Team players
Collaborating on ‘The Werribee Devils’
They say it never rains but it pours. I don’t know about that. Sometimes it rains without let up, and sometimes it just never rains. Or it threatens to bucket down but the storm clouds amount to nothing. Last month it threatened to bucket down — ominous grey clouds massed overhead. I’m talking about my in-tray. I’m talking about juggling assignments and freelancing and the rest of life.
Last month, as part of a Professional Writing and Editing class assignment, I worked with an RMIT photography student, Leah Moss, to help her produce a narrative photobook, The Werribee Devils. As well as collaborating with Leah on her photobook I’d also agreed to work on two paid editing/proofreading jobs that were still on the horizon. Leah had taken reams of film of her subject — the Werribee Devils youth league women’s basketball team — but hadn’t finished shooting when I signed on as her editor. Would I be tinkering or would the copy need a major overhaul? What would the story be? Would there even be a story? Would all three jobs come my way at once? Of course they would.
I was raring to get a head start on the project but all my attempts to set up a first meeting with Leah failed. I waited in the wings, itching to help my photographer tell her story, compulsively sharpening my red pencil, and biting my nails in case the deadline for this assignment were to coincide with that of the paid work. While I was in this increasingly antsy state, Leah, with her camera, was methodically capturing dramatic moments in the Werribee Devils’ first games of the season, compiling quarter-by-quarter game recaps and recording top-player statistics.
When Leah had a first draft to share with me, I was away with no wifi for a few days and could only view the layout on my phone. This felt like the final straw in a long line of straws. I look back now and wonder at my impatience: what line of straws?
Reunited with my laptop, I got stuck into the first round of editing. I wasn’t getting a strong sense of story from the photos and text. Individually, the photos contained moments of high drama. My eye was caught by a number of them (they’re all quite striking, really) and hooked, I’d read the caption. But the captions weren’t compelling me to look back at the photo or go on and read the text. Nor were the headings. In fact, the headings were the give-away symptom that made for a straightforward diagnosis of the problem: the photos and accompanying text covered just six games, some of which the Devils won and some of which they lost. The team might make the finals, it might not.
The story needed something more. Maybe an inside scoop. Or an origin story. Something with human interest — so the reader could relate to the players beyond basketball. Leah agreed and set up a photo shoot with the Devils captain at her workplace and an interview with the coach.
Meanwhile, I got stuck into some copyediting. I see now there’s a pattern to how I work. First I gnash my teeth and tear out my hair. I don’t know where to begin. I throw up my hands. I rub my temples. I give up in despair. I go direct to my wit’s end and hang out there for a while. Then I make a start. (Then I go back and start again, because I’ve forgotten to turn on Track Changes.)
Leah had sent the first draft to me as a pdf of the InDesign document. I converted it (via Adobe Acrobat, in My Desktop, in MyRMIT) to a Word file, which I edited and showed her at our first meeting. I wasn’t sure how she would react to my interventions and wanted to explain them to her face-to-face. She was a model of calm interest and our meeting was like a first game of the season in which we both played well.
Leah read through the changes, pointed out problems some of them, then hit ‘Accept All’ and inserted the corrected copy into InDesign. We talked about the way forward, agreed on what the next step was, and when we’d do it by. Then we parted ways and each did what we said we’d do. We met three times and worked this way, emailing in between. Back to my metaphors: we were starting to play as a team; workload-wise, there was a fall of steady, light rain.
A couple of weeks into the collaboration, the idea for the story, the thread of continuity that would run through the text and captions, dawned on us. Every year the Devils hold tryouts and a new team is formed. However, it’s one thing to form a team, it’s another thing to play as one. What the photos in the book showed was the development of a ‘real team’. Once we had this theme, we had material for captions and I had more of an idea about what to emphasise and what to downplay as I edited the copy. Leah was firm in wanting to retain game recaps as text. Now that we had a story, the information in these recaps could be given a context and infused with a sense of meaning.
If we’d hit on this story a week earlier, we’d have been able to shape the content even further. But I’m not complaining. I got to work with a talented photographer who was committed to her project. And once my imagination was fired up, when we had the missing puzzle piece of ‘story’, I found myself giving priority to the photobook after my other work came in. I was telling anyone who would listen that it never rains but it pours. But while I was collaborating on the project, especially in the days leading up to the deadline, it didn’t feel like I was being rained on. Or, if it did, I was dancing in that rain.
