I’ve discovered something magical and I want to share it with you.
This magical discovery more than doubled my creative productivity and helped me to finally put an ending on the fourth draft of my novel.
Do you need some magic like that? Get ready. Here it comes:
Parallel Play.
I first heard this term from Dr. Diana Glyer, who was my first English professor at Azusa Pacific University, my primary mentor in undergrad and grad school, and is now a dear friend. She used the phrase to refer to her (then five or six-year-old) daughter’s playtime with her friends: sometimes they wouldn’t play together as such but would each play in her own way in the same room a few feet apart. She talked about how healthy and generative this was, and I was genuinely surprised by this.
But I shouldn’t have been. I already had evidence that Parallel Play works. On at least two occasions in my undergrad career, I sat up late into the night with a fellow student working on a paper or project due the next day. We didn’t talk much, but the knowledge that someone else was sitting there working too made it so much easier to keep working on those occasions than it was during those nights when I sat up writing into the small hours by myself.
Furthermore, some of the best times I’ve passed with good friends have been spent sitting in the same room, engaging in our separate pursuits in companionable silence.
Fast forward to summer of 2020. Diana was talking about a project she desperately needed to work on but could not find the wherewithal to sit down and do it; I was in a very similar place with my novel. By this point, I had moved to Virginia and Diana was still in California, and there was a pandemic on, so we couldn’t get together in person. But I said, “What if we worked together over Zoom? I’d be less likely to get up and raid the fridge or sit there scrolling Reddit if you were there too.” We agreed that we would try. We set a date and we logged into Zoom and we sat together—three thousand miles apart—and we worked on our separate projects.
I wrote more than twice as many words in my Parallel Play time with Diana than I had been managing to write in the same amount of time sitting on my own.
We agreed to make Parallel Play a weekly thing. Within a month or two, I started inviting other friends to Parallel with me. Soon, I had three Parallel appointments per week on my calendar.
When Diana and I started Parallel Play on July 1, 2020, The Ruler’s Mark had sat virtually untouched for almost a year and a half, during which time I had torn my hair out trying to figure out how to finish the draft. In six months of Parallel Play, I wrote over 60,000 words and reached the ending that had been so very evasive for so long.
Then I took a break “for Christmas” which stretched through the first four or five weeks of 2021, and got almost nothing done, creatively speaking. And guess where I am right now as I write this? That’s right: I’m sitting in a Parallel session with Diana.
There is something transformative about working alongside someone else, even if you’re not working on the same project or in the same room or in the same time zone or even the same country. (One of my Parallel buddies lives in Thailand!) The act of gathering is both powerfully motivating and powerfully generative.
SIDEBAR: For more reading about the magic of gathering and collaboration, please get your hands on Diana Glyer’s The Company They Keep, wherein she demonstrates that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien could not have done what they did without the help of their friends in the Inklings—and Bandersnatch, wherein she offers guidance as to how we can all do what the Inklings did.
What tasks or projects have you been putting off? What have you been dreading working on? What have you been meaning to accomplish for a long time and just can’t make yourself sit down and do it?
Whatever it is, I challenge you to find someone else in the same boat, set a date, and Zoom together. Or Skype, or Discord, or Facetime, or whatever. And you sit there and do your thing, and let them sit there and do theirs, and see what happens. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
And hey, if you have a Parallel experience of your own, please share it in the comments.