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By Dan Brotzel, @brotzel_fiction

I met my two collaborators, Martin and Alex, at my local writing group. By coincidence, it turned out that we all lived in the same road.

As we got to know each other, I decided to share an idea. It had struck me that a writer’s group is itself quite a promising set-up for a story: all those fragile egos, all those different personalities hungry for publication, all the different sorts of writers and writing — from epic verse to steampunk, in our case.

Originally I’d thought the idea might make an interesting short story, but over time — and as my friendship with Alex and Martin grew — I started to think how much more fun it would be if we wrote something longer, together.

So I put the idea to them, and they ran with it. After a few meetings in our local pub, we had thrashed out a set of characters —  we would each run 2 or 3 — and a broad structure. We knew it was to be a novel in emails, building to some sort of explosive climax, and that was enough to get us started. And so, Kitten on a Fatberg — now to be published by Unbound — was launched.

Part of the fun of the project was the element of blind collaboration. We set up a dedicated email account for the book, and each of us began firing off messages, in character. So every few days you’d go into the inbox to read an email from one of your co-author’s characters, which talked about some terrible thing that your own character had just done at the last group meeting.

You would then fire something back from your character attempting to explain or justify their behaviour — and taking great pleasure in dropping someone else’s character in it, and so on. There are 8 main characters in the book, which means lots of scope for feuds, alliances and even romances in various combinations.

Over time, the direction of the story became clearer, and we starting meeting to shape the narrative to its conclusion in a more conscious way.

The whole thing took about two years. The experience was hard work, complicated at times, but always great fun.

Here are a few things I learned along the way about how to collaborate successfully on a long-haul writing project such as a novel…Continue reading