Collaborative writing, or get ready for a mad party!

I've been asked to blog about collaborative writing, what kind of a beast is it, how to do it, how not to do it, and if it's a good idea to do it at all. Before you read any more, however, know this, I only have experience creating flash fiction sprees on my blog like the one about Easter Bunny Apocalypse (20 writers participated) or Bloody Santa vs Zombie Siren (10 writers participated) or quick flash fiction exercises like compiling a story out of tweets between two writers in real time, like Turtle, Sloth, and Dust Bunny. I also wrote a script for a short movie together with another writer and collaborated on converting stories into scripts and back. Apart from this, I don't have experience writing a book together with another writer, like Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett did in Good Omens, for example. Here is a good list of books written by 2 authors or more, for your viewing pleasure. I will speculate, of course, on what it would be like. Writers are professional speculators, after all. With this in mind, if you're still here and still reading, let me give you what I do know and what could hopefully help you decide whether to collaborate with another writer or not.

Writing together is like jumping into temporary marriage. Imagine for a second that the person you want to write together with is a complete stranger, and with this complete stranger you will have to air our your darkest laundry, your deepest pains and memories, your most sacred ideas. You will have to become vulnerable, lower your defenses, and embrace any feedback from the other writer as your own. Can you do it? It's a scary prospect, isn't? From what I've read, successful collaborations were possible either between long-time friends or spouses. Writing is such an intimate act that it's impossible to get naked enough with someone who might mistake your openness for weakness, your beautiful scars for ugliness. And that will kill your creativity on the spot. Another thing about writing is the need to keep the passion alive, to write fast while the idea is hot and pliable, before any trace of doubt crosses either one or the other writer's mind and cools it down, makes it go stale, or, worst of all, renders it suddenly boring and uninteresting. It's hard to battle self-doubt alone, imagine how hard it would be to battle it with another person, or two, or three, or ten. On the other hand, collaboration may be just that fire that will keep fueling your inspiration, but only in the case of mutual understanding, like that in... err... a marriage.

In a pair, there is always 1 writer and 1 editor. In a pack, always 1 leader. From what I know, no matter how equally people strive to share their writing duties between themselves, it seems like one person takes on a bulk of writing, and the other person acts more like an editor. This is in the case of two people collaborating. As soon as you introduce more people, one person has to stay as the leader of the pack, to give direction to people, kind of act like a director of a movie, or a the mastermind of the whole thing. This is what I did with 20 writers, prodding everyone, keeping everyone on track, sending written material to everyone, and keeping the fire aflame by becoming a cheerleader of sorts. The trick to keep so many people interested and organized is to be very clear and firm. I have watched the excitement bubble all the way throughout my flash fiction experiments and watched it spark and fizz out when people from the same group tried to do similar types of projects, including me as a writer and not as a leader. People created Facebook groups that died, sent out emails that didn't get answered, etc. I wondered why it happened, and decided it's because we, writers, are used to work on our own, that when collaborating, we need someone to steer us. There needs to be a base, a foundation on which to rely on, and it has to be solid. A solid person who is always there, always accessible, always excited. It's a hard job, but it pays off. Collaborating on writing is not about pride, it's about supporting each other's weaknesses to be stronger together. So if you're better at editing, yield the bulk of writing to another writer, or if you are collaborating with more than 2 people, choose a pack leader ahead of time.

No idea is a bad idea when writing together. The beauty of writing with someone is that suddenly you have a warm body to bounce ideas off of, and it's an amazing thing that can lead to rich stories, if only you agree that any idea has merit, no matter how crazy or outlandish it sounds. Every big awesome amazing writer has said something similar about writing the first draft fast, to keep the passion flowing, to keep the imagination flowing, and so on. When it comes to collaboration, this is true like never before. If everyone agrees to just go with the first thing that comes to mind and not slow down, the results will be astounding. When 20 writers (the largest number I ever attempted to round up to write one story) sent each other their writing, because this was a quick flash fiction project and they had nothing to lose, they jeered and squealed and clapped their hands like little kids. In other words, they had a blast and it seemed like creative energy was doubling and tripling and multiplying. As soon as someone slowed down, however, or doubted this thing or the other in the story, the excitement started cooling off, and we eventually lost a few people who fell out of the race. This only confirms what every big reputable successful writer said already: write it out while it's hot, using your heart as a guide. In other words, go mad! The head will come into play later, in the 2nd draft, and the 3rd, and so forth. Will you be able to agree to every mad idea having merit and not question each other? You have to have the right people to agree to this.

So, to conclude, from my experience, collaborative writing is both exhilarating and exhausting. It's something you have to go into willingly and expect being filled with amazing energy and being gutted completely empty at the same time. I can tell you that after collaborating and after going to writer's groups, I chose to write alone. I'm a hermit, and a stubborn one at that. What about you? Have you written jointly with anyone? Got any wisdom to share? 

