As part of my assignment to write more and post about it occasionally, here is something I wrote today after reading your recent microblogging post.
I find this is also true in my experience writing and playing music with people.
I’ve basically had no luck creating the basic musical ideas of a piece in a group setting. Very little to no progress was made in the projects I was involved in as a writer in this way. It always ended up being more efficient to just work on new ideas alone, and then bring them to a group to develop, flesh out, whatever. Sometimes even that was hard and basically everything would be done alone, and then brought to the group to consider/learn. Efficient is not even the right word, there was basically no chance of having something to work on if something wasn’t developed to a certain point alone. This situation had made me think over the years that I just wasn’t good at collaborating with people in general.
So it’s interesting to hear that others are finding this kind of collaboration unproductive too.
Some of the problems I encountered in a music context were:
- Multiple instruments in a room trying to make different things will create a lot of noise and distractions, so you kind of need to be all working on the same thing.
- Following a lead on an idea can take time, lead nowhere, and sometimes/often needs the participation of others. This can make you risk averse and passive to avoid wasting others time. This can block creativity. What has ended up happening is that some people become more passive than others and then the others feel more pressure.
- You feel a need to be working on something because that’s what you’re all there to do but there are no promising ideas. This makes it awkward and feel urgent that there be something to work on. This is bad for creativity. This also makes you just want to call it a day. it sucks.
So I ended up doing the vast majority of my work on music projects on my own, and it improved lots of things. People understood my ideas better because they were more developed, they could better judge whether it was worth it to them to spend more of their time on it and learn it, we had clearer things to work on, and more things to work on. I had less of the experience of getting stuck and calling it a day.
It also makes me realise that I haven’t really tried to make music with others in an asynchronous, remote, online-group-type way.