Writing Alone and Other Group Activities

Facing Fears & Getting Started

Facing Fears & Getting Started

There can be a lot of fears facing collaborative writing. While some jump into the process with excitement, the majority do so with trepidation. How will my voice merge with someone else’s? How can we avoid a Frankenstory? Do I know these people well enough? For some, the hardest thing is figuring out how they can truly share their creative process and ideas.

“I’m stubborn and independent and opinionated and extremely passionate about my craft,” says MM Schreier. “Therefore, one of the hardest parts of my first foray into collaborative writing was setting aside ego.” Like Schreier, Wayne Hills found that “giving up control of [his] vision was a scary thought” and that it “hurt when a story or thread went in a direction different from where [I] saw the story going.” But in the end, Hills says, “ultimately all the stories I worked on, after the internal struggles to let them go, turned out much better for it. It’s along the lines of the old saying that ‘two heads are better than one,’ except we had the blessings of many more, all imaginative and talented storytellers working toward a common, and sometimes unforeseen, goal.”

When you get writers working together, what many realized is that collaborative writing isn’t about individual ideas. It isn’t about abandoning ideas or turning them away. It is about allowing ideas to mix and evolve, until something entirely new, that you could never make on your own, exists.

“Anyone who knows me knows that I’m an idea guy,” explains S W Fox. “I generate all kinds of really original ideas in a short period of time with very little prompting. Those ideas in turn grow to large proportion with a complete world and backstory. I was terrified that if I handed my ideas over to a team they would be ruined, that the story would be taken in a direction that undermined the worldbuilding and the value I had created in all of that. What I discovered was that sometimes things got ripped apart, taken in a different direction and totally undermined the value of what I hoped to achieve, but other times, the input was novel and worked like a catalyst for further growth, and amazing stories developed as a result.”

But how do you let go?

“Let’s face it, all creative types have [an ego],” explains Schreier, “and working within the constraints of group vision, it can be frustrating and disappointing when you are excited about an idea, but the team decides to go in a different direction. It’s important to remind yourself that those different directions can be exciting too. There’s a delicate balance between speaking up if you believe the piece is going down the wrong path, and shutting up and exploring something you may have never tried on your own. When the team took a turn away from my personal ideas, I found it helpful to write my thoughts down and tuck them away in my ‘rainy day’ pile. It keeps those concepts safe for individual exploration at a later date, while freeing up headspace to fully commit to the group vision. When I did that, it was such a pleasure to discover new vistas born out of group creativity.”

Some writers worried about putting forth ideas and others excitedly flung their ideas into the process. All, however, were most concerned about the collaborative process. Specifically, how would their group creativity get managed?

“[A] concern of mine was that we would have difficulty making a decision,” says Serena Armstrong. Armstrong wasn’t alone, as several teams didn’t have a system going in. Cayce Osborne, who like many authors writing collaboratively for the first time, “was both excited to meet the challenge and concerned about potential clashes in approach and personality.”

“Every writer has a process in how they develop a story,” explains Fox. “That process usually takes many years and many many words to refine. When collaborating, it makes sense that it’s challenging to get everything to sync up among everyone. Each process might be a barrier or hindrance to someone else’s process. But, I found that with patience and determination, if I kept working with the same team and allowed for time and for insight to flow freely, then the things that started as failure would often lead to success.”

Each team had their own method for determining how decisions would be made, how disagreements would be managed. It was a process of trial and error. Some went in with plans while others played it by ear, but the takeaway in the end is that every group not only worked it out, but learned something in the process. Armstrong found that differing opinions did slow her team down on occasion “which was not ideal,” but that “in each instance [we] were able to come to agreement or to leave the final decision with the Story Manager for that piece.” The Story Manager, the person in charge of final creative calls, was a rotating position that many teams made use of during the weeks of writing. It allowed for final decisions. As we discuss in a later chapter, many teams found that determining clear roles for each story saved time and kept stories progressing smoothly.

“Collaborative writing is both easier and harder than I thought it would be,” says Fox. “My fears came true, but also sometimes they didn’t. The neat thing about working with the same team over the course of several stories is that it forced me to confront fears about the collaborative process.”

And facing those fears allowed authors to learn about themselves and the writing process. “It was a challenge to write as a group,” says Osborne, “and I enjoyed the back and forth of ideas, the way we fed off one another, and our success in juggling various outside commitments and time zones to produce something wonderful. Our group was not without its clashes. But where there were disagreements, I learned from each one: how to better deliver and take criticism, how to stand up for ideas I truly believe in, and how to meet a deadline despite such clashes.”

As it turns out, writing collaboratively may require us to be a little braver, to put ourselves out there and to share ideas before they are polished. It also offers us rewards we don’t get when we write alone. We learn more about the writing process, our own strengths and weaknesses, and our comforts and discomforts more readily when we’re in a team. We learn how to coordinate, explain, edit, and get along. And perhaps most importantly, we don’t have to take the leap of faith that solitaire writing so often requires.

But finding someone to take that leap with may be just as frightening—how on earth do you form a team and who is it comprised of? Is it safer to go with friends, or worth risking a group of acquaintances, or even strangers? In the case of the teams that contributed to this book, they were brought together with a single contest in mind, but it may surprise you to know that they weren’t all friends beforehand.

Hills had never met any of his teammates in real life, although he “[knew] several through [online] writer’s groups.” Hills says, “It didn’t bother me at all that I hadn’t interacted with some others before because we all had the same goal. I quickly learned everyone’s strengths, and I believe they learned mine, so we worked together well.”

For other writers, like Osborne, meeting new writers was actually part of the draw. “I didn’t know anyone in my group before beginning the team challenge. A few of them I’d interacted with briefly online, but some of them not even that. One of the reasons I decided to sign up for the competition in the first place was to get to know my group members better, and I’m so glad I did. Some of them continue to be trusted readers and friends. Not having done a team event before, I’m not sure what the difference between knowing and not knowing my group mates would’ve been. But I’m not sure I would’ve done it without the added bonus of making new writing pals!” In fact Osborne says that getting to know the other writers was “the most enjoyable result, without question.”

Even for writers who knew their teammates prior to writing, they felt they gained more in friendship throughout the experience. “I pretty much knew my whole team from previous writing adventures online, but had never met any in person,” says Fox. “I had never collaborated with any of them but was thrilled to get to know them better over the course of the writing experience. They helped me get through some really rough stuff as well, and I consider them my friends these days.”

For Victoria Kelsey, knowing her teammates was part of the fun. “Our group had a core that was well-known to each other, not through collaborative writing, but through trusted beta reading and friendly competition in various writing contests. The one person I didn’t know before the collaboration began was so fantastic and organized that everything felt very comfortable from the beginning. It made it a lot easier to jump right in and mind-meld. I’d like to say I’d try it with complete strangers, but I’ve been so spoiled by this experience that I think that would be a tiny bit of a fib.”

Ultimately, each group came together with different experiences, fears, solutions, and relationships, They created stories and learned things about themselves and fellow writers they wouldn’t have comprehended just by asking. While collaborative writing may seem scary or messy, that trepidation is merely the cost of admission, at least the first time around. As you read through that finished piece, it can be a true thrill, spying each little piece you contributed and realizing you made a difference, regardless of your fears.

Dialogue Only

Each story in this section had to rely purely on dialogue.

No exposition. No descriptions. No tags.

This was the first challenge our teams faced together.