Last week, I went to an art class and drew a strawberry (or from my angle, the leaves on a strawberry). The drawing was passable. And I certainly got into a state of flow in the process.
But the best and most surprising part?
Working in a group, including a 7-year-old and someone seven decades on from her. Marking an artwork together.
It went like this:
I made my strawberry green-leaves drawing. I passed the strawberry to the person next to me, who chose to draw a different angle of the luscious red strawberry. As did her neighbour. So we ended up with 3 different strawberry views on one piece of paper.
Then it came back to me to pull them all together into one whole gorgeous artwork.
No one artists’s work stood out. They each added something. They merged into a bigger truth of strawberriness.
Collaboration’s trending
In the same vein, I heard on the radio about a new fiction book set in a Manhattan apartment in the early days of the pandemic lockdown, “Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel. ” Edited by authors Margaret Attwood and Douglas Preston, it was co-written by 36 celebrated authors, including John Grisham and Celeste Ng (plus the editors). And only if you peek to the end do you find out who wrote what.
I’ll be reading this book! I find it fascinating to see how such different, accomplished writers can keep a story going when they usually write in very different styles and genres.
You’re probably aware that there’s quite a history of writers collaborating with fellow writers and other creatives (like illustrators), for example:
Collating anthologies
Creating film and TV screenplays
Co-authoring
Ghostwriting
Making comic books
Translating
Writing a book within a “shared universe”
Embrace the fun of collaborating
During the week, I also attended workshops with other writers discussing tactics and techniques. And I was reminded how much we all build on each other’s creativity:
The templates we create from others’ viral posts
The ChatGPT prompts we borrow
The headlines that grab us, and we adapt
The new vocabulary we pick up from a pro
The research AI does for us so generously
It’s a creative feast, fuelled by diverse talents and tendencies. And this feast feeds us.
So my takeaway is to just accept that
Artists steal (as Austin Kleon reminds us)
Writers team up
Being a creator doesn’t have to feel lonely
When you need to, reach out.
The creative spark you need is just a friend away.
‘Strawberriness’ love this term. Creating together reinforces a sense of oneness for me, we are all connected and come from the same ilk. A beautiful fabric with many threads all woven together reinforcing, supporting, collaborating complementing the threads around it. I love the idea of your collaborative art class and might have to investigate something similar near me. Thanks