Free Live To Write Another Day by Dean Orion Page A

(individual scenes or sequences) of your old structure you can use as templates for parts of your new structure?
    • Is each modification you’re making consistent with your core message?

10. Writing Partners
     
     
    Being in a writing partnership is kind of like being in a marriage. It’s an intimate relationship that needs to be based on trust, mutual respect, and commitment. You have to really like this other person with whom you’ll be spending a great deal of time and sharing your ideas and your dreams. So if having a writing partner is one relationship too many in your life, you have my permission to stop reading this chapter right now and skip to the next one—or forever hold your peace!
    Assuming I haven’t scared you away, let’s talk about those three things I just mentioned…
    Trust , in this relationship, means that no idea is a bad idea—that you can throw anything out there no matter how lame it might sound, and there will never be any judgment about it on the part of the other writer. It means that this person will always have your back creatively.
    Mutual respect means that you never trash each other’s work. I learned this lesson the hard way when a writer I was working with repeatedly deleted or radically rewrote scenes that I had written in our script without even thinking about discussing the changes with me first. You can imagine how that partnership turned out.
    Commitment means always being willing to do what it takes to make the work better, and always seeing the job through until it’s done. This is the toughest one of all, because as I’ve already mentioned, the story never stops being told . So no script is really ever done—which means, like parents, once you conceive and give birth to these mind children , they connect the two of you forever.
     
What You Need to Give Up
    When you enter into this relationship, the first thing you have to be willing to give up is creative ownership of the work. When you work with a writing partner, there is no draft just for you. In fact, there is no you anymore. You are now we. So every idea, every outline, every script, right from the very outset, is only fifty percent yours, creatively speaking. (To be clear, I’m not in any way referring to ownership in the financial sense here. Obviously that’s an entirely different conversation.)
    The second thing you have to be willing to give up is creative autonomy. Since fifty percent of the work belongs to you and the other fifty percent belongs to your partner, you are only one of two votes that determine every creative decision that must be made on its behalf. So everything must be discussed at some point and negotiated if necessary, which can sometimes be a sticky business.
    Most significantly, you also have to be willing to give up your own voice, as does your partner, for the sake of this third, entirely unique creature that is the product of your collaboration. This may seem like a scary proposition, effectively losing your identity as an individual writer (and make no mistake, that’s exactly what it is), but in my experience, this melding of voices is actually one of the coolest aspects of writing with partners—the fact that you’re creating something that would never be the same if it were written by any two other people.
     
What You Gain
    Here are the big advantages to writing with a partner. First of all, you get a second brain, and who couldn’t use one of those, right? Just think about all those painstaking hours you need to spend tuning in the radio, carving out characters that are properly motivated, endlessly structuring and restructuring. Now you don’t have to figure out all that stuff on your own. Half the answers are your partner’s responsibility.
    Plus, now you have a reliable sounding board to help work through all the rough patches, a person who’s as knee-deep in the story as you are and equally invested in making it work.
    You’re now also working with someone who is