Who says we don't?

A writer's life can be a lonely life, hence one reason we reach out to one another. I worked for fourteen years writing manuscript after manuscript with no sales. And then I met Mel, and we began to collaborate on the novels I had written. And then we got married and when he came home from work he would talk about the exciting life of an ER doc. He once told me that he felt his job was a sacred trust. I gasped and said, "Honey, what a great title for a book! Why don't we write one together?"

I would like to say the rest was easy, but it wasn't. Those first six novels I wrote with Mel's input were the most difficult I had ever written, because not only had I studied the art of novel writing for fourteen years, but Mel had studied the medical arts for about the same amount of time. We were very knowledgable in our fields, but I wasn't knowledgable in his field, and he wasn't knowledgeable in mine. Mel had to learn a new language when he went to med school, and it's called medicalese. I didn't understand that language. He didn't always understand mine. I had to explain what I needed for a specific scene, and then I had to get him to slow down and stop talking so I could write it down. Then I had to ask him to pretend he was talking to a kindergartner. Our six hard-hitting ER-type novels proved our love for each other in very concrete ways. If a marriage can make it through that kind of miscommunication without more than one fight, it can last through anything .

After those six books, we switched publishers, and they didn't want hard-hitting ER novels, they wanted women's fiction. We continued to write about characters with medical skills, and we still included medical scenes, but we backed far away from the constant trauma of ER medicine. You cannot imagine how relieved I was. Mel says he still misses it, but I think secretly he's relieved he doesn't have to work so hard. Editing a complete manuscript for me and placing a medical scene here and there is easier than dumbing down a whole book ilea with complicated procedures for someone with the understanding of a five-year-old.

Working together on a book is just like working together in life. There will be disagreements and misunderstandings. The trick to getting through it with friendship intact is to trust your partner's heart. Mel didn't purposely make medicine difficult for me to understand, he simply took for granted I had a brain. I didn't purposely make him rewrite and dumb down medical scenes just to irritate him, I simply needed to make sure all of our readers would be able to see the scene in their minds as they read.

Mel and I are thrilled with the books we've worked on together, and we look forward to working on many, many more. We also look forward to more years of marriage, of loving each other through the hard times, and learning to trust one another more deeply. That's what true collaboration is about.

What are some of your tricks and practices for getting along with others?