Writing LIVE via Ustream

Today I did an experiment, a crazy experiment, you might say, one that grew out of chit-chatting with my Beta Readers on Facebook, me posting my daily updates on what chapter I finished writing today, and them commenting that they want to read my chapters as I crank them out, and me asking if they want me to send it to them as I crank them out, every day, and them threatening to install cyber stalker cameras to see what I'm writing, and me asking, what, you guys want to watch me write it LIVE?!? And them yelling, YES!!! I me going, oh, really, for real? It would be boring. And them going, no, it would not be boring at all! And me confirming the same idea on Twitter and people telling me, yes, they would like that, and me getting scared shitless and still saying, okay, all right, I will do that, thinking back to Hugh Howey and his multiple LIVE videos of opening his books and such, and deciding, fine. I will do it. I will. And then waking up this morning, not knowing where this will lead, and turning on LIVE camera at a little past 10am (my typical writing time), and...

My anxiety was gone, my audience swallowed it. Typically before starting to write I have these amazing bouts of self-doubt, of visions of my writing being complete shit, of biting knuckles, running into the kitchen and back out of the kitchen to get coffee, then to reheat coffee, then checking all of the last messages on my phone, then playing Words With Friends, then crying, a lot of crying, and usually bugging my boyfriend at work over Skype to tell me that I don't suck, that it's okay for me to write. This can last from 30 minutes on good days  to 2 hours on bad days. It's getting better the more I write, but I still experience intense self-doubt every single day. NOT TODAY. The fact that I was on camera to perform, to let people into my house and into my writing process has completely erased it. There was the general trepidation that people typically have before going on stage, but my anxiety evaporated! I felt as if a thousand hands held me and told me it's okay, it will be fine, I will be fine, because these were my readers here, and it was for them that I was writing my story. If you're a parent, remember those moments when you're tired and irritated and unhappy in those first months of having a baby, when your baby wakes you up in the middle of the night and you stumble to the crib to pick your baby up, but the second you sniff her head, feel her warmth, your tiredness evaporates and all you feel is love? Which is impossible, right? Given the circumstances. Yeah, that's how I felt. I felt like my self-loathing was chased away by the presence of my readers, by their warmth and willingness to spend their time watch me create. For them. Truly, it felt divine.

I couldn't go as deep into my characters, kept snapping back. Although it is hard for me to start writing, once I do, I enter a stage of some kind of a creative flow, when even when interrupted, my eyes stay glazed over as if I'm not here but in my story, talking the language of my characters, seeing through their eyes, remembering with their minds. Today I couldn't quite do it. I would constantly feel like someone is watching me, that I have to take care of that someone, to perform for, to make feel good, to answer questions, to interact, to look nice, whatever. The entire session lasted about 5 hours and by the end of it I stopped caring and finally got into my typical flow, but it was triple hard. Overall, I didn't manage to snap into my story fullly the way I usually do. The worst part was continuity. Usually when I write, I notice mistakes, trace back in my brain the path of the story, then scroll back through the manuscript to find a particular place with information on particular details, then walk away from my laptop and maybe graze on hazelnuts in the kitchen while thinking how to connect the dots, and usually within a few minutes it comes to me. Not today. I felt like I couldn't step away because people would be coming to an empty screen, and that unnerved me, and I couldn't quite dig deep into my mind because a portion of it was occupied with sensing that extra presence of extra people in the room. Could I get used to it? I bet! It would take a while, though.

Alone no more, together forever. The most humbling part of the whole experience hit me towards the end, when I grew conformable enough to go into my zone, when I even managed to get deep into one of the emotional scenes and cry a little. You might call this totally cheesy, go ahead, it totally was, but people were sending me messages about how they wanted to give me a hug right now, a real hug, and that made me cry even more, because what was happening was a miracle, and it had 4 layers, so I experienced a kind of a quadruple love. The first level was my own experience that I drew from, my first love when I was 15, my first kiss and the intense emotions connected with it, which served as the basis for the scene. The second one was the love exchanged between Ailen and Hunter, my two characters who are in love and can't be in love, because she is a siren and he is a siren hunter (and, of course, just the idea alone how they can't be together always makes me want to cry). The third one was the real love expressed to me by my readers through those quick messages on Ustream, and they felt so real, like they were next to me. And the fourth one was my love towards my readers, expressed in a way of creating something for them to experience, which in turn grew from my past. This quadruple connectedness blew my mind, and, you guessed it, made me cry even more! I know, I'm a cry baby, so what, it felt awesome! 

To summarize, what happened today gave me an incredible high in a sense of being able to share the creation of my story with those for whom I was creating it, LIVE. It was like giving birth to something magical together, and it made me realize that no story is ever written by one person. It takes a village, it truly does, because even if the author has written a book in complete isolation, the book itself has been drawn from countless experiences with other people that author had. Moreover, this experiment prompted two other bloggers write about it. Here are their posts, Truly Inspirational by David Eccles and Writer Voyeurism by Fran Mallory.

Guess what, I WILL DO MORE LIVE WRITING! Here is my Ustream channel. Stay tuned.