Real Words

I have never really done well in my collaborations with other creative people. My brother told me once that this is because I never played team sports. I think that he might be right about that; I always did everything on my own so I never quite learned how to adjust to working with others on things. However, I think that collaboration is a great thing and I’m working on learning how to do more of that. The few projects that I’ve started exploring collaboratively lately really have me excited.

The main one that I want to highlight here is my participation in the I Live Here: SF project which I think is important because it’s not really about writing but it inspired my writing. This is a great local (San Francisco) photo project through which a local photographer (Tangobaby) is photographing the people who live here. She pairs up with San Franciscans from various walks of life, photographs them in the settings here that really symbolize the city for them and then works with them to edit down and choose the photos that will be included in the project. And I was lucky enough to get to be a part of that recently.

The experience of it really inspired me. One of my biggest beliefs about the writing life is that it is crucial for writers to involve themselves in arts that are not about writing. Writing is all about experiencing life and then putting it into words. By attending dance performances and taking sewing classes and playing with fingerpaint and doing photo projects, writers experience the many senses of life and this is what informs and enriches their writing and makes it real and beautiful.

My part of the collaboration in this project, besides just being the one in the photographs and choosing some of the locations and pictures for use in the project, was to write up a post for the project’s blog that is all about how I feel about San Francisco. My writing for that post was directly inspired by the experience of being out and about in the city taking those photographs. Meeting someone new (the photographer), spending time in places I enjoy but don’t visit often enough (like Macondray Lane) and working on something that isn’t just my normal web writing all combined to light a flame of creativity for me. It’s not a flame that can be lit solely by working all day alone on my writing.

What was great about this project as a collaboration for me was that it wasn’t a collaboration with another writer. You see, I think that it’s difficult for people working in the same medium to collaborate effectively. Not impossible, just difficult, and really tough for me to learn which is why I don’t think that it has been successful for me so far. However, this act of combining my writing talents with someone else’s other artistic talents has made collaboration a success for me.

I am exploring other projects that may also allow for this to happen. I’ve been working on a set of fairy tale / nursery rhyme based poems for a long time, playing with it here and there, and I recently gave some to an artist friend to see if she is at all inspired to illustrate them. She may not be but the act of considering this collaboration has given me renewed excitement about the project and made me feel like trying to work more with others at the same time.

I think that collaboration can be a really powerful creative thing. I think it can truly end up being more than the sum of the parts that each individual contributes. And I think that this is something we should try to add to our working lives now and then. (Incidentally, the photographer who does the I Live Here SF project has another collaborative project called The Julie Project that is also worth checking out.)

What do you think? What are your experiences with creative collaboration?