Collaborating with another person is a funny, sometimes touchy thing. It can be a minefield. It can be easy. It can be a great experience. It can be a chore. It can make you a better writer and it can make you wish you never agreed to the project in the first place.

Alan Moore said of collaborations (]source):

Ideally, yes. It probably takes a certain type of person to get here, though.

Collaborations in comics are, of course, par for the course. Collaborations in prose are a little more rare, though not entirely uncommon. The process of collaborating on a work of fiction interests me. How to tackle it, how to go about it, and of course the interplay of two writers who both secretly want to be the star of the show.

That, or there is the old "pass on an idea for someone else to write" thing that Arthur C. Clarke does.

Collaborations. Ever worked with another writer? Hell, let's expand this to other creative people, so you folks who have worked in comics can chime in, too.

During my starving grad student days a fellow church member who was a freelance writer had a series of Sunday school lessons to write for a church publication. She had a lot going on and paid me to do some leg work for her. Besides gathering references for her I actually wrote up drafts of the lessons. She was surprised, and seemed rather pleased, that I had actually tried writing them up. I don't recall how much, if any, of my writing ended up in the finished product. But I made several hundred badly-needed dollars and she got to spend a bit more time with her husband and family. Maybe a bit more than anticipated--about nine months later she gave birth at age 40 to an unplanned baby after already having two teenagers in the house. I wonder sometimes if by freeing up some time for her I wasn't indirectly responsible for that....

I wrote a short film script with one of my best friends earlier in the year. It was... interesting. I'm proud of the finished short, but writing it was a pain in the ass. Fun, too, but a pain in the ass. We both did the story and I did the script, with a bit of back and forth. He's not too good at compromise. And because our approaches are very different - he tends to get cosy and spell things out, I like things dark and subtexty - we spent most of the time bashing heads. I'm not saying I was right and he was wrong, we just have different sensibilities and I guess we aren't well suited to writing together. Working together, aye, but not writing together. Still, I enjoyed it for the experience. And we'll be doing another one some time next year, but not quite as collaborative this time.