No, I Don't Want to 'Jam' on It in a Google Doc

Search for articles on why people love Google Docs, and you get answers like this: 
 

Perhaps the application’s most powerful feature is that Google Docs allows users to collaborate on a document in real-time.
 
You can literally see where your colleagues are editing, what they are typing, and comment and collaborate LIVE as you mutually edit the document.

That’s not a feature — it’s a bug. It’s literally my nightmare.

I need space when I’m writing. Some room to breathe. I want the freedom to put down the wrong words in the wrong order and then play with them until I get the thing where I want it to be. And I can't do that when someone else is watching.

Much like dancing, writing for me is an awkward process full of missteps that's best done in private. So it stresses me out when a client or colleague says they “love working in draft mode,” or they want to “jam on a project” or “do a Google Docs collab.”

And don’t try hovering over my shoulder when I’m writing.

I remember an experience about 10 years ago when I was writing copy for a new product launch at Channel Intelligence (a tech startup that made me a zeroaire), and someone was in my office clarifying a few features for me. I told him I would make revisions and then send an updated draft.

He said, “That’s OK. I’ll hang out here while you rewrite that section.” And he started to walk around my desk.

This cat was planning to idle next to my chair and WATCH me write.

Uh-uh. That shit won’t fly.

Had to lay it out for him nice and clear.

“Nope. That’s not happening. I can’t have someone watching while I play around with phrasing and try to get the piece just right.”

I’m not an on-demand writer or a great real-time collaborator.

Johnny’s gotta have some alone time with the keyboard. Sometimes the best stuff comes out through my fingers late at night when I’m by myself in my office at home.

Although “alone” doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t be around people. It just means I don’t want to be around people who might try to pull me into a conversation or ask me to, “look at something real quick.” Coffee shops, co-working spaces, and airport terminals are all great places to work when I need to get into a good groove away from home. Or at least they were until this past March.

And they will be again one day. I look forward to getting back into that white noise.

Sometimes I feel like something is wrong with me because I can’t turn it on like a trained monkey. But at least now I know I’m not alone. Because on a recent episode of The Working Songwriter podcast, singer-songwriter Joe Henry articulated how I feel when someone wants to collaborate in real-time.

Working Songwriter host Joe Pug talked about the freedom he feels when he’s engineering a recording himself at home. “It’s just you, your recording rig, and your instrument,” Pug said. “It really brings the latency between writing and recording to almost zero. There’s no one else that you have to communicate with.”

That led Pug’s guest, Joe Henry, to go off on this riff about recording un-self-consciously: 

“I’ve done a lot of co-writing, but almost never in the room with the person, where I would feel the responsibility to justify any move I might make. I think if someone was sitting there with me and I was writing, and then I’d start into a second verse, they’d say, ‘Whoa. Why there? How do you go from where you just were to there?’ And my response would always be, ‘I have no idea.’
 
“I don’t want to know. I’m just following the thread. I’m just sort of being led. I’m not trying to pre-ordain any thought and then try to make it pretty. I’m really being led by process. And any time we can steer wide of having to account in real-time to ourselves or anybody for what’s happening, [that’s what] takes you right out of the creative mind and into the analytical mind. Which, John Cage taught us they both have their place, but they are not the same animal.
 
“And as soon as you’re thinking about what you’re doing and evaluating it, you’re no longer in the creative stream. You’re sort of up on the bank looking down at it. But you’ve taken yourself out of it. And any time we can work and follow instinctive flow, and not and have to stop and sort of confer with anybody, you can really get lost in the way I think many of us want to get lost.”

I’m not comparing the writing I do to what artists like Joe Pug and Joe Henry do. But there are parallels.

I don’t know either of those guys personally, but I’ll bet neither of them would want to do a real-time “collab” on lyrics in Google Docs.

Guess I’m just a “local file” guy in a cloud-based world.

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After I published a piece last week about Uncle Red, I got a few comments from some long-lost second cousins.

One of them commented that she was going to sign up for my email list. I added a comment explaining a little about myself and described what I write about. Then I told her I’m an acquired taste for some people. To vouch for the “acquired taste” thing, I tagged a lifelong buddy, occasional childhood nemesis, and partner in crime — my (first) cousin Susie.

This was her reply:

Awwww — how nice is that?

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Final thought: Please smack me upside the head if you ever hear me refer to a pet as a “fur baby” or children as “littles.”