Writing a (long distance) book with a friend!
Our families together in Sydney!
For the past few months, I have been writing a book with Ella. She is the daughter of another world traveling family. We met in Ha Noi, Vietnam. We became close friends and ended up meeting several times throughout our stay in Vietnam and also in Australia. We even spend New Years at the famous Sydney harbor with them!
Ella is an amazing writer and we decided it would be great to collaborate on a book. As we started sharing the book (work in progress), several people have asked the same question: ‘How do you write a book with someone who is thousands of miles away?!?’.
Which I guess makes sense since it is hard to even write a book with one person, let alone two and then you add in the distance, time zones, etc
After many chats, this is how we decided to progress: our book has 6 main characters. Ella is responsible for three and I have three. The first six chapters of the book describe the different characters, where they are from and what their ‘role’ is. After that, we interchange chapters. Ie. if Ella writes chapter 7, I will write chapter 8, she would write chapter 9 and so forth. Here are some pros and cons about writing a book with somebody else:
Pros:
I sometimes read through the book and after I finish one chapter of some character, I think ‘That was COOL!! I wonder what is going to happen next with that character.’. But I would have to wait 6 more chapters until I see what happens next with that same character.
You work together with somebody and you share ideas and such.
If you have a new idea but you don’t quite think it is right, you ask for advice
Cons:
You have to type the same things if you are a few chapters behind the other person.
You only get to add new dialoge or new things when you are ahead of the other person or you talk with the other person to make changes together
The website that we use is very good. It is called Google Docs and is free of charge! You can share the “document” (aka the book) with as many people as you want. There are three different ‘modes’ when sharing with someone else:
editing: this is for the editors. You can delete, write and change anything in the book. We only have a couple of editors, like my mom.
commenting/suggesting: if you are a commenter, you can only give your advice, but you can’t change, delete or add anything.
viewing: in this mode, the person can only view the document.
Some other perks for using Google Docs: there is no limit on the amount of documents or pages of each documents! There are MANY different fonts. It auto saves the document as you write, two people can simultaneously use it (so you can even use it as a chat).
I would totally recommend Google Docs for anyone looking for a place to write anything including books, book reports, etc. My friend Ella has use the website pages.com to write other books, and she really likes it. I have not tried it though. Maybe for our next book…
I think it is a really fun thing to do with a friend. It makes us stay in touch and we work on a fun project together. It improves my writing skills and I really like writing about our packed-with-adventures book. I think it is fun. Hopefully we get to publish it one day!
PS: our book is called the Locked Crystal and it is an adventure that takes 6 teenagers around the world in search for clues!
Having fun in Melbourne with our friends!
