A collaboration between two writers can happen in many different
ways. Two writers can sit together in a room and work together, for
example, by alternately writing a line or a section each. But collaboration
does not have to depend on the two writers being in the same space, and
usually doesn’t. Collaborations can take place through email, for example,
or could result from chat-room conversations, or MOO encounters over
the Internet. Collaboration can be with someone you know very well or a
complete stranger. However, when collaboration occurs, it will demand a
very high level of response to each other’s work.
Collaboration can be very stimulating because your own ideas are
constantly being triggered and moulded by the other person. You will fre-
quently find that responding to your collaborator’s contribution results in
a text which you would not have written otherwise. The other person’s
interests and style may help you to broaden your horizons and take you
into unchartered territory. Another advantage and delight of collaboration
is that you have a ready-made audience of one. Knowing that someone will
immediately read and respond to your work may motivate you to write
faster and better. Merging your writing with that of another person—
while retaining an awareness that their work is different from your
own—is a fascinating experience.
There are no good or bad ways to collaborate. It may be best to decide
on a topic, though this can be quite broad. Nor is it a necessity since ideas
and topics may emerge as you write. You may want to write a section each:
this is very productive because it gives you a chance to still partly retain
your own writing direction while inevitably also losing it. Whatever mode
of working you choose you will need to be very flexible in how you
respond to the other person’s work. You may, for example, at one point in
the collaboration extend one of your collaborator’s ideas; at another point
you might turn a quotation they have introduced into a narrative or poem;
at another decide to completely change the topic, and so on.
When you collaborate:
- Do not struggle to maintain your own identity, try to take as much, or
more, interest in the other person’s writing as in your own. - Be explorative with the structure of the piece. It can, for example, be in
sections and each can be different from the one before and after. Do not
feel you must stick to any particular genre: a poem can be followed by
a short narrative, and so on. - Do not feel that you necessarily have to stick to the order in which the
collaboration was originally written. Sections written in response to
each other might be more effective if prised apart in the final text. On
the other hand, sections which were not written consecutively might be
placed side by side because they seem to resonate together.
126 The Writing Experiment