How Two Authors Write as One
You might not know that Ellie Curzon is the pen name of not one, but two, authors: Catherine Curzon and Helen Barrell. Here’s Helen to tell us how they write novels together.
Catherine and I have been writing together since 2017, and the way we do it has barely changed since. Writing partnerships are unusual in fiction, but not in drama and comedy where it’s more often the norm. Classics such as Dad’s Army, Porridge, and more recently comedies like Peep Show and Alan Partridge have been the work of co-writers. In the US, they go further, with Friends and The Simpsons being the work of writing teams.
When it comes to fiction, the way co-writers write varies. You might find a partnership where one writer comes up with the plot, and the other writes the chapters. Or you might find that they’ll plot together, but split the writing up, often by dividing the book into the points of view of two different characters and they work separately on their chapters.
But Catherine and I do it differently, in a way which is only possible now thanks to online collaborative working. This was something that came into its own for many who suddenly had to work from home during lockdowns, but still needed to work with colleagues. But this was something Catherine and I had already been doing for several years. We arrange times to write, so that we’re both in the same shared document online and off we go!
We chat about our story ideas, bouncing our thoughts off each other and as Catherine has a far more plot-focused brain than me, she will shape them into a plot. It’s rather like a map—if you set off on a hike with friends, you want to make sure you’re all going in the same direction. You don’t want someone to wander off and get lost as it’ll ruin your hike. If we tried to write together without a plot, it really wouldn’t work.
You may have heard before about different kinds of writers—plotters, who come up with plots before sitting down to write, and pantsers who “fly by the seat of their pants” and start writing without a plot. Plotters don’t tend to have lots of edits to do before sending in their draft, whereas pantsers will need to read through carefully and make sure what they’ve written hits all the beats that a novel needs, and iron out inconsistencies that can creep in. Some plotters will have a bullet-pointed list of plot points, whereas others will have a peg board on their wall covered in Post-Its—even using color-coded ones, or put it into a spreadsheet, or will use something a writing program like Scrivener for their plot. For every writer, it seems, there’s a different way to approach the plot. How do you approach yours?
Catherine and I often write a synopsis for the story, then Catherine breaks it up into chapters. At that stage, extra bits may well be added so that the beats flow. The plot isn’t set in stone, either. While we’re writing, we might decide that something we thought could be covered in one chapter needs to be split into two, or that two separate chapters can be combined. Or we might decide that a whole subplot can come out, which means deleting several chapters from the plot. Having an up-to-date chapter outline is really helpful, too, when we get our edits back too; we have an overview of the novel, and we can find sections which the editor wants us to tweak.
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If you’re writing on your own, you know all of your characters, so Catherine and I talk to each other about ours. We share photos of people who resemble what we can see in our heads, as well as photos of houses, cars, clothes, etc. It means that we can see what each other is seeing. If we had completely different ideas, and didn’t communicate them, we’d soon end up in a pickle and it would show on the page. If I didn’t know that Catherine’s character lived in a two-storey house, I could send my character up to the third floor—a floor which in Catherine’s mind doesn’t actually exist!
We divide up the characters between us, sometimes doing this in advance, or once we arrive at their scene. I write the point-of-view character, and Catherine writes the other main character. We divide up the rest so that we don’t have too many sections of the novel where one of us is writing on their own for a chunk of time. And we’ll sometimes divide them up based on who has a burning desire to write a particular character! We’ll sometimes share a character and refer to them as a “community character”—so if in one scene, the point-of-view character has a scene with a “community character,” Catherine would write them. Then if Catherine’s character has a scene with the “community character,” I would step in and take over.
In every one of our novels, there are sections where we can’t remember and can’t work out who wrote what. “Did you write them here or did I? Is that your description or mine?” If we can’t see the joins, then hopefully our readers can’t either. And that means our job as co-writers has been done!
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