Collaborative Storytelling
Now that you have been creating for yourself the past few weeks; or I least I sure hope you have if you’ve been following along with this blog, it’s time to start looking towards others for help. Maybe you’re not the kind of person to seek collaboration from others. You’re that lone wolf creator who thinks they have it all figured out and don’t need any help. Well I’m hear to tell you that will slow your growth as a creator down.
As I’m writing this post I realize I am not the best at this either. I like to do everything Please provide the text that you would like me to spell check.on my own and like to control as much of my creative process as I can. I struggle to let people in and make creative choices for me. So don’t feel like I am preaching at you. In fact I am speaking to myself as I write this post, because I need to learn to be better at this as well. Here are three practical benefits to being collaborative in your story telling.
This first benefit is it helps you grow trust and vulnerability in your community. It take humility and vulnerability to be able to let someone into your story and critique it then make changes to your art. But new perspectives can be life changing. Maybe there is a piece you were missing to your story that someone else can see. Or maybe there is that blank that you don’t know what should fill it and their perspective can help find the missing puzzle piece. By collaborating with others you are building a community of people who trust you and your ideas. When you listen to others ideas they will be more willing to listen when you have an idea or feedback for them.
When working with another person your idea can grow into something you may have never expected. This is the second benefit to being collaborative, it can help spark new ideas you may have never thought of yourself. When it’s just you working on a project you are limited to your own experiences and talents. However when you add in another person you gain a whole other set of skills and talents. For example if you are a writer who creates poetry. What if you have a friend who plays piano? When you combine your two talents you now have 3 pieces of work. A poem, a piano instrumental and a potential song. Now all you need to do is add in someone who can sing and you’ve got yourself a song. Look how collaboration has grown your initial idea into something new!
The third benefit is you may learn new skills you didn’t know you needed. When working with someone else. Their workflow may be different than what you are used to but maybe you find something that actually helps you create better. Think about a time when you were working with someone else, what is something you learned or took away from that experience?
Just for fun let’s look at one final benefit of working with other people is they have their own following. When you guys collab your two following can collide. This can expose your story to more people then when you were working alone. Creating isn’t all about views and that should not be your highest value but your story is unique in special. People can benefit from hearing it.
I hope you will take something from this post and apply it to your creativity. Go out their and make some friends who you can create with. If you have any past collaboration experience we would love to hear what you learned through that experience in the comments below.
