When I was younger, a lot of the things I liked to do were very individual-oriented activities. Very few of my hobbies and interests involved collaboration. I read books by myself, I drew pictures by myself, I sang by myself, I knit scarves and gloves by myself, etc. But, without a doubt, out of all the things I liked to do for fun, I spent the most of my time writing stories.
I’ll start from the beginning in my history of writing. I don’t remember exactly why I began to like writing —whether it stemmed from my original love for reading or whether I just liked to use my vast childish imagination create my own worlds — but I do remember when it was that I realized I liked it so much.
In my old elementary schools, there was a program that required each student to write and illustrate their own mini picture book. This was a yearly project that went on from kindergarten all the way to the third grade (as far as I can remember). And this project became the jumpstart for all my short stories, plot bunnies, and planned novels to come in the future years. It got me excited about writing my own woven storylines and building my own characters to live in my numerous worlds.
Now, when I was a kid, no one had access or knew the existence of Google docs, and the concept of working with another person to come up with story plots or write was foreign to me anyways. I never gave the idea of writing with someone else much thought because I didn’t like the possibility of having to share or compromise my writing. Instead, I did a lot of story exchanging with my childhood best friend who also loved to write. She’d finish a story and send it to me and in exchange, I would send her mine. This way, we could still provide feedback while enjoying the story, but for the most part, we could also keep our stories as we originally intended.
After I moved to California, this very quickly changed. In the sixth grade, I met a friend who loved to write just as much as I did. Only, I learned that in addition to writing her own stories, she liked to write stories with others. And when she first suggested the two of us write something together, I was a bit hesitant. I thought of how it would just be all too easy for ideas to conflict, and I was afraid to get into that.
But my concerns turned out to be more trivial than I built them up to be. The first real collaborative writing piece we did (that I distinctly remember) was for a forensic science class. The partner assignment had minimal requirements, as we only had to create a crime scene in a digital sketch and then write about the case. Most of the other students had, at most, about half a page of writing. My best friend and I stood out by having five pages single-spaced, with a worked out plot, main and side characters, and dialogue in a CSI-esque story. We had mystery, suspense, (attempted) humor, and a lot of words. The assignment never specifically asked for a story, but we used the opportunity to come up with something fun to work on together, and maybe give our teacher a good laugh (which we did).
That was the start of a beautiful partnership, if I do say so myself. By this point in time, Google Docs was much more widely used and that made it even easier for us to write together. I came to realize that it wasn’t hard to compromise when I needed to, and that it wasn’t really compromising. Rather, we would talk about what might not work, and what could work instead. And we were constantly encouraging each other’s ideas. At the same time, we learned how to fill each other’s weaknesses with our strengths. For example, when we first started writing together I used to be extremely weak in writing dialogue and preferred to write description while my friend loved to write out the verbal interactions between characters much more than she did the actions and descriptions. After writing several stories together with her, it really helped to improve my writing because I was learning from her while working with her.
We didn’t always write together either. We still wrote lots of pieces on our own and shared them with each other like the story exchanges I used to do with my friend before I moved. But at least now we weren’t doing only that. If I think back on it, doing the story exchange with my friend was definitely a lot of fun, but I didn’t really learn how to really cooperate with others in writing and learning when to compromise. Now, I can rely on always having a fun and productive writing experience with my writing buddy (love you).
