Collaborations + critiques ▫ audio tutorial

KASAMA LABS, MAY 2022

“No, that’s not what I meant!”

“I don’t think we can say that.”“What do you mean, ‘there’s no story here?”

“I just don’t feel like this draft is working.”“Hold on, what’s this episode really about?”

These are all outtakes from our episode draft discussions at Shelter in Place headquarters. Nate and I have worked together on more than a hundred episodes, and we both came to podcasting after decades of workshopping and critiquing work everywhere from writing groups and MFA workshops to ad agencies and portfolio school. And yet even now, almost without fail, things usually get tense at some point during the scriptwriting and editing process. 

We’ve also had those moments with our Kasama Collective trainees, and occasionally even with colleagues and students. Because collaboration and critique—working with others during those tender formative stages of a creative project—is hard. Especially when that first draft or first idea is one you came up with, it can be incredibly challenging not to take things personally. 

And yet without collaboration and critique, our ideas are limited to our own individual potential. Collaboration and critique at its best can help us—and our ideas—to grow. They can help us to feel more supported and connected both to the people we’re working with and to our reasons for creating.

But of course the opposite is also true. Reckless, uninformed critiques or bulldozing partnerships can be incredibly damaging. You can see the carcasses of unhealthy collaborations in every band that’s ever split over creative differences, or the large percentage of divorced couples who were also business partners. The creative process can be an emotionally fraught one that feels like it’s not your idea, but you, who’s being criticized or found unworthy.

We’re devoting this module specifically to these two elements, because collaboration and critique are essential, interdependent skills not just for creativity, but for life. The goal of this module is to equip you with a toolset that will help you critique and collaborate well.

To quote the architect and author Matthew Frederick, “The most effective, most creative problem solvers engage in a process of meta-thinking, or ‘thinking about the thinking.’” 

So let’s do a little thinking about the thinking behind successful collaborations and critiques, starting with collaborations.

Collaborations

We’ll start the discussion of collaboration with four Big Collaborative Principles, then share four practical tips. 

Big Collaborative Principle number One: “be process-oriented.”

One of the biggest challenges with collaboration is that most of us can’t help falling in love with our own ideas. Our own writing. Our own vision for sound design, audio editing, or logo design. Artists and creators of all trades will often use childbirth metaphors to talk about creative work, because we often have that same deep, irrational attachment to our creative offspring as we do to our biological ones. And yet just as sometimes it’s an uncle or teacher or coach that can help our kid grow in a way that we can’t, it’s a creative collaborator — someone with a little psychological distance — who can help our idea achieve its full potential . . . if we can release our grip and relinquish a little bit of control. But how do we do that?

In his concise and beautifully-designed book 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, Matthew Frederick writes, “Being process-oriented, not product-oriented, is the most important and difficult skill for a [creative person] to develop.” 

He outlines a list of what being process-oriented means, and it’s good advice for anyone doing creative work. We’ve swapped out the word “design” for “creative” in Frederick’s list of what defines process-oriented work, a number of points from which we’ll come back to: 

1. Seeking to understand a creative problem before chasing after solutions. 

2. Not force-fitting solutions to old problems onto new problems.

3. Removing yourself from prideful investment in your projects and being slow to fall in love with your ideas.

4. Making creative decisions conditionally — that is, with the awareness that they may or may not work out as you continue toward a final solution

5. Knowing when to change and when to stick with previous decisions

6. Accepting as normal the anxiety that comes from not knowing what to do.

Principle Number Two: “accept uncertainty.” 

Here’s another quote from Matthew Frederick: 

He says, “Engage the creative process with patience. Don’t imitate the popular portrayals of the creative process as depending on a singular, pell-mell rush of inspiration… Accept uncertainty. Recognize as normal the feeling of lostness that attends to much of the process. Don’t seek to relieve your anxiety by marrying yourself prematurely to a creative solution; creative divorces are never pretty.”

As humans, we naturally seek comfort, control, and balance. Living with things unresolved or unbalanced is stressful. It’s why Robert McKee saying “all stories boil down to the struggle to restore the balance of life” is so insightful. So just like being process-oriented, embracing uncertainty (and the anxiety and discomfort that go with it) goes against our natural tendencies for certainty and resolution. 

Embracing uncertainty is a macro lesson for creative work as a whole, but for this week’s discussion, of course, we’re talking about the additional level of uncertainty that goes along with working with someone else. Even for Laura and me, where we know each other’s personal histories and attitudes on creative work down to the sentence level, there is still an element of uncertainty when we share an episode draft with each other. And this can be even more nerve-wracking when it’s a new partner, and you don’t know how they’ll react or what their style is. 

