Category Archives: Publishing

Six Steps to Success in Collaborative Writing Projects

[Dalya’s note: Deborah Pruitt will be featured on Writing Wednesdays 4/3/13 and has written this guest blog post. She’s the author of “Group Alchemy: The Six Elements of Highly Successful Collaboration.” In addition to heading up Group Alchemy Consulting, she serves as a faculty adviser at the Western Institute for Social Research.]

Embarking on a collaborative writing project can be fun and interesting. You will be able to share the burden and get the benefits of different perspectives on your final product. And, as with all joint ventures, there are potential risks. Breakdowns can easily happen due to confusion, lack of agreement and differences in work styles. To keep that from happening and ensure a successful result I recommend the following six steps to success.

1) Identify the unique pieces of the project.

Break the project into discrete segments and decide on their logical order for what you want to accomplish. This is your outline plus notes about what each segment is intended to accomplish and how it fits together with the others. Don’t be afraid to spend some time on this together – your time spent in front of the project will save you lots of revision later.

2) Identify everyone’s strengths and specialties and take advantage of them.

Create unique assignments for each of the segments of the final work.The more clearly you break the project into discrete segments the better you can identify the key components and decide who can best meet them. For instance, you’ll be most successful if you assign a budget section to someone with that experience. Or a section that focuses on program content would be best written by someone on your team who is closely involved in that program.

3) Agree on a project schedule and benchmarks for completion along the way.

Everyone needs to have a clearly defined plan so that all the pieces are ready at the right time. If one person needs information from another to complete their portion, you want to make sure that is clearly identified and a timeline agreed to.

4) Assign a project coordinator.

You can think of this person like a general contractor on a building project. You need one central person to hold all the pieces together in the big picture and keep things moving along. She or he can collect materials, answer questions, provide updates and manage deadlines. She might also determine whether a meeting is needed to clear up questions or develop the ideas to keep the project moving.

5) Assign a final editor.

Identify one or two people who will assemble all of the pieces and edit for voice, tense and general proofing. This could be the project coordinator but doesn’t need to be. Think about your strengths and choose the best editor among you for smoothing the final version into a unified and well-written piece.

6) Disseminate the final draft to all involved for review and feedback.

Once you have a complete draft ready to go, get everyone on the project to read it as a whole piece and provide feedback. This is where the benefit of multiple people can really shine. Each one of you has a particular expertise and perspective so when you read the piece you can look for the continuity and coherence around your area throughout the piece.

At the heart of each of these steps are agreements that structure and support each person doing what is needed for the project. I will be discussing the art of strong agreements that create successful collaborative projects on the April 3 Writing Wednesdays call. Please join us! If you haven’t already signed up please do so at: http://writingtomakeadifference.com/community.

When Silence is Undone

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[Dalya’s note] This guest post originally appeared on February 25, 2013 on writer and ecologist Hannah Miller’s blog, Hannah Miller. The book featured here was written by my friend and colleague, Louise Dunlap. Louise used to be a member of the National Writers’ Union alongside me. Her work complements mine very well.

Whatever it is you have to say is still within you. It never goes away. It sits inside of you, enclosed in a black box, a flight data recorder that will be read only if you are cracked open utterly.

Conditions we fail to notice at all shut down our observation, our criticism of the conditions of life, and even our acts to change it. It still, all, always, starts with words. Whatever’s there in the black box deep inside of you. For the writers gathered in the Temescal Branch of the Oakland Public Library last Saturday (I think dissidents would be the proper word, that’s a great one), the question was, what keeps the words in?

Writer-of-writers Louise Dunlap, clad in a U.S. Social Forum t-shirt and a bike-titanium sense of humor, coaxed words, tears, laughter, squirming discomfort, and murmurs of Namaste out of a roomful of Bay Area writers. Undoing the Silences was the title of the seminar, and going around the room for introductions, Louise asked us to tell our names, what we would write, our strength, our weakness, and what keeps us from doing this. The cloud of ideas and thought that emerged from the room was world-toppling as nuclei are: children’s books, naturalism, peace, harmony. I said I wanted to invent a new language, a statement which surprised even me.

But Louise was not there to coach us through our chicken-scratches – she had come to Temescal with New Village Press to address the blocked arteries.

“Fear and despair,” she said. “That’s what I am hearing.” Pixie cuts, curls, shorn heads all bobbed. I just sighed. (see The Rest of this Blog, by Hannah Miller.)

Apparently, there is a sort of judo you can do on these things, that Louise knows and practiced on us. They seemed rather innocuous, free writes with prompts like: Write about a time you last teared up. Write about a time you ate chocolate. Seven minutes each, for the express purpose of “removing the editor.” I wrote about my boyfriend and my work, and I learned a lot, but what really bowled me over was this magic being practiced on us.

Here’s the secret: what we often think is external – fear and despair created by the conditions of the world, or the futility of journalism, or the futility of organizing – is actually just our internal editor clocking in for their horrible, bloody, imagination-slaughtering shift.

The exercises Louise had us do really shut down the butcher; her book is a judo textbook for this sort of thing. It’s not completely obvious – why would shutting down your internal editor really work, if the world is burning up and everybody is still at each others’ throats etc etc? It works because of something very special that I was so grateful to learn: that creation has a buoyancy of its own, a self-contained power source, an explosive magic like a tiny seed in soil.

And it grows as you do it. Words create hope as they push forward, and hope does its own photosynthesis. Hope is its own power. Love is its own power. It is so mysterious, sharing the same undefinable properties as life itself.

“The goal,” said Louise, “is to find a channel where the words can come from your heart.”
May my heart never be blocked again.

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