Two Cooks in the Kitchen, Part One: How we Make Co-Writing Work

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This post is part of a 2025 series affiliated with the Writing Innovation Symposium (WIS), a regional event with national reach founded in 2018. Marshall Kopacki and Raegan Gronseth, 2025 Bedford/Saint-Martin’s WIS Fellows, are recent graduates of Marquette University and coauthors of a novel-in-progress. Learn more below and in posts tagged “writing innovation” and “WIS.”

By Marshall Kopacki and Raegan Gronseth

This January, we had the pleasure of attending our first professional/academic symposium ever. Being undergraduate students, this opportunity was hugely edifying because, well, these kinds of things have a demographic of almost entirely instructors. We often felt like flies on the wall, listening in on panels and flash talks about how to work with and teach students that were functionally us. 

Our interest in the way these well-established educators interacted with each other and communicated about their research and pedagogies was borderline anthropological; it felt like a deep dive into a culture completely disparate from our own, with terms and mutual understandings everyone but us seemed to be in on. Apparently, they would eventually be doing anthropological research on us too – a cultural exchange, if you will.

The role of educators as students, and the “cultural exchange”, was most apparent to us when we had the chance to explain why we were there. We were told before the symposium that people would be especially interested in our process as collaborative writers, but we thought it wouldn’t be as big of a deal as we were told it would be. When we started writing collaboratively, it felt like second nature. It didn't occur to us that that would be interesting to anyone. That was quickly proven wrong. It seemed that everyone we talked to wanted to know how we do it, what we did to figure out a sustainable process for creative co-writing, especially as undergrads. It turns out that collaborative writing is something people have been trying to crack for a long time.

How we make it work

The process we've outlined here is what we've found works for us when we're working on the same project together (the same process we used to write this post), but, interestingly, is different in some significant ways from the processes we follow when we each write solo. That's not to say that this process couldn't work for an individual, too, but it's tailored for ease of writing with a partner.

The two most important things to remember are that you must trust in your partner's creative competency, and that you can't take anything personally. Writing with more than one person means more than one mind producing ideas, and not all of those ideas will be the best way forward; make sure you're both ready to express and receive critical feedback! It should be more fun and exciting than stressful or daunting, ideally.

Thorough plotting: All chapters are outlined beat by beat prior to writing. Because we know most of what happens before we start, creative conflicts are avoided during writing. 

Before we sit down and attempt to produce any actual prose in a new chapter, we verbally discuss and then bullet point all of the major events that'll happen and what order they'll happen in. We also make notes for specific details or descriptions we want to include, bits of dialogue, minor events, gaps, questions, and other unsure spots. This ensures that we can be fully on the same page when we start the prose.

Bracket system: The outline is broken down into individual brackets for every action. We build the chapter out from the main actions, then fill in the details using the bracketed summaries as a guide. 

If writing is like making a Build-a-Bear, the brackets are that first step where you pick out your favorite empty plush bear skin. The stuffing, in this case, is all of that detail and internality. A bracket might say something like [John has a thought about his mother's cooking before telling Andy that he can't make it to dinner]. To get that out of the brackets, you have to fill in all of the internal bits. What prompted John to think about his mother? Does the restaurant Andy wants to go to serve food like John's mother makes? Does John hate his mother's cooking? Love it? What does that thought tell us about his decision to not go to dinner?

If you're using a word processor that offers the ability to leave comments, those can be a helpful tool for working out the tougher brackets. When tackling harder chunks of the story, we often write out several possible draft paragraphs and leave those as comments on the bracket for the other one to read and weigh in on. Having a second mind can really help cut down on time spent waffling between two ways to describe a guy’s eye color.

Verbal dialogue writing: Everything we put on the page we say out loud first. 

It's really that simple. One of the most frequent comments we receive on our collaborative work is that our dialogue feels convincing, human, and realistic, even when it's ridiculous. Every time people talk to each other in the story, we're talking to each other out loud, adjusting until it feels like a conversation that two people would actually have. The whole process of writing can be so overwhelmingly messy, but funnily enough, we think that a big roadblock new writers experience with dialogue is trying to keep it too clean; in real life, people do a lot of half-answers and talking past each other. Some characters might communicate in clear, precise terms, and that's a telling trait! But when we're going for a natural conversation flow (or even a purposefully scattered flow), building the dialogue verbally first goes a long way. This is one of the privileges of writing a collaborative work: there's always someone that knows just as much about the story as you do.

Writing as the characters: We did a lot of character work before starting our book, and we write using the character’s voice rather than our own. 

Another comment, or question, we often get is: "How do you keep it from sounding like you've Frankensteined together two different stories?" (Or something to that effect; I can't say anyone has asked in those terms specifically.) The answer to this comes in two parts.

The first part is character guides. We made cheat sheets for every prospective character in our novel which outline the character's general demeanor, how broad their vocabulary is, how they address the other characters, and how various moods, stressors, or changes throughout the story affect all of those things. This, much like the thorough chapter-by-chapter outlines, keeps us on the same page and makes editing way easier. When we’re working on nonfiction works together, we preemptively discuss tone, casualness, and sometimes structure/format of the writing, which seems to be enough. 

Two writers, two editors: We write and edit each other's work. Most paragraphs end up being written about 50/50 because of the heavy editing and re-working.

This is the second part of the answer to that cohesion question. We know that we're not going to get it right every time. We also know that we have different strengths and weaknesses, so we made peace with the fact that we both have to trust the other to edit our writing. It can be hard to relinquish control like that, but it's necessary for the process and always ends up better than it would have if we were working separately.

The theme for WIS ‘26, artifact, invites colleagues to connect writing, art, and facts. Special features include a makerspace, an Artifact Exchange, and an opportunity to contribute to a scholarly publication. Proposals as well as applications for Bedford/St. Martin’s WIS Fellows are due 10/24; undergraduate contributions are due 11/21. Registration opens in November, and the event itself takes place onsite and online January 29th and 30th, 2026.