Kat 1. Do You Play Well With Others?

For me, group work rates equal to choc-avocado cake in terms of strangeness. If you’re friends with other people in the group, or most of you are committed to the goals at hand, fine, but when it comes to educational projects, many groups seem painfully reminiscent of Christopher Currie’s students in Uninterrupted Study. Who hasn’t ever staggered away feeling wounded, underappreciated, and vaguely bitter? It’s a scarily common post-group malaise.

Writers can also be pretty bad about group work. There’s mistrust in the eyes of writing students when they’re paired up, as though we’re all just waiting to have our beloved ideas stolen away. Fiction writers are loners, thank you muchly, and we’ll leave the Kumbaya singing hug-ins to the script writers of the world.

And yet, here I am. In a group.

Reading Willow Pattern made me want to sit the authors down and ask them how on earth they managed it. How did nine writers, each with their own style, ideas, and quirks create a work in 24 hours? How did they make it so good? Ok, sure, they’re pros. These aren’t exactly 9 people who’ve never tried to write before. But surely there’s something more than ‘be a professional’ that we can take from this?

I can rattle off the social and educational psychology answers to why it worked, but they’re rather dull. Partin says that you need common goals, rewards, and interdependence. In Tannenbaum, Lewin explains that we are social beings who don’t like to stray far from our groups- groups work because they play to social needs. By all accounts, groups should be consistently wonderful ways of creating, but we all have horror stories that disprove that idea quite soundly.

In high school, and very rarely university, it feels a lot like being told to go and work with that guy eating the glue. In Willow Pattern, though, it’s a gathering of like-minded sorts. It’s not a blind panic over grades; it’s a bunch of talented sorts testing the boundaries of what they can physically achieve, and disintegrating those boundaries with over-strong coffee and Coke™. Maybe the idea of group work is less about the in-your-pocket style of work we get used to in school. Maybe the best example of group work in Willow Pattern comes not from Currie’s university students, or even the writers in their metafictional cameo, but from the four Tibetan Monks in P.M. Newton’s Mandala. The world around them is going awry, but still they sit, meditatively going about their tasks. No muss, no fuss, no stress: each individual was focused on their own work rather than wondering if the others were doing enough. Each had faith in the abilities of those around them. There’s no questioning of motives- just blind trust that the three Monks with them are giving their all to the project. As an image of group work, I have to admit I like it.

In Willow Pattern, there were many more group members than the nine authors who participated. From the QWC staff, to the Twitter™ follower who delivered Coke™ to an author, the group radiated outwards. In a way, the group was a mandala; starting off small, but stretching and growing far beyond the confines of what a pile of sand should be. Each member, no matter how trivial their role, added to the overall structure, and the image created in often subtle but always meaningful ways. Even now, over a year after the end of the 24 hours, more colours and patterns are being added. Not
all groups get such good mileage from an idea, granted, but for the rest of the year, we’re going to learn as much as we can about how to stretch ourselves creatively.

Feel free, of course, to join in. I for one would love to know what people have learned from group work, or how much coffee you think it’d take to write a story and get it published in a day. My guess: I’d need 18 mochas and someone to slap me whenever I stopped working.

For the industrious among you, those psychology ideas are courtesy of ‘Classroom Teacher’s Survival Guide’ by Ronald L. Partin (2005, Jossey-Bass Publishing), and ‘Social Psychology of the Work Organisation’ by Arnold Tannenbaum (2013 Taylor and Francis Publishing)