collaboration (Patreon)

I’m lucky to have a collaborator, honestly, I’d recommend collaboration to every writer out there if not for one little thing.

Collaborating isn’t easy.

Ben isn’t the first person I collaborated with. I remember 2 others for sure, and I can’t shake the feeling there’s a 3 I forgot.

The first one was someone who also write, I met him at a con and we kept talking online afterward. Really knowledgeable. I suggested we work together in a Private Detective story set in a world where magic and science coexist and he quickly pointed out flaws in my plan for the story, and then we quickly hit a problem that seemed insurmountable.

He felt that no private Detective would ever call a police officer a ‘Cop’ since it’s insulting. As far as I was concerned, that’s just common parlance, and, a few years after the fact, I was able to confirm it with a police officer. But yeah, I discovered that if he considered he was in the right, he became unbendable. It was his way or nothing at all.

So I thanked him for trying this with me, but said out difference in how we approached storytelling was too different for it to work. He has never spoken to me since then.

The second time, it was with my boyfriend of the time. because I’m the road so much I’d call him every Saturday and we’d speak for hours. I’d also send him the chapters I’d written and we’d talk about it. He’s a visual artist so he has a different way of approaching storytelling and he often brought up interesting point in what I did. So I though that we could collaborate.

It didn’t work out, in the end I think we were both too attached to how we wanted the story to go. Fortunately, he still talks to me.

Then came Ben, first as someone who commented the stories posted online, then as a beta reader and, because of how good his comments were, then as someone who helped with building the outlines for my stories and now we’re cowriting a trilogy.

The thing I found out through those attempts is that the principal thing that is needed for collaboration to work is a lack of ego. You have to be able to let go of your ideas and accept that the suggestions might improve the story.

The thing that make this even harder is that this mindset had to be on both side, otherwise one ends up always giving in and the other takes and takes until the story is basically theirs alone.

Another thing that makes this difficult is that this isn’t something you can simply ask about when talking about collaborating. It’s something you discover as you work, and once you’ve started working with someone else it can be difficult to end the collaboration because of what you’ve already invested in it.

I still think everyone should try collaborating, since with the right collaborator, it can really improve the end result, but you have to be willing to let go of the collaborators who don’t work the moment you realize this so you can move on to someone else, or just go back to working on your own.

And with that. I, will wish you a good day.