My Kind Of Teamwork

Writing with someone is an odd experience. That must sound funny, considering my burgeoning enthusiasm for human contact and social interaction. I value work that lets me be with people, and there is some of that in writing, but I don't find that it works so well in the main phase of the process. It always sounds funny to me with someone talks about their joint efforts with a writing partner, because it doesn't seem like it's that kind of an endeavor.

I'll enjoy the process of trying to generate ideas with someone, and I depend upon the fresh perspective of an outsider when I emerge from solitary writing with something completed, but that part in the middle feels like it has got to be me alone. I have been told of methods by which two people can write together without badly altering the process that I presently employ, but it sound sort of like one person's hands on the wheel and another person's feet on the pedals.

I have been lately helping someone with songwriting. Songwriting is a peculiarity to me. I enjoy composing lyrics, but am hamstrung by an inability to play any instrument. I cannot write the music. I find that part awfully hard, and the lyrics are somewhat less so. As I think I have said not so long ago, I know that others find that it is reversed for them. Perhaps this is the arena in which I can and must resort to collaboration.

It has everything that I like to it, this form of co-writing. Like Rodgers and Hammerstein (I think), my imagined partner will write the melodies and I will write the libretto, so to speak. We need not bog each other down with a lot of agonizing and hand-wringing over every word and comma. I'll do my thing, they'll do theirs, and we'll each compromise a little bit to fit them together like a dovetail joint in a table being built in two locations up until the final assembly.