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]

I think it depends. In writing fiction, I have never felt an urge to collaborate. But in other areas of writing (work-wise) I can certainly see where one person brings, for instance the technical knowhow and the other brings the grammatical skills (that's how I've made a living for a long time!). So in that sense I can collaborate. But creative fiction is so different from nonfiction ... tenor, style, pacing ... I'm amazed that people can make it work, but they obviously can, and enjoy it. I do agree that as Dr C says above you must sacrifice a bit of ego to even attempt it - to be willing to give up some aspects of control, and even some of your content, to the greater good of getting a smooth story written. I just like my own methods too much, I guess!