You won’t get it right the first time. And you won’t always agree with your collaborators. When disagreements occur the experience often feels like failure.
It is something much better: it is an opportunity to learn. Learn what? What kind of collaborator you are.
You’re not wrong simply because you see things differently than another writer or the client or the director of the stage project. Wrong perhaps should defined only in one way: to refuse to reconsider, to explore, to look within.
To Fail Often and Well — Do this!
Set some parameters, define the playing field. “Anything goes” is not an acceptable way to work, because when things fall apart — and they will, momentarily, at various intervals — you need a tether. Years ago I took part in a touch football game on Thanksgiving Day. My host was eager to get started, so he declined to define the end zones on the open field where we were playing. As a result, the first touchdown scored was contested. “He crossed the goal line!” “No, he didn’t.” Who needs that?
You’re the writer. That means you are open to suggestions, but not prone to allowing other “writers” to enter the fray with their versions of your work. Comparing your work against another person’s work is useless: you already know you prefer your own way of doing things. If your collaborators have suggestions, tell them to be frank — verbally or with the written word — and stay open minded. But, in my experience, it only creates calamity when another member of the creative teams decided to become a writer.
Tell the truth. If you don’t like how things are going, say so. You probably alreadyhave been told that “discretion is the better part of valor” but I’d toss that nonsense out the window. You don’t want to be rude, but neither do you want to be afraid to find a constructive way to express your views. As David Mamet wrote in Glengarry Glen Ross — and I’m paraphrasing — “Tell the truth. It’s the easiest thing to remember.”
