30 Day Fandom Meme Day 28

[leethet]

Day 28 – Have you ever collaborated with anyone else, whether writing together, or having an artist work on a piece about your fic?
No. I don’t see how it’s possible! In fact, once I polled some people in HP about how they collaborated because I simply can’t imagine it working (even though it clearly does – many collaborations are just fantastic). I can’t imagine writing a story with someone else and either enjoying the process or having it come out well, even though I’ve seen that it can happen. Fascinates me.

In HP a couple of artists have done art for my stories (Lizardspots did a sort of comic strip, trekkiegrrl and yael created single scenes), not in collaboration but just because they felt like it. It's very cool to see how other people interpret scenes, and how close they sometimes come to what I was seeing in my head. I don't know if that's coincidence or simply that I described it effectively - you really can't know - but it's very cool to see how others visualize my words.

Comments

[leethet.livejournal.com]

This is most interesting - looking at the excerpt and knowing each of you took a character makes the back and forth very interesting to read (I find myself putting myself in one or another writer's place and going "Shit, now what?"). I can see how that would be challenging! I can't imagine being able to produce a story arc without some kind of outline, but I see that you guys did "outline" by consulting as you went about how the story should go (and, presumably, should not go), so you began to channel your efforts as you went along, it seems (correct me if I'm misreading it). I don't know how you could have finished without doing that, but I also suspect this has something to do with both of you being pros at the writing craft. It was unlikely either of you would suddenly do something ridiculous.

Did you find you had to throw out chunks that went in a wrong direction, or did your constant communication keep you both from veering too far?

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

Shit, now what Yeah, that's the risk part, but also makes this process addictive. There's the part where *you* as a writer have to come up with something and then there's when you're hit with something from the other side.

As I said in another comment, I think stories have an in-born structure and that begins to emerge. And yes, you must be able to trust that your writing partner won't do someting stupid. I was in another multi-player collaboration where half the writers were "serious" while there were two people throwing monkey wrenches into the plot just for the 'fun' of it. There's no way to finish a story like that and I bailed. The project fell apart.

The only time I have ever thrown a huge chunk out was with Nan. We couldn't decide whether or not a character should overhear an argument. We decided he didn't and then kept writing and realized a couple of dozen pages later we'd made a wrong turn. So, we reconsidered, found the turning point and backed up. It was like the proverbial road not taken and the second way worked much better. If only real life could work that way :)

To answer your last point, communication is vital. It doesn't require fairly regular huddles between writers if plotting is key. I think I had fewer huddles with Fara and Linda because those stories were less plot-driven and I could speak to them *through* the characters. This was particularly true with Napoleon and Angelique.