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Answer by Larry Dixon, scif-fi and fantasy writer, artist, designer, editor, and falconer:
There are many advantages!
As my co-writer Mercedes R. Lackey and I say, when you’re co-writing, you each get to do the best parts. When you have a good connection with a co-writer, you can build storylines around your strengths.
Each writer can play to her preferences and let the other writer do his thing. In the Serrated Edge books, for example, I’d get a manuscript handoff from Mercedes with “***LARRY: CAR STUFF GOES HERE***” on the page, when it was time for Tannim Drake to talk technical.
Collaborative writing can be fun and social. We are social animals, but writing is a very solitary art. Usually it’s just you, in a room, with a word processor, for hour upon hour. When you have a co-writer—especially when you have a shared document ability like Google Docs and can use instant messengers—you’re not just all alone. There’s someone you enjoy being with and working with you, but he or she isn’t all up in your face.
Another advantage of collaborative writing is that it lightens the load on everybody involved. One person is declared the senior and has the final say. The editor gives input and expects the writers to fix things and add things.
Our superhero book series at Baen, The Secret World Chronicle, was a blast during production because there’d been as many as four writers on the same book, sometimes live in the same document on some nights. One writer might jam away around page 46 while another’s at page 88, and another will click on through to do callbacks, and another writer can ask the others to continuity-check something.
With a co-writer, you can get prompts if you bog down on a page, from someone who’s inside the same headspace. And, you get to make a lot of jokes about what you’re working on. It can be a load of laughs!
Now, co-writing is a specialty. It takes a set of skills that run from emotional support to productivity hacks to “voice” editing. I am most known, by cover credits, as a co-writer because I have honed this skill set for decades, and I have co-written far more novels than have my name on them (for marketing reasons: co-writing is considered to “dilute the branding” if done too often with a writer). I truly enjoy bringing my abilities to bear and working with multiple writers.
The skills you develop being a co-writer help a great deal in the industry too, being a mix of confidence, diplomacy, and social graces.
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