Sonja Foust and Melinda Skye, looking super cute at Skye's wedding

Melinda Skye, writing partner extraordinaire for ScriptFrenzy this month, wrote an awesome post on partner writing that you should go read right now. Here’s a little piece of it:

It wasn’t completely a smooth road. There were a few hiccups. The first one came when Sonja sent me back the script (really early on) with a character standing in a fluffy dress. There was no explanation for the dress or what was going on.

I are evil. By the way, she did a great job writing the subsequent scene, even without knowing where I was going. (Honestly, I didn’t really know where I was going either.) Read the rest of the post!

I just want to add that I would never have written even the small amount that I did for ScriptFrenzy without a partner working with me. She endowed me with the motivation to sit my butt down and write when, really, all I wanted to do was curl up in fetal position on the couch and watch 5 hours of Lost every night. Yeah, it was that kind of month.

The only downside? We have such different schedules that I continually felt guilty for holding onto the manuscript for so long. I think this would be less of a problem were we not on a deadline, and Skye was full of encouragement and understanding even with my lameness, but I am pretty much incapable of NOT feeling guilty about not pulling my weight, so there you have it.

So I, too, am a new fan of partner writing. I doubt it would work with every set of partners, but in Skye’s and my case, I think our different talents compliment each other. The combination of plotting and discovery writing was invigorating for me, and I loved the fact that if I got stuck, I could just pass it along and wait for it to come back again, magically fixed by the power of a brain that was not mine. It really did feel like magic, after toiling for years alone on manuscripts where, if I got stuck, I had to unstick myself.

Three cheers for writing partners!