Two Cooks in the Kitchen, Part Two: How YOU Can Make Co-Writing Work (A Guide for Students)

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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. Raegan Gronseth and Marshall Kopacki, 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

In Part One, we talked your metaphorical ears off about ourselves and our process, but what does that have to do with you? It doesn’t, really – but we can offer you something to take away from all this! We’ve compiled a series of collaborative writing tips with recommendations for how you can implement what we’ve learned through trial and error, specifically for undergrads learning to write together effectively. 

Knowing who you’re working with will help with communication. Work together and form partnerships. Anyone can learn to be in sync with anyone else with enough time and effort. 

Having a good relationship with your project partner is imperative to having a shot at making an entire shared project work. For the purposes of this kind of writing, having people that are very similar work together will make the entire process much easier. Too much disparity in demeanor or interests can/will result in disengagement with each other, one student doing the majority or all of the work, and/or developing a project neither student particularly cares about. Random partnering will guarantee similar problems.

The key to collaborative writing is essentially being on the same wavelength as your partner to the greatest extent possible. Feeling alienated by the person you’re working with is never fun or effective. Having a pre-established relationship to your project partner is a huge advantage when communication is key. It also cuts out the time required to get comfortable enough with strangers to be productive. However, being paired with a friend isn’t always an option. You may have to get to know someone from scratch. It can be a daunting task, but it also can help you make friends with someone you may not have otherwise talked to. One of the most enriching parts of collaborative writing is developing a working relationship and friendship with your partner. Who knows, it could continue on outside of class. (Ours did.)

When working with a partner you don’t know, try to find common ground as fast as possible. You might be surprised about what kinds of similarities you share. Do you both have pets? The same minor? Are you taking other classes together? You’ve already ended up at the same school, taking the same class, at the same time, so surely there are other things in your life that overlap in some way. Identifying similar interests will help develop project concepts later down the line that you’re equally invested in. 

Try not to let your project ideas develop too much before partnerships are formed. When someone gets an idea they’re really excited about in their head, any suggestion from the other party will feel like compromising. Instead, allow room for play. Brainstorming is the most fun part of projects, it’s also the best way to engage with each other’s unique perspectives. 

To make this really work as a collaborative project, you have to find something you both want to work on equally. For example, you both like poetry. You think: I want to write a series of poems about nature, and they want to write a series of poems about the human experience. Great, we can work on writing poems together! Now, here’s the problem. You both already have in your head a theme you want to focus on. If you get this far, you’ll probably try to pitch a project where you can just both write separate poems with their respective themes and put them together into the same document and call it a poetry collection. That wouldn’t be wrong, you would complete a writing project you both contributed to, but that really defeats the purpose of collaboration. You would be working independently, with your own creative goals, to put together something less than cohesive. Alternatively, you could work towards a common, driving theme to center the poems around. People don’t love to compromise, and having to piece your concepts together, or come up with something new after the fact, will make you feel forced out of your own ideas, and frustrated with the partnership. You don’t want that. 

We know we’ve been drilling the idea of working with people as similar as possible into this, but really, no two people are exactly the same. Having things in common is important for establishing a baseline for connection and potentially a project concept, but embrace each other’s differences, too. Lots of (super interesting!) interdisciplinary projects are the result of people with different interests working together towards a common goal. 

Regardless of how alike you are to your working partner, you will both be exposed to new ideas and perspectives. This is where creativity starts to flourish. One of you wants to write about nature, and the other wants to write about the human experience? Now you’re both working on a shared collection about the relationship between humans and the environment with each partner focusing on different perspectives, and taking stylistic inspiration from your personal favorite authors. 

An additional note, play time is integral to brainstorming, but also developing a relationship to the partner. Getting off task is beneficial here, within reason. The more you know about each other, the easier productive communication will become. 

We outlined what works for us, but that won’t work for everyone. No formulas, procedures, or steps will ever work for everyone. Figure out what works for you. Lots of verbal communication is the only thing we can say for certain makes working together more effective. 

Writing methods aren’t something that can be strictly taught so much as are stumbled upon. This is frustrating for everyone, always – writing collaboratively or individually. Processes, tips, and methods can be suggested, but trying to follow specific steps to write successfully and expecting them to work for you and your partner together, is often unrealistic. As everyone’s individual writing process is unique, so is every writing partnership’s process. We swear by our method, and wholeheartedly believe that nothing else could be easier or more effective, but that all has to be taken with a grain of salt. 

If you can’t follow a miracle method, you can (and should) find your own groove. Writing collaboratively is impossible to do without excessive thinking out loud and sound boarding. Even at the point where the project is plotted and just needs to be written, having someone physically present to give feedback, read aloud, or discuss direction is significantly more helpful than exchanging paper feedback or emails. And again, the point of co-writing is to co-write. Every step of the process should be based on shared ideas, decisions, and visions. The more comfortable you are with verbalizing your concerns or ideas, the more integrated both you and your partner will be throughout your shared work. 

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.