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

[elmey.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting way to work, I saw the description you gave above. I have a feeling I wouldn't be very good at it, but I think that's partly because I tend to work slowly and focus so much (too much probably) on emotional nuances.

Did you feel at all that you had to adjust your writing style? Or did the styles merge pretty easily?

[leethet.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that pace would definitely be an issue - either because you're writing to a deadline (as pros do) or because one of you would get too far ahead and get impatient or the storyline would fall apart because one person couldn't do more 'til the slower partner caught up. It seems that would wreak havoc on any enjoyment! But I would guess that generally the successful collaborations involve people whose writing speed (and ability to find time to write!) is broadly the same.

The related "pacing" question also boggles my mind - matching styles seems to me to be a very important issue so the story doesn't, you know, read like Dickens and Hemingway sat down to take turns.

[elmey.livejournal.com]

matching styles seems to me to be a very important issue

People do have distinct styles. I tend to notice it fairly quickly (an old lit major). But then perhaps people with radically different writing styles would be unlikely to have an urge to work together like this :)

I wonder how betas deal with that.