“I always find that if two (or more) of us throw ideas backwards and forwards I get to more interesting and original places than I could have ever have gotten to on my own” (Cleese, John 1991 A lecture on creativity, https://vimeo.com/18913413 –  27:20mins).

There are a few things that really come to the top of my head when I think about this quote and how it applies to my way of creating and futher developing a creative piece. The first one is I’m antisocial! That’s what my internal voice screams whenever I am faced with group work. But there is no denying that what this quote suggests is how we as creators not only need to collaborate amongst each other, but how we all should take a big step back from our work and detach ourselves and our view points we place onto them and start to look at them from an mass audience standpoint.

Whilst working in a group or in a team based environment, I am so prone to creating an idea and sticking with it, once my creative muse starts to flow I fall into the trap that my idea is perfect and shouldn’t be touched. This for me is a common occurrence and whilst I enjoy creating my own ideas and working on them solo it can often lead to a stories overall lack of progression and/or improvement.

The other week we created a world, character and story based on a classroom activity. Taking what we had done we then collaborated with the person beside us, having them contribute to the development of the character, their world and then develop story. What I found from this was the ability to really bring my character to that next stage a lot quicker then I could have done on my own. One of the things that really made me understand and accept this quote was at a point during the activity my collaborative partner being of Asian descent and having a connection to the culture, that I myself do not  added some racial diversities and cultural accuracies I would never have been able to achieve alone to the character and their world. This was a really great moment in development; our character achieved a new height and a deeper level of character development. From there on his story began to truly flow and we were beyond where we had first started.

I truly think this activity and this collaboration solidified the quote for me and showed how these exercises can help improve or just build upon something that could have originally been lacking. The idea of detaching yourself for your work and just taking a big step back is something I hope I can apply to more of my works. I also look at it from a tactical and I guess marketable standpoint. (Whilst none of this is going to be marketed) I always try and think if I was to try and market and idea or publish a piece of work, how would I attract a large audience? Working alone and trying to add ideas like diversity, racial and cultural accuracies are great but it can be a true struggle to add these to your work and get them right when you are lacking the correct knowledge. I was happy to see that I could do something like this for my own work without possibly being racially insensitive or spending hours on the internet trying to make my character truly accurate.

Even through I don’t have the same background as my character I felt that with my partners help we were  able work as a team and bounce ideas off of each other and find what truly landed for this writing exercise, creating something truly unique and different.

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