Further Adventures in Co-Writing

 As perhaps may have been clear from previous Adventures in Co-Writing entries, @bookshop​ and I spent 70,000 words in perfect, gorgeous sync, and the story was *so* easy, and I swear, we were, like, thisclose to wrapping it up...and then everything fell to pieces, lol. I, admittedly, wrote the moment that caused the breaking point--actually, I may have written many of the moments--but when we got to the crisis point and really stopped to examine it and really stopped to dig into what we’d written...we realized that maybe we’d accidentally been writing two TOTALLY DIFFERENT stories the whole time, lololol, oops. 

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I mean, they were clearly compatible stories, because we went so long without realizing it, and I feel like you could probably immediately guess where our stories were going to diverge (hint: it involves conflict. Or lack thereof), but it kind of caught us by surprise. 

So, anyway we spent weeks--literally weeks--trying to come up with an ending we both were truly happy with. We have...so many endings of this story, lolol. I feel like we’ve each written, like, three different endings at this point. And I mean, RADICALLY different. Like, diverging at different points, arriving at different OTPs, etc. And then every time we wrote another ending, we realized that we were losing things about the other endings that we really liked. And anyway, we couldn’t seem to find an ending that we were both really thrilled with. Like, no matter what we did, one or both of us was compromising, and it didn’t feel satisfying. (And I was, admittedly, being a baby about missing other versions of the characters, and having to do rewrites, etc.)

And then the other night we came up with this idea: What if...there is no canon? Like, what if we just write every single ending we want to write? What if this story can happen a hundred, thousand, million different ways? What if there’s a universe for each OTP, and other OTPs we haven’t thought about yet, and an OT3 in there, too? What if there’s a universe that focuses instead on some of the secondary characters we haven’t had time for? What if there’s a universe that’s mostly fluff sexilogue, and a universe with a lot of pining and conflict? ALL THE UNIVERSES. 

And, for the first time in weeks, I felt like we could take a breath. Like, WE COULD HAVE ALL OF IT. EVERYTHING. We don’t need to choose. WHY SHOULD WE CHOOSE? WE’RE FANFIC WRITERS. WE GET TO NEVER CHOOSE. Like, this is what we *do.* All along, what we were really doing was writing ourselves fic, opening up possibilities, and then we couldn’t bear to foreclose any of them, because *we’re fanfic writers,* we are at our most comfortable when everything is a possibility. 

So our new plan is to put up an Introduction and Dramatis Personae, and be like, “Here are our characters. Here are the basics. There is no canon,” and then throw a bunch of fics up there at you: long ones, short ones, one-shots, multichapter, this OTP, that OTP, this POV, that POV, random AUs, etc. This seems like a lot, but, like, we’ve got so much written already that we basically have a whole little fandom, we were like, “Why not put it all up? Why pick and choose?” YOU can pick and choose. You can, hopefully, get a feel for the characters and know which OTPs you prefer, or who you’d want to read about, or just which of your favorite tropes you want to roll around in. 

And then the hope is that, well, all of you will want to join in eventually. Like, you write the story you haven’t seen yet. AS ALL FANFIC WRITERS DO. 

So, those are Adventures in Co-Writing now. It turns out we weren’t writing Hipster My Fair Lady or Hipster Emma. We were writing, well, everything.