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

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

I have had four great collaborative experiences.


The first is the long running and yet to be finished Escape from NY/MFU crossover AU. [It's a dystopia; Thrush has taken over the world.] gulffire and I divvied up the characters and only played out own. We shared writing the linking narrative.

That process worked out well, so I repeated it with three other people, NL Hayes, nsandik and farad. Each collaboration and the stories that resulted were very different but they were all great experiences. I think the stories turned out well, too.

I was also involved in two multi-writer collaborations that imploded for various reasons and did not work out.

In art+writing, Suzi Lovett illustrated my early St. Crispin zines and I could not have been more pleased. For some of the OC characters, seeing her illos was the first time I truly saw them and it was great!

[elmey.livejournal.com]

I worked for a long time in television where the process of making programs is very collaborative and often very frustrating. I like not having to collaborate when I'm writing :) I'm not even that fond of talking about the details of what I'm writing. Once it's written I'm happy to jabber on, probably ad nauseum, but not before. Obviously, as you say, some people collaborate very successfully, but I wonder how hard it is to have both people equally pleased with the process/results.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

Here's a piece I wrote interactively with Nancy:

http://file40.net/file40g/two_spies.html

I started it, writing the first paragraph. She wrote the second. I wrote the next four. Nancy wrote the one after that where Illya reflects. Then the interchange gets shorter and shorter as the guys begin to engage.

We knew our characters but we didn't know what or how they would interact with one another, what they would say or do, particuarly as they got drunker. But the exchange turned out pretty interesting and philosophical and we were so pleased, we followed up with a full blown novel.