Collaborative Writing: It’s Okay to Play! by Jasper Ezekiel
This week’s featured article is “Collaborative Writing: It’s Okay to Play! by Jasper Ezekiel.” Enjoy!
***
Collaborative writing saved my marriage.
Collaborative writing is actually the entire basis of my relationship.
During the two years when COVID was at its worst, from 2020-2022, when I was doing college online and my husband (then-boyfriend) was going from job to job, we wrote a whopping 2000 pages together.
How did we do that?
Through a shared passion of writing and the rich characters we built together.
But wait, isn’t writing supposed to be a lonely art?!
It doesn’t have to be.
Let me share a couple of ways that I believe collaboration is vital to the creative process.
We’re Already Collaborating
Have you ever called up a friend to complain that your plot isn’t going the way that you want it to?
Have you ever told a stranger about your book and through the conversation, worked out a plothole you didn’t realize was there?
Has someone ever asked you a question about one of your characters that made everything click into place for you?
Congratulations! You’re already a collaborative writer!
Writing, just like everything else human beings do, is a social affair. It’s meant to be done with other people.
With their input, with their feedback, with their support.
Even if you are a lonely writer with no one who reads your work, even mentioning that you’re a writer to someone in public is a way of collaborating with the world and letting everyone know, hey! I do stuff!
A Deeper Connection
Writing with someone else is a great way to form a deeper connection with them.
The obvious example from my own life is the rich and deep history of writing between me and my husband.
Because both of us grew up roleplaying on message forums in the 2010’s, we both have a history of understanding collaborative writing.
When I entered the relationship with my husband, we were in an East Coast-West Coast long distance relationship.
Writing collaboratively kept our love life alive.
If I couldn’t actually cuddle with him or buy him gifts, I could write about our characters doing it for each other, which was close enough to the same thing that we survived until he was able to move in with me.
But collaborative writing isn’t only for romantic partners.
When I was a kid and learning how to write, in the rich days of really exploring the written word for the first time, I wrote collaboratively with all my friends.
We wrote fantastical escape stories about young kids who were abducted by aliens, who were secretly dragon princesses, who got on a magical train that never stopped.
It was a beautiful game of pretend we got to do, working on our parts of the stories at school and coming home to write together over the internet.
It deepened my relationships with my friends because we got to go on amazing adventures together while going to different schools and only seeing each other on the weekends.
You’re Never Too Old to Play
Playing pretend is something that’s hard to do as an adult, but play is a vital part of human living, not just for kids!
Collaborative writing is an acceptable way to play pretend with your friends.
Do you know someone who’s a writer who you want to explore the worlds of?
Do you have a friend who’s never written before who you know would be great at it?
Does your partner not have a creative bone in their body but loves to watch TV?
Try dropping them a line!
Collaborative writing starts with talking about your character and your plot and while you may never make it to the page, humans are natural born storytellers.
I’ve never started a storytelling game with someone that I know and walked away feeling bored!
Play with all the people you know! Maybe you’ll get a whole book out of it!
While these are some great reasons to write collaboratively, you might be wondering how.
Look for my next article for more information on some specific ways you can write collaboratively with the people in your life.
***
About The Author
Jasper Ezekiel is a poet and all around writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s also an illustrator, a photographer, a fiber artist, a jokester and a huge dork. His book of poetry is called Good, Clean Mania and is available on several digital platforms, as well as in print through Amazon.
You can find him on Instagram @s8nicangel
Good, Clean Mania is a collection of three zines that Jasper Ezekiel put together over the years of 2020-2022. These zines have been further edited into completion to be the book you hold in your hands today. Topics of Jasper’s poetry spans from things like God and love to a bad day at the hardware store to a connection with his cat right before she passed away.
