By Sue Stoney, the Message Crafter
When Robinson Jeffers, the American poet known for his work about the central California coast, was building Tor House in Carmel-by-the-Sea, he retained the services of a stone mason on the condition that the stone mason allow Jeffers to work beside him as an apprentice to learn the stone masonry craft. The stone mason agreed to the arrangement.
Together, they built the great house. Later, Jeffers (with coaching as needed by the stone mason) built the smaller house next to it, where Mrs. Jeffers home-taught their children.
This model for collaboration in learning a craft is the one I use as a Writing Coach, and I offer it to you as a model for the writing projects you may be contemplating or already involved in. If you are a business owner who needs to offer content to the public to establish your credentials in a targeted market, and you are not a writer / editor yourself, I guarantee you that, whatever communication piece you need to develop will come out better as the result of collaboration with someone who is a professional communicator AND who can introduce you to your own inner writer and support you in honing your writing skills.
This type of partnership in content strategy and development is called collaborative writing. As you stand in your excellence with respect to your expertise, a writing coach stands in his or hers with respect to helping you craft the messages that sell your products and services. Your English teacher was right – you write well about that which you know and are passionate about. A collaborative writing partnership with a writer / editor / writing coach produces a better product every time. I’ve seen it happen many times in my career.
Three things characterize a successful writing collaboration:
- A hand-in-glove partnership. You are a geek or nerd who specializes in a unique area of knowledge. The writer / editor coach with whom you work needs to be someone unafraid to dig into the details of what you do to help you write about it in a way that best showcases your expertise. At the same time, the writing coach should not take over your side of the collaboration. Whatever communication piece you are developing, you control the content that informs it. The writing coach controls the messaging, language, and text narrative that tells your story to the wider world.
- A writing process that presupposes editing review all along the way. Meet with your writing coach before you ever start a writing project to plan the process. Incorporate edit review by you, at least one other person who does what you do, and your writing coach throughout the process right up to publication. Be clear with yourself and your other collaborators as to who’s reviewing for what. When you write, remember that you are working on a draft. Write until you lose momentum and then walk away from it.
Clear your mental palate and, when you return to your writing, put your writer’s cap aside and don an editor’s cap. Read what you wrote out loud. Consider recording what you’re reading and playing it back. As you listen, critique what you’ve written as objectively as you can. Does it sound like you? Does it sound as though you are standing in your excellence with respect to your knowledgebase? Revise what you wrote to reflect the answers to those questions. Then provide the draft to your collaborators and incorporate their revisions in the next version.
- A revision process in stages of continuous improvement with input from all collaborators that reflects their expertise. I like to call this last characteristic “knowing who’s on first”. You might have heard the very old comic bit by the comedy team Abbott and Costello. If you are too young to know what this is, Google it and you’ll find it on YouTube. It’s worth a look because it illustrates how NOT to do collaboration. Throughout the writing process, as you incorporate input from your collaborators, avoid confusion as to who’s providing what kind of input.
If your strong suit is not spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation, leave that to your writer / editor coach. It’s okay to fix something if you see it and check the validity of your correction with your writing coach. After all, he or she is helping you to perfect your writing skills. But don’t frustrate your budding inner writer by focusing on those things. Your role in the process is to test the copy for validity with respect to your expertise.
And, as to your other “does-what-I-do” collaborator, the same rule applies. Don’t confuse yourself or that other person by focusing on the language and messaging aspects of the review process. Leave that to your editor. Provide that subject matter expert with a checklist of things you’re hoping that person will look for and provide input on.
I have been asked many times to provide my “why?” for making writing a collaborative process that involves a writer / editor coach. The answer to that is the same on both sides of the collaboration. I know I am firing on all cylinders with respect to my craft when the project is truly collaborative, and I know my collaboration partner is, too.