Co-writing! It’s a Trend!

by Terrie Moran and Laura Childs
You may have noticed that co-writing has become a well-established practice within the mystery community. Think of Clive Cussler, W.E. B. Griffin, James Patterson. Oh, and did you notice that Nelson DeMille is now writing with his son?
Reaching into the long-ago past, let’s not forget that Ellery Queen was actually the nom de plume of cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, who wrote so many wonderful mystery novels and short stories.
One of the latest writing teams is our own Sandra Murphy, who joined forces with Michael Bracken on the short story “Gracie Saves the World” recently published in the anthology The Book of Extraordinary Historical Mysteries.
Among my many mystery-writing adventures, one of the most exhilarating is that I’m presently the “with” writer on the New Orleans Scrapbooking series by New York Times best-selling author, Laura Childs.
And how did I wind up lucky enough to work with Laura Childs? It all started with an editor at our mutual publisher, the Berkley division of Penguin Random House, asked Laura Childs to read and possibly blurb my first novel. And fortunately for me, Laura liked Well Read, Then Dead and gave it an awesome blurb. Still, you could have knocked me over with a feather when, some months later Laura Childs, whom I’d never met, called to ask me if I’d like to co-write her scrapbooking series. I didn’t stop to wonder, “Why Me?” I said, “Yes.”
A golden opportunity for sure, but it still required agreement among our agents and editors until we had secured written contracts. Once everyone felt satisfied with the terms, the difficult work of writing began. Why difficult? Because writing is always difficult.
Before I tell you about our writing process, I want to say that every co-writing team takes a different approach. I know this because I’ve served on panels with co-writers and I have several friends who are co-writers. I don’t want any writer to avoid the opportunity to co-write a book or a story because what I say here doesn’t seem like something you want to do.
We all know writing is generally a solitary process. One challenge of writing with any partner is that you can’t wander off on your own inventing twists and turns with the plot or the characters. In a joint project one writer can’t toss in a change without talking to her partner. Can you imagine the catastrophe?
I got lucky because Laura Childs is probably the most organized writer on the planet Earth. She writes detailed outlines approximately a third of the length of the finished book. The outline includes snippets of conversations, notes about settings, food, personalities, wardrobe, etc. My job is to write each chapter according to the outline. Then I send the chapter to Laura, who reads it, sometimes accepts it, or sometimes sends it back for further work. Finally she rewrites and edits so that the story is definitely in her voice. We both proofread the manuscript about a hundred times before Laura finally submits it.
As the “with” writer, it is my job to adapt to Laura’s intimate knowledge of her characters: how they talk and how they think, what they do in a given situation, etc. Now that our fourth collaboration, Mumbo Gumbo Murder, has been released (on October 1, 2019), I can tell you that I’m much better at understanding Carmela, Ava, Babcock, and the gang then I was when we started writing together years ago.
When people ask me whether or not they should accept a co-writing offer, I always remind them that, to me, it’s a great honor to be asked to work with a writer of the stature of Laura Childs, who has a solid reputation for writing quality novels and a long established body of work. It’s important to realize that the person whose name is in large print on the cover is the team leader and has an established style and storyline that meets readers’ expectations. Consider it your job to follow along in that pattern.
So, if the opportunity ever comes along, I recommend you grab it.

Recipient of both the Agatha and the Derringer awards, Terrie Farley Moran is author of the beachside Read ‘Em and Eat cozy mystery series, co-author of Laura Childs’s New Orleans scrapbooking mystery series, and has published mystery short stories in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly Magazine, and numerous anthologies.
Laura Childs is the New York Times bestselling author of the Tea Shop Mysteries, Scrapbook Mysteries, and Cackleberry Club Mysteries. In her previous life she was CEO/Creative Director of her own marketing firm and authored several screenplays. She is married to a professor of Chinese art history, loves to travel, rides horses, enjoys fundraising for various nonprofits, and has two Chinese Shar-Pei dogs.