When we decided to write together, we stumbled into the only method that worked for us. Some writers work in the same room, one person tying, the other walking up and down calling out lines of dialogue.

    That couldn’t work for us. Our ideas emerge from our joint obsessions, conversations, endless what if? We’re constantly asking each other, would this make a story? Is this a situation we could use? Once we’ve found an idea that really excites both of us, something we’re willing to give a year of our lives to, we then do the planning, the research together. We go to locations, we meet people, we draw maps, we take notes. All of that is a shared process.

    But once we start writing, it changes completely. Once we are sure that we are ready to go, that we have the same story in both of our heads, then once of us will write a section, a few pages entirely alone. We’re even geographically separate. Sean writes in a shed in the garden and Nicci in an attic room. When the person has finished, they send it to the other who is free to edit, rewrite, cut, or whatever they think fit. Then they continue. The book is passed between us in this way until a first draft is finished. Meanwhile, we’re constantly discussing it, how it’s going, what isn’t working, what can be improved.

    There are disadvantages: it’s slow and messy and complicated.  But we feel that, for us, these are vastly outweighed by the advantages. Above all, in a way that still feels mysterious to us after all these years, the collaboration allows us to become this other writer - Nicci French - and frees us to write in a way that is quite different from the way we write when we write for ourselves.

    The disagreements mainly come at the planning stage where we’re constantly making decisions about the story. But it’s less of a problem than people might think. In the rest of our lives, we’re just as immature as everyone else and we have our own share of disagreements and arguments and squabbles. But the reason we’ve been able to sustain this partnership for so long is that there is a basic degree of trust. When one of us is rewritten or one of us has a ‘brilliant’ idea that the other vetoes, we have to believe that this is not because of a power struggle but that it is about what this particular story needs. If we didn’t share that basic trust, we wouldn’t have got beyond fifty pages of our first book.