As someone who collaborates all the time, it may come as a surprise that I struggle with collaboration. It might be a matter of perspective, selfishness, ego, or any combination of these things that makes the work difficult. The truth is that collaboration is the art of letting go. In order to be successful you must relinquish control of your finished product and recognize that the work means that other people are going to get involved and are going to have opinions that differ from yours. In some cases they either have better ideas, or simply have the level of power to make the final call on a thing. It bugs me, mainly because my name is attached to the project and if it goes south that drags my name based on decisions that were not entirely mine to make. However, for every situation like that which does exist, there is another situation where the call was made not to go my way and it worked out much better for it. Thus is the power of collaboration.
I am thinking about this as I am going through this process on another (cannot disclose) handful of projects in which I don’t have the final say. Most of the ideas and writing coming to the table is excellent. There are spaces where I am like, “no, please” but that again is part of the process. Over the years I’ve grown more welcoming to having new partners–this after I had one writing partner for a while and he was magical.
Another secret to collaboration is having a platform to do your own thing and voice your own point of view and flavor without that collaborative group. This is primarily the blog for me. The fact of writing is you are never the only voice in a writing project unless you are self-publishing and self-editing your work. There are always others who have questions and thoughts. Stephen King can tell his editor ‘No’ but odds are that you will have a much harder time doing that until you reach that level of notoriety.