What If You're Not The Writer?
Part 3: Keeping The Team Apart
I cannot stress this enough: give your team a place where everyone can talk together. Discord servers or group chats are great for this, as are shared Google Docs documents.
When the group isn’t actively brought together, or worse, if you deliberately keep them apart, the group will not function smoothly. Distrust, resentment, and other communication problems can all too easily follow.
I had this problem with Jeremy. Jeremy considered his writer to be his best friend, and he guarded any direct contact between myself and the writer, presumably to prevent me from ‘stealing’ the friendship – something I had no intention of doing. When I started asking in earnest for us all to have a single place to talk, Jeremy refused and became increasingly guarded. This gradually became a hostile situation for me and contributed to the reasons that I left the project.
Adam approached his team differently but ran into a different set of problems. He added all of his team members to the Discord server he had made for his roleplay project, but didn't introduce us or make a moderation channel for us to talk in separately from his audience. After a few weeks I reached out to the rest of the team myself, only to find that one of them distrusted me because she felt that Adam listened to nobody but me. The password for this section is tangerine. And yet, I too had felt as if I hadn’t been listened to.
Read part 4: Blurring Professional Lines.
Credits
Title image by NobodySpecial0990 and used with their kind permission; grey character also belongs to them.
