Modern technology, however, eliminates all the practical problems involved with collaborative writing. Thus, to use this book as an example, once Dave and I had settled on a detailed plot outline, we were each able to write our respective chapters, swap them back and forth in emails, cross-edit and add new material, rewrite—whatever was needed—just about as easily as a single author would manage his own rewriting and editing.
Of course, that still leaves the creative and personal aspects of the business. Those can be either a challenge—sometimes an insuperable one—or an opportunity. Part of what annoys me a bit about the unthinking assumption of a lot of people that collaboration automatically reduces the quality of the writing to the lowest common denominator, is that they overlook the obvious. Collaborative writing is a skill, like any other. Some authors are hopelessly inept at it—or simply don’t want to do it all. Others manage it poorly; still others in a workmanlike but humdrum manner; and some—I happen to be one of them—do it very well.
I think there are three key ingredients to the skill. The first, and most important, is that the author himself has to want to do it. Any author for whom collaboration is a chore or a nuisance, done only for practical and commercial reasons, is not going to do it well. They will meet the challenges, perhaps; but they will miss the opportunities and potential benefits.
The second is that you have to choose your partner (or partners) carefully. This has both a personal and a professional side to it. On the personal side, your partner has to be someone you’re on friendly terms with. On the professional side, they should be someone whose particular strengths and weaknesses as a writer match up well against your own. There’s no point in Tweedledum co-authoring a novel with Tweedledee. You want a co-author who is going to add something—and whose weaknesses (and all authors have them) can be cancelled out by your own strengths. And vice-versa, of course.
Finally, you have to pick the right story. Not all stories lend themselves well to collaboration. To give an example from my own work: except for my friend Richard Roach, who has been working with me on the project since we were both men in our early twenties—over thirty years now—I would find it very difficult to collaborate with anyone on my Joe’s World series. (The first two volumes of which, The Philosophical Strangler and Forward the Mage, are now in print.) That story is just too bound up with my own view of things and my sometimes quirky sense of humor. I doubt if many other authors would be able to find their way through its surrealistic logic.
On the other hand, some stories lend themselves superbly well to collaboration—and the 1632 universe is one of them. This is a big, sprawling canvas of a story. Or, since I tend to think in musical terms, it’s a story that lends itself to something of a cross between chamber music and a jam session. That’s not simply because the story allows for it. In many ways, I think, it almost demands collaboration.
The reason has to do with the nature of alternate history stories. Those can, of course, be written by a solo author—and written extremely well. But there is an inherent “occupational hazard” involved. A single author will almost inevitably start shaping his story to fit whatever historical schema he develops. And, over time, in the course of a multi-volume work, the story begins to suffer because of it. It’s a subtle thing. But what tends to happen is that the complexities and quirkiness and—if you will—unpredictable chaos of real history tends to get washed away.
I wanted to avoid that, once I decided to turn 1632—which I wrote as a stand-alone novel—into a series. And so I looked for collaborators. I found them in two places.
The first, obviously, was Dave Weber. By then, Dave and I had become friends and I’d had the experience of working with him in the course of writing a short novel for one of the anthologies in his Honor Harrington series. (“From the Highlands,” which appears in the third of the Harrington anthologies, Changer of Worlds.) Once Dave told me that he’d enjoy working in the 1632 universe, we decided to write the sequel to 1632 together. The result, you have now read. I hope it has pleased you. It certainly pleased Dave and me—so much so, in fact, that we now have a contract to write four more novels together continuing the story. (The first of which, 1634: The Baltic War, will be the direct sequel to 1633.)