One example of this is with our season two episode “A good age.” This was over a hundred thirty episodes in, but was the first time that I’d felt compelled to process something I was going through in a memoir-based episode. There could’ve been enough for me to say about endurance sports and aging to fill up half an hour on my own, but I realized it would be a fuller and more dynamic episode comparing my experiences with Alana and Michele’s. So the uncertainty I had to embrace was not knowing how much of my own story was going to make it into the final piece, and as we went through multiple drafts, a lot of my stuff did end up getting cut. But again, it was a richer and more interesting episode as a result — and was a process we all really enjoyed.

Principle Number Three: “be methodical, not mechanical.” 

Matthew Frederick writes, “the creative process is often structured and methodical, but it is not a mechanical process. Mechanical processes have predetermined outcomes, but the creative process strives to produce something that has not existed before. Being genuinely creative means that you don’t know where you are going, even though you are responsible for shepherding the process.” 

Methodical means that you can follow an organized list of steps even if you don’t know the final destination. This is why we’ve tried to provide as many possible tools for taking methodical steps, from brainstorming and ideation, to scriptwriting, editing and dealing with creative blocks, to sound design and the rest. 

Being methodical and including different steps, we might say, can be an effective technique for dealing with inevitable emotional discomfort that goes along with doing real creative work. Being methodical can help you keep moving forward: even if you’re unsure where you’re going to end up, you can still set a timer and write for fifteen minutes. 

Principle Number Four: “embrace creative constraints.” 

This principle may be familiar, but is worth repeating in the context of teamwork since again, if this is a shared attitude, everything will turn out better. Frederick’s book has a charming line drawing of two stick figures playing basketball using a grocery cart as a hoop. 

He says, “Limitations encourage creativity. Never rue the limitations of a creative problem . . . within those limitations lies the solution to the problem!”

Now that we’ve looked at the big-picture observations, let’s go over five practical tips that will set you up for positive, productive, and life-giving collaborations. 

Tip number one: clarify goals and roles. If you’re co-writing a podcast script, what is the 1 most important thing we want to communicate? What am I responsible for? (And what are you?) And very important, what are our deadlines? 

A great example of not clarifying roles enough was “A mother for all seasons.” I’d done an initial read-through of the interview transcript, and the initial part of the post-it outlining exercise with the key plot points and themes. But what I’d forgotten to do is create the headings with those same labels in Descript, so when Laura opened the file, she was unpleasantly surprised and felt like she hadn’t been set up for the scriptwriting handoff as well as she’d been expecting. We worked through it and the episode came out well in the end, but it was a tense moment that would’ve been avoided with a simple two-minute clarifying conversation a few days prior. 

Tip number two: agree on the process. What does the writing and editing process look like? Are you going to share a Google doc, or email a file back and forth? Do you want to give each other full editing privileges (like rewriting each other’s sentences), or only making comments on each other’s work? (This can be suggesting vs. editing mode in Google docs, for example). Also, this of course is something that can evolve over time as you work together more and gain more trust in each other’s editorial instincts.

And very important, who is the final editor? (This goes back to defining roles, and may be different if you are truly co-writing a script, versus one person consulting or editing the other person’s idea.)Tip number three, discuss how you’ll work through edits. Do you plan to do live episode read-throughs, or just work asynchronously, commenting or revising the document? (In case we haven’t mentioned it before, we highly recommend live read-throughs (often referred to as “table reads,” like everyone is sitting around a table with papers, in radio and screenwriting circles). Whether you are in the same room, or doing it on a video call, it is the best simulation delivering a script to a real listener, both in terms of how they process it, and how the words roll (or don’t) off your tongue. We started doing table reads partway through season one, and consider them an essential part of the process. 

Tip number four, do a little contingency planning: what happens if the process breaks down? Someone gets sick, has a family crisis, etc? How will you adjust? Is it working solo in parallel on distinct parts, and then come back together for read-through once you have a draft? Or something else?

An unforgettable example of us not contingency-planning was Tres Corazones, our audio holiday card. The initial idea had seemed so obvious and natural: “Hey, we’re doing this podcast, and we hate updating the spreadsheet of all our friends’ addresses, so why don’t we just do an episode instead of a printed card?” But what we hadn’t taken into account is the kind of mental and emotional state we’d be in after a training cohort, cross-country flight, and the challenges of trying to work during a visit with extended family. In retrospect, we could’ve just sent an email newsletter . . . but we had, unfortunately, fallen in love with that idea.  

