Advice for difficult creative partnerships
June 3, 2012 9:16 AM   Subscribe

Creative differences: Is there any good advice or useful experiences out there about how to work diplomatically with bandmates or co-writers without murdering each other?

Been working for years on a promising creative project with a friend. We might be at the last stages of getting it out the door, but the working relationship is driving me crazy.

At first it was one of the most fulfilling partnerships I've ever had. But now we've diverged in many ways, and it is frustrating me, but I don't know how to push production forward without having a fight.

My only role models I can think of are bandmates who can't get along, like Roger Waters fighting with David Gilmour over the direction of Pink Floyd. Except, unlike Roger Waters, my friend, because of life priorities, has very little time to dedicate to this thing I have been toiling on.

He doesn't place as much importance on it as I do, though he still has a sense of co-ownership. When he does make himself available, after putting the toddler to bed, he can become really pushy, the way only a high-powered attorney can get.

Lately all his new ideas actually seem wrong and offensive. I have to be the guardian of not ruining everything. He often wants to tear down things, including his own great original ideas, that we worked so hard to get right.

It's not just that he's tired all the time, but that he has deep-seated personal issues with women. One reason I want to do the next project solo is that I'm tired of having to police our work for old-school misogyny that he keeps wanting to inject, and which would guarantee that we alienate half of our potential audience.

Anyway, I am sure that my perspective is weird at this point, but is there any standard, time-tested advice out there--famous quotes or personal experiences--on how to work together creatively while minimizing tensions?
posted by steinsaltz to Writing & Language (5 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Can you have a give-and-take, where one project is "yours" and one project is your partners and go back and forth like that (like, one of you writes a song outright and gets to call all the shots with the only input being suggestions from the other that you're free to ignore)? That might break up the partnership idea for a long enough time for you both to recharge a bit.
posted by xingcat at 9:40 AM on June 3, 2012


Keith and Mick. I think you might as well go ahead and have a fight or a show-down or a "confrontation". You could also try renting a hotel room for a weekend and lock yourselves in and swear a blood oath that you're going to finish the damn thing or die trying. You might not be friends for a while afterwards.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:46 AM on June 3, 2012


Finish it and move on. I think some of the best work comes from people with wildly different personalities and interests, and dull work often comes from people who are most alike and agree on everything. And why wouldn’t it?

Creative partnerships are very much part marriage, part business deal, and can be much more one than the other, as long as everyone understands what’s going on. That’s what makes them confusing to figure out. You can work on compromising and learning to deal with each other like a marriage, or say "we don’t have to be friends but we have to get this done", but you both need to know the ground rules.

You sound a little defensive about his role. He’s either a partner or not at this point. This isn’t working at McDonalds, if you’re doing 90% of the work and he’s bringing 10% that makes it better then he’s still a partner.

Just like marriage or business, you also have to decide wether it’s worth it at some point. But finish the project first.
posted by bongo_x at 12:16 PM on June 3, 2012


What sort of incentives do you have to finish this project?

Because, y'know (echoing bongo_x), in an awful lot of band situations (especially famous ones like Pink Floyd or the Stones or the Beatles) they're business partners as much as they're creative partners. So they've got strong motivation to figure out how to work together, because if they don't they're out of a job.

Even if financial incentives are minimal or non-existent, there can also be "creative" incentives, like, "He's a miserable bastard 22 & 1/2 hours a day, but the 90 minutes we're on stage together are So Fucking Awesome I'll put up with the rest of it." But even then there's a concrete, achievable goal - a concert gets played, an album gets released - that can provide motivation.

So recognize that your "role models" have reasons why they want or need to figure out how to work together, and think about what motivations you and your partner might have.

But if you don't really have any kind of external motivating incentive to finish, if you just want to finish on principle, or to feel that you haven't wasted all this time and effort on a project that just fizzles out, you might be out of luck, and there's really no shame in letting a project die a "natural" death, even if it's unfinished. I mean, it's frustrating, but you've undoubtedly learned a lot about your craft during the process. It might be hard to see right now while you're frustrated and angry, but you have. You take what you've learned and apply it to future projects.
posted by soundguy99 at 5:51 AM on June 4, 2012


The other thing that strikes me about your situation is that you actually have two not-entirely-related problems with your partner, and you're not really separating them in your head.

The first is "practical" - you feel your partner isn't pulling his weight, isn't devoting enough time and energy to the project. But as bongo_x pointed out, not all creative partnerships are 50/50, even if they started that way. So one solution is kind of what xingcat mentioned - you separate tasks or responsibilities. For example, if you're writing a courtroom drama together, you're the one who actually works on the plot & dialog and puts the words on the paper, he's the one who weighs in with the reality check based on his experiences as an attorney. It's not a "fair and balanced" division of labor, but it plays to each of your strengths, it takes into account how much time each of you has to devote to the project, and keeps the project moving forward.

On the other hand, I've certainly seen these kind of "practical" issues solved, at least in the short term, by having a confrontation/argument/discussion, ala Ideefixe. Maybe your partner's just kind of lost track of how little time he's devoting to the project, or is oblivious to how much time you are devoting. Maybe he just needs the kick in the pants of, "Hey, we could be done with this thing in a month if you'd just reply to my emails, damnit !!"

The second problem is "creative differences" - the old-school misogyny, the urge to dump ideas that you've already worked on and gotten right - and I think that might actually be the more serious problem, but this is where external motivation can come into play. The fact that he wants to rework or revisit old ideas suggests that he kind of views this as the NeverEnding Story - he doesn't really see an endpoint, so to him it's equally important to insert his agenda/opinions into what you've already done. If you can point to an actual goal that can be achieved by finishing the project, you can steer him away from this and concentrate on finishing. Or again, accept an unequal division of labor, however frustrating it might be, bull through the project doing the lion's share of the work yourself, and ignore as much as possible his suggestions for reworking old ideas/adding misogyny. If you can actually hand him a "finished" product, it's then up to him whether he can accept having his name on that product. Which may be a whole other argument, but at least the project is done.
posted by soundguy99 at 6:56 AM on June 4, 2012


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