Creating Collaborative Content

The Difference Between an Interview and a Conversation, and Other Forms of Collaboration

As part of my new project about celebrating what makes us human in a digital age, I’m creating content by collaborating with my digital native peers around monthly themes. There are a few different types of content, and my collaborator often shapes the actual format of the content and the process of creating it.

My pitch to any given potential collaborator is open ended and pretty similar to start with, and then I let their personal reaction and response shape the creative process. It’s interesting to see how different people respond differently when asked the same question. When I’m not sure what direction to go, I’ll give them options.

When I first started talking to potential collaborators at the end of April, I thought I knew what the content options would look like. As I actually talked to people, the forms evolved into three main types of content that I’ll be creating or curating around each monthly theme.

The Coffee Shop Conversations series is based on interviews, profiling digital natives who live their lives with the intention of celebrating what makes us human. These are written by me for narrative purposes, but serve to allow the person to tell their story through their words and my writing.

The In First Person series allows a collaborator to respond to an open-ended writing prompt relating to the monthly theme, their work, and their experience of being human in a digital age. I make minor proofreading edits, but generally publish these as they are given to me.

The Creative Collaboration series features creative multimedia content that I co-create or co-curate with my collaborators.

Conducting an Interview

The blog theme for May was the senses with a focus on visual aesthetics, such as flowers, plants, and art. My first interview was with yoga teacher and painter Izzy VanHall. I take her yoga classes regularly, and she teaches workshops called Paint Your Practice that blend art and yoga.

I’m familiar with the professional process of conducting an interview. You prepare specific questions and often record the exchange to go back and listen to it later.

This felt different. I wanted it to be a collaboration, with the final product being a story. I had two broad themes I wanted to touch upon, but I didn’t write out specific questions. Instead, we sat in a coffee shop and just started talking. I introduced the themes as starting points for the conversation, and let Izzy respond. I asked simple and really open ended questions, and then I listened.

As I listened, I wrote furiously and took paraphrased notes. I also wrote down some sentences to use verbatim as pull-out quotes. At one point, the conversation naturally diverged into related themes. Then we came back to the topics at hand, and I took some more notes.

The Creative Process

Next, I took my notes and wrote a draft of Izzy’s story. I started by typing out everything I had written into bullets, and then I began to craft a narrative from the notes. The story naturally evolved into a retelling of the conversation we had; as the author I offered context where necessary but wanted to emphasize her voice in the telling of her story.

It ended up being mostly paraphrasing of what she had said, with a few direct quotes I had written down when she said something in such a way that I knew I wouldn’t be able to summarize or re-word it effectively. Finally, I understood how this story would set the example for the Coffee Shop Conversations interview format.

An Exploratory Phone Call

Another future collaborator, interactive artist Smita Sen, wanted to hear more about the vision for the project before suggesting how to create content together. It had been years since we had spoken, so we hopped on a phone call and caught each other up on our respective work.

As Smita explained the four main themes she works with as an artist, two stuck out to me as particularly relevant and interesting for Old Soul Wednesdays. By this point I had figured out the interview format as well as the guest writing and creative collaboration options. Based on her time constraints, we decided a Coffee Shop Conversations piece would be the best way for us to work together.

The process started out the same, with a long conversation in which I guided her to certain topics and then let her elaborate on her ideas. I took notes, but this time when I typed them up I was able to streamline them into a narrative as I typed, synthesizing them more easily than the first go-round when I typed them up into bullets first.

I sent Smita the draft, and she had bigger edits than Izzy did- but what this sparked was an even more collaborative creative experience. I wanted to make sure I had the facts right, and I also wanted to make sure I had the emotions right. We worked together to make sure to describe her projects, her work, and her own collaborators in a way that did justice to everyone involved.

I was telling her story, but it was still her story. I deferred to her in cases of word choice, connotations, and impressions. When she shared the work with her personal network, she gave me the greatest compliment: that I had handled her story with care. I realized, looking back, that that was exactly what I had intended.

Finding Unique Angles and Exploring New Roles

A challenge thus far has been finding unique ways to tell what could be similar stories; for example, I worked with several different visual artists for content for May and I wanted to make sure I had various content formats and was presenting something unique with each new piece of content.

This meant approaching the interview stories with sufficiently different guiding themes such that the material we covered would be unique. It also meant crafting sufficiently different open-ended writing prompts for the guest writing pieces.

Another challenge, less of a challenge really and more of a new experience, has been stepping into the role of editor when I work with guest writers for the In First Person series. Some pieces required one or two tweaks, others required rearranging of content and some cuts of a sentence or two.

My strategic goals in this role are to make sure the piece will read well online and that conventions of syntax and grammar are observed in a consistent way across the website. However, the guest writer is the ultimate owner of their work. I check in when I’m proposing changes more serious than a couple of commas.

The relationship between editor and writer is a collaborative one- or at least it has been so far in my short experience editing for a publication. I hope it stays this way.