure that as much as possible, I give you at least one scene in space.

[Erin] I also think you can get tools from collaboration that are like random things you would never have to have known otherwise.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] A good example of this is, so Zombies Run is based out of the UK, and all of the characters are British. I am… Was, when I was writing, the only non-British writer. So I would write things and they would be like, “This is very American.” They’d be like, “You just used this American slang. This is not how things work. Stop saying… Whatever… The floors start at zero.” It really made me, like, open my eyes in a way to sort of what are the things that I’m making assumptions about in the way that I tell stories that I wouldn’t have thought about if a collaborator hadn’t said we tell stories a little differently and you’re going to need to adapt to that. I actually think that even though I don’t write in Britishisms outside of that, it really helped me think differently about the assumptions I was making as a writer.

[DongWon] Mostly, up until this point, we’ve been talking about writing for IP or writing for an existing universe in those ways. There’s another type of collaboration that is two individual writers working together. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on a number of co-written projects that were quite successful. Your talk about tools is what made me think of this. I think they’ve worked the best when I could see each writer knew what they were bringing to the table. So, in the case of James S. A. Corey, that was Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Like, Daniel was really bringing this sort of like rich worldbuilding, really thoughtful politics, very expensive sort of systems oriented thinking. Then, Ty was bringing a really strong sense of action and pacing and all of these things. It was one of these things that each of them individually… I mean, Daniel is a truly wonderful novelist in his own work, but I could see how the alchemy of the two of them working together were making something that was so dynamic and so fun, and created this really fantastic science-fiction series. Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar, working on This Is How You Lose the Time War together, that is a collaboration that’s really driven by their friendship, and each of the two characters, Red and Blue, are kind of reflections of both their styles and ways of being in the world, and then figuring out a little bit of how their friendship worked through these two characters interacting and talking to each other. You could just sort of see, like, Max’s more mechanical thinking, Amal’s more like organic thinking… I’m obviously being very reductive here. But, like, these two I think coming together in these two characters in these really symbolic ways and weaving together to make this really beautiful story. So, what I love is each of them knowing what their toolkit was and also understanding there was a way that that would we interact with someone else’s toolkit to make something that works better together than individually.

[Dan] Well, let me follow up and ask you some questions about that. Was there a point in either of those processes where you, as the outsider, saw them start to click into what those roles were?

[DongWon] I think with Daniel and Ty a little bit more. Because that was a little bit more not clearly what section was written by which person. They did alternate, and then they would sort of pass and edit together. That was meant to be seamless. With Max and Amal, it really was more… Each… Red sections and Blue sections are meant to sound different. So those were written separately, and then sort of edited to work as a whole, but that was… Also that just showed… They didn’t even tell me they were working on this. It just appeared on my desk one day. I was like, “What did you guys do?”

[Chuckles, laughter]

[DongWon] Which turned out to be a beautiful sort of surprise. So it depends a little bit on the project. Right? With Mark working with Rick Riordan, it has been, again, a little bit more deliberate of Mark. Like, okay, how do I fit into this voice, into this style of storytelling, while bringing their own sort of personality and their own perspective to it. Which is what, as Mary Robinette was talking about, they were hired to do. That’s why Rick wanted Mark, because they had read Mark’s other work and said, “This fits. This is the perspective that these characters need to have. This is Nico.” Right? So I think in each of… Each case is a little bit different is one of the things that also is really useful. Not only look to who you’re partnering with and what are they bringing to the table. Know what you bring to the table. It’s always a little bit of a tap dance, always a little bit of give-and-take.

[Dan] Yeah. The first collaboration I did with Brandon was for a book called Apocalypse Guard, which is not published and might not ever be published. We back burnered that one. But that is a book he wrote for Delacorte and wasn’t working. He basically handed it over to me and said, “Is there any way you can fix this?” Which meant that I came into it kind of more with that mindset of, well, what are my strengths here? I had the benefit of looking at an existing thing and realizing, okay, what do I… I know Brandon is better at endings than I am, he is better at worldbuilding than I am. What am I going to bring to this? Character and voice and humor. That really helped us crystallize, this is what I… My specialty, this is what your specialty, we’re going to put these together and create something neither of us could have done on our own.

[Erin] This is making me think of one really specific type of collaboration, which is that I also do some cultural consulting, where I come onto projects and collaborate with them to make sure that there thinking about the world beyond the one that they just know from their own cultural background, is the way I’ll put it. So, just bringing my own experience to the table. Those tend to work better when it really is a collaboration, versus, like, a we wrote this, please fix it so we don’t get canceled, which is a thing that sometimes happens. But when it’s truly collaborative, it’s really interesting because what happens is you’re bringing your understanding and, like, I’m bringing my worldview and saying, like, “how is this worldview a little different than the worldview that you would bring?” Even though you’re in sort of more control of this property and what’s happening with it, I’m trying to bring something different to the table that I want you to listen to, because it’s going to reach a whole new group of people and also, just, I think, be a broader and more interesting story. I would say that one thing that I’ve really gotten out of doing this is, even in other collaborative projects, I will put my foot down if I feel that the collaboration is going towards something that I think is harmful, or just like a story that I don’t think needs to be told in that particular way, because it’s not… It’s putting things out in the world that I don’t agree with and I don’t want sort of my name associated with. That can be a really delicate process, which is why I’m bringing it up right here at the end of the episode. But I think it can be very delicate to figure out when can you take power in a collaboration, and when is it important to say, “This is my Hill to die on. I do not want us to tell this type of story.” And when do you have to let things go, and really understanding the difference between something you may not like aesthetically or a choice you may not have made as a storyteller, and something that you think is a deeply personal and, like, thing that you don’t think should be out in the world in the form that it is in the particular collaboration.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, I’ve seen… We mostly talked about when things go well. I’ve also seen collaborations not go well, and those projects not make it to publication, which I think, in each of those cases, was for the best. Right? I think that’s also something to keep in mind, is that there are failure states of this that are different from the failure states of writing your own solo project. Sometimes it’s knowing what’s important to you, knowing where your line is and saying I’m not going past this line and holding that ground, which can be very difficult to do, but it’s important to have clarity about why you’re doing this and what you’re bringing to the table.

[Dan] Okay. It is time for some homework. What we would like you to do today as an exercise… This is not going to produce salable fiction, because you are taking words from somebody else. Grab something on your TBR pile, a book that you are intending to read and haven’t gotten to yet. Open it up, find a random paragraph, and use that paragraph is the opening of a short story.

[Mary Robinette] In our next episode of Writing Excuses, we learn what all the one star reviews for I Am Not a Serial Killer have in common, and we talk about the two halves of a reader’s brain. Until then, you are out of excuses. Now go write.