New Monday #64

So far, I've written about inspiration, happy accidents, limitations and stealing... but there's one thing you can do that ensures all of that happens—the inspirations, the accidents, the limitations, the stealing: work with other people!

Pick Your Partners

Pick your partners carefully. Things to think about:

Do you have a chemistry with them? Is the experience pleasant? Are the results good but the experience like getting your wisdom teeth pulled out through your nose?

Are they perfectionists? Are they push-overs? Hint: you want a balance. A good creative partnership is usually built on a bit of pushback.

Is there respect involved in the relationship?

Generally, there’s an insecurity to people who cannot collaborate. They might be geniuses of what they do, but they’re very hesitant to give up control or let someone else be right. Figure out a way to test for this.

Collaborate with people who don’t think like you. You don’t need another you coming up with the same ideas you’d come up with. You do need some overlap, some area of commonality, but in general either the ideas have to be different or the way people work has to be different. Dan and I have a bunch of overlaps, but we do have some fundamental differences. Perhaps the biggest difference between us is Dan tends to be more methodical and plan oriented, and I’m more improvisatory and spontaneous. But we've also figured out that our ideas together are almost always stronger than our ideas apart. That's what you're looking for in a partnership.

Two slobs living together is a mess. Two neat freaks living together is the bliss of boredom.

Beware the silent partner. I've seen this a lot. A band has two guys that seem to write all the music, and no one else seems to matter. Then they kick out the drummer or someone that isn't part of that composition partnership, and suddenly the writing goes to hell, the band is fighting, and the whole thing is a mess. The guy that got kicked out was the silent partner. Ringo was definitely the silent partner of the Beatles. Watch the 'Get Back' documentary to see this in action. His very presence seems to keep the band from killing each other. And when they're working on a song, it's when Ringo, after sitting there and not playing for hours, starts actually playing, that it suddenly sounds like The Beatles.

If there's money involved, lock that down

There's a wonderful song by The Brains called Money Changes Everything:

They say, we'll be your friends

We'll stick with you till the end

Ah, but everybody's only looking out for themselves

And you say, well, who can you trust

Ya think ya know what ya doin'

It's all in the past now

Money changes everything

A minor hit for The Brains, very successful cover by Cyndi Lauper. The song's about a girl leaving a guy for one with more money, but it's equally true for creative partnerships: if money gets involved, it will change everything.

I'm not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV. But I can say this: if you value the friendship, figure out the splits and lock it down with a contract.

U2, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and R.E.M. What do they have in common other than that I don't really like any of them? All members have equal shares in writing credits regardless of who actually wrote the song. What else do these bands have in common? LONG careers with no one hating each other.

There's many ways to approach the business side of a creative partnership, but if you're moving into something that appears to have success and legs to it, take care of this.

Rules for working together

The following is based on years of collaborating with bands in the studio, actors on the stage and designers / creatives in general. These rules work for me.

Discourage or forbid people from saying, "I have a good idea." When I hear someone say that, my brain, competitive bastard that it is, immediately starts planning how to prove that it's actually a terrible idea. And most people think this way. So ditch the value indicator and just pitch the idea. Better yet, don't even say you have an idea: just say what you're thinking, throw it out there. "Let's have a bridge." "What if we add a trombone?" Let the value of the idea come from the idea. Don't try to sell it.

Let's not judge ideas in general. Let's not say, "God, that's dumb," and things like that.

Creative people are typically by nature sensitive, and they respond badly to negativity. Neg them out enough and they'll shut down and have nothing to give you. My dad was awful with this. We'd be working on a project around the house and would ask me for an idea, then promptly shoot it down. It would turn me into Jr Silent Guy Who Hands Him the Hammer. Then he'd get mad at me when I had no ideas. It took me a while, like writing this paragraph 30 years after he died, to figure out that he was using my ideas to spark his own ideas. This is all well and good, but being nasty about it won't work.

How do we encourage others to feed us ideas? How do we get into an idea conversation?

We do it by accepting any idea, even the bad ones. I learned this from a book called A Sense of Direction by William Ball. This is a great book on creativity. It's scoped to theatre stage direction, but so much of it is universal in nature.

So, when someone throws an idea in, accept it immediately and apply it. Even if it's a bad idea. They'll feel encouraged and throw in another idea. Accept and use that one, too. There's a good chance these early ideas don't really work, but just accept them and plug them into the project.

After getting positive traction on the bad ideas, something flips and that person starts pushing out really good ideas. It's almost like subconsciously testing if you value their contribution. Once they get secure in the relationship, they start pumping out good ideas.

But what to do with the bad ideas? Leave them alone. Bad ideas tend to vanish of their own accord. In William Ball's words, "Bad ideas fall out of orbit." You usually don't have to explicitly toss an idea that's bad out. You might find the person that suggested it votes for its removal, or that it's replaced by a better idea, or it just goes away and you really don't know how that happened. If you have to actually kill a bad idea, hopefully it's counterbalanced by good idea contributions. You definitely want collaborators to have a sense of ownership with a project. If people have an ownership stake, an emotional tie, they tend to work harder and bring a higher level of creativity.

Speaking of testing: I was hired to produce a band, and when we got into the studio, they fought me everywhere. From simple things like, "Let's set the drums up over there," to arrangement suggestions, it was a pitched battle and it was awful. And it went on for hours on the first day of a week-long lock out. Man, I was pissed. I had really vetted these guys, they were referred by a lawyer friend, I had flown to hang out with them on their home turf. Now it was going to be a damn war.

We were all getting into our cars in the studio parking lot the first night. The four band members lined up across from me. And the guitarist apologized for their behavior. It was a test, he said. They figured that if I wouldn't fight for what I thought was right for them and their music, that my ideas couldn't be very valuable and I couldn't have much commitment. But because I engaged with them the way I did, firmly but politely, I passed the test and they were ready to work. We banged out an album's worth of music in the next week, and we had a ball doing it.

I could go on and on about collaboration—it has really been my main way of working across 45+ years of creative endeavors. But I'm not writing a novel and am more concerned with ideas that help you to reflect on your own experiences and thoughts.

Please feel free to write. This last bunch of New Mondays have sparked a lot of emails to me, with lots of interesting ideas and conversations, the very nature of collaboration.

Warm regards,

Luke