It’s raining here in the home of the BWW, Northern California, or as we like to say, No Cal. Actually, I don’t know who likes to say that.
Today I am thinking about collaboration and ownership. You see, for a long time in my pre-screenwriting life, I had a really difficult time accepting someone else’s prompts for direction in my work. It wasn’t that I didn’t accept the criticism someone offered, but that the solutions I stayed away from because they weren’t “mine.” I know Elizabeth has a great bit of thinking on critique and solutions which, I paraphrase as, “Offer your readerly thoughts and let the writer come up with the solution.” And that makes sense, because the reader doesn’t always know what is wrong, so to offer solutions is often to suggest fixing something that isn’t broken, while leaving unmended, that part which is in disrepair.
(Can you tell from that last sentence I’ve been watching Downton Abbey?) But you get the point – readers often don’t know what is broken, they just know when they feels something broken.
The flip side of that is when you are working with a group of readers over and over, who understand your goals, understand you as a writer, and most importantly understand the form of your work. Then an open ended question – “What would happen if she could do this –” can lead to some great discoveries. Even if someone gave you, “Make her two inches taller,” we will still communicate it in our own way. So, to those who shy away from using a great idea because someone else came up with it, to you I say – piffle. The execution is always yours, and the execution is what makes a book great. 