So to recap, we have four Big Collaborative Principles: be process-oriented, accept uncertainty, be methodical—not mechanical, and embrace creative constraints.

Then we have four practical tips for good collaborations: clarify goals and roles, agree on process, discuss how you’ll work through edits, and do contingency planning. 

Critiques

Now that we’ve talked about big-picture and practical tips for collaboration, let’s look at the other side of the coin: critiques. We’ve come back to Creativity, Inc. repeatedly, because it’s such a helpful illumination of creative culture. (With all these quotes, as with the Matthew Frederick ones, we’ve swapped in audio terms at times instead of architecture and film to make the point more natural.) Chapter five highlights key lessons from their internal feedback process. The first big point is that everyone on the team needs to buy into the value of critique. If someone secretly thinks that they can actually do better work on their own, they’ll be tempted to secretly dismiss feedback, and rationalize why their original material is “right.” But at Pixar, and at Shelter in Place, a core ethos is: “we believe that ideas — and thus episodes — only become great when they are challenged and tested.” 

The second big point they make is remembering that it’s the work, not the author, that is being critiqued. Quote, “The script itself — not the writer — is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: you are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. . . . you must enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.” 

The third big point from this chapter of Creativity, Inc. is critique to make the story right, not to be right. They say, “to the extent that there is ‘argument,’ it seeks only to excavate the truth.” As they cover elsewhere in the chapter, it’s not about winning or impressing people or pleasing them or getting credit or defending yourself (all emotional undertones we can bring to a critique, all the more if the topic is close to home). 

When everyone agrees that they are there to serve the idea, not themselves, then magical things can happen. Wallace and Catmull note, “any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves.” 

The fourth big point is to reframe critiques not as competitive, but additive. Wallace and Catmull note “The key is to look at the viewpoints being offered, in any successful feedback group, as additive, not competitive. A competitive approach measures other ideas against your own, turning the discussion into a debate to be won or lost. An additive approach, on the other hand, starts with the understanding that each participant contributes something…”

So to recap, four big principles of productive critiques from Creativity, Inc.:One, everyone agrees that critiques are helpful. Two, it’s the idea we’re critiquing, not you. Three, critique to make the story right, not be right. Four, see critiques as additive, not competitive. 

Now that we’ve covered some of these higher-level attitudes of giving and receiving feedback, let’s get into some particulars. 

Rule number one of giving helpful critiques is the “compliment sandwich.” When someone presents their work, you lead with something good that’s working, or that you like; then you bring up the area(s) that could use improvement, and then you close with another positive. 

We’ve all probably heard that stat about it taking multiple positive communications to balance out a single negative one, so that’s part of it. The other part of it has more to do with the nature of creativity itself: when we create something, that idea isn’t something we’re holding at arms’ length — it’s something close to our hearts. So any jabs or pokes at it really hurt. But a “compliment sandwich” softens critique. 

Rule number two of helpful critiques is “be specific.” Again, from Creativity, Inc., they say “I’m writhing with boredom’ is not a good note.” A better note would be “my mind wandered a bit during this section . . . would you want to break up this long section of interview?” Or “this part felt like the momentum of the story slowed down, because we got into all these details about knitting needles and I kinda forgot about where the main character was going.”

Rule number three is “don’t just tear down — build up.” Quoting director Andrew Stanton: “there’s a difference between criticism and constructive criticism. With the latter, you’re constructing at the same time that you’re criticizing. You’re building as you’re breaking down, making new pieces to work with out of the stuff you’ve just ripped apart. That’s an art form in itself. I always feel like whatever notes you’re giving should inspire the recipient — like, ‘how do I get that kid to want to redo his homework?’” 

A final word about collaboration and critique: even if you’re a solo podcaster with no plans of ever working with a partner or team, I want to encourage you to seek out opportunities for both collaboration and critique. If you’re not sure you’re ready for those things, start small. Ask someone to work with you or in parallel on a very small task with clearly defined roles and deadlines. The exercises for this week are designed less to make that process overly structured, and more to help you do the up front thinking that will make you open to the process. Because while collaboration and critique can be difficult, they can also be wonderful. They can help you see your own blind spots and strengths differently. They can make the work better and open up new opportunities. They can make you better too. They may even become the way you discover your next episode, or your next podcast, or a whole new way of creating.