It's been an interesting day. Among many surprises, was a lengthy conversation with with an acquaintance who is collaborating on a book. He expressed that he and his co-author were frustrated in their repeated attempts to find a common voice.
He wanted to know how Robert and I had done it.
The short answer is we didn't. We tried, we really tried, but finding a common voice is much, much harder than it seems at first. We love each other's writing. We respect each other's thinking. We like each other's style. But I cannot write like Scoble without sucking at it, and he won't even try to write like me.
In the beginning, we had thought that the book would morph into a common style, but it did not. We brought in a blogging associate in the hope that he could impose some sort of law and order over us, but we learned the hard way, that an editor's job is not to find your voice. It is to make your voice sing as well as it can. After a few weeks, the editor left, I assume in frustration. Our publisher gave us a new editor, Faithe Wempen, who knew almost nothing about blogging, but a great deal about making copy tight and clear and accurate. She was great, but she was committed to do her job, not ours.
A month passed and we still had not completed the first of 14 chapters. We owed our publisher 80,000 words and had not yet agreed on the first 500 of them. We had five months left to get the book written and we had not yet gotten really started. It dawned on both of us that we had to resolve this ourselves--just the two of us. Any third-party would just complicate it.
That, in fact, is how the book got written in my voice, for better or worse. From the beginning, we had agreed that I would be the principle writer. Robert was the fountain of blogging insight and experience. But he had a day job. I did not so the book was written in my style. I'm sure there were times when Robert read sections, that he just hated, but he kept to his side of the bargain. His contributions to Naked Conversations at least equal and probably surpass my own, so we are in all ways to evaluate it co-authors.
The process that worked for us is that each chapter began with my interviewing Robert. We started having naked conversations. He would tell me what was important to him in that chapter and who he thought I should speak with. He would open the doors for me to access anyone in the blogosphere, who trusted Robert, but did not know me. Then I went off and conducted interviews and wrote it up and sent it to Robert for comments and reviews.
Once, he decided to rewrite me and I told him in very measured tones that I felt like he had sprayed my copy with graffiti. It was a bit strong--but only a bit. The process limped forward very slowly at first. The chapter on Microsoft was the most difficult, and the least enjoyable.
But each chapter got a little easier. By about chapter 5, we knew we had found our process and we started having fun with it. By Chapter 6, we were confident we had found our stride. We had become a team.
My advice this morning is that only one of the two collaborators write the book. The other will have enough to do to make it a full collaboration. Maybe Woodward and Bernstein, controlled by the style regime of the Washington Post could finish each others paragraphs, but most collaborators cannot do it. The four Cluetrain authors did it, but the back channel story is that their agent locked them in a room in Colorado for a few days to force the collaboration out of them.
Each of us has our own voice. Singing in harmony is for but a very talented few. Speaking with one voice for a corporation is hogwash and so it is for most authors in collaboration.
