I Love Collaborating

Being a solo entrepreneur can be lonely at times, so being able to collaborate with others is always good.

Is it always a good thing, collaborating? I’d say ‘yes’, as long as you get on well with the person, and are on a similar wave-length.

5 reasons why working collaboratively works

1. You gain a different view point when looking at any problems, or working on a creative project. There is more versatility of input when people have different background experiences.

2. Often, you get taken outside your comfort zone. Collaborators often see these changes as challenges and can help support you moving forward.

3. Working with someone else introduces you to a wider audience, and that is reciprocal for whoever you’re working with too. network sharing.

4. Can learn new skills within the safety-net of your collaborator’s knowledge.

5. You might have a block — working with someone else can help free up your thinking.

I have often collaborated in business, and even creatively in the past, as the member of an educational Arts team. However, I’ve not collaborated on my personal creative projects…

Until November last year, when I collaborated on writing a poem. The challenge was to write a poem with quite a complicated form.

Patricia, who I was writing with is based on Vancouver Island, Canada. We have never met, having only communicated on Instagram. However, what was interesting is, although from very different backgrounds, we are of a similar age, and we do think in a fairly similar way.

We didn’t speak to each other whilst writing, all of our communication was via Instagram messages. However, since writing together, we have now linked up on Facebook video calls, and look forward to future collaborations.

The poetic form is called an Interlocking Rubayat. The poem had to have ten verses and each verse had linking rhymes between them.

Each verse had four lines, and three of the lines had the same end rhyme pattern. The other line, became the main rhyme of the next verse.

It sounds complicated. It was! Especially as the challenge was for each of us to write alternative verses.

This meant that if I wrote a verse, Patricia had to wait to see mine, before starting hers, because she had to find words that worked with my third line rhyming pattern.

We wrote the poem during October and November last year, and we called it “Requiem”, because we, like so many others around the world, were hoping that 2021 was going to start with much more freedom.

How did the collaboration help us:

We planned the overall idea — vaguely before we started.

· Handing over the poem, with an 8 hours difference gave each of us the space and time to consider our verse when writing.

· There was no competition between us to do better than the other, the idea was to write a poem that could have been written by one person.

· We had to alter some rhymes to match what the other had written.

· Because we were sending a verse to each other, most days, we were able to correct ideas we felt didn’t work, with ease.

Our biggest compliment when we finished the challenge, was that Patricia’s sister couldn’t work out which verses she had written! Oh, and we won the challenge.

Lis McDermott is an author, poet and professional writing mentor, find out more at www.LisMcDermottauthor.co.uk