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"We started out writing our stories to relieve the pain, fear and struggle we experienced daily. There is also incredibly strange to see your 'ordinary' life replayed as a motion picture ... The end result a remarkably real and honest account, with dialogue plucked directly from our book." 

That's web journalist and editor Kimberlee Morrison describing the experience of consulting on a feature film about her own life. She worked on Freedom Writers, a movie that told the true story of how a charismatic teacher transformed the lives of struggling students in Long Beach, California.

Thanks to that life-changing class, Morrison graduated from college with a journalism degree. She now works as an editor for the Know More Media family of business blogs. She promotes the work of forty different website, including this one.

Today, she shares advice about collaboration in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...

Jason Boog:
You worked very closely on the Freedom Writers Diary. What is it like working on a group writing project like that? What is your best memory of that collaborative process? How can we learn to work with other writers?

Kimberlee Morrison: 
The writing experience was an integral part in the development of the relationships many of the Freedom Writers have today. Because the group was so diverse, so were our experiences. Continue reading...

We wrote anonymously and did the first few editing sessions in class. There are several stories amongst the Freedom Writers about that binding moment, when everyone knew that we had to do more than just listen and read, and we had moved beyond the Rubicon. We could not afford to hide behind ignorance or had to accept that the stories where much bigger that the individuals who wrote them.

For me that moment was when my story was critiqued in class. I have this image of myself sitting quietly listening as everyone offered their criticism on the mechanics of how I told a very personal and painful experience. I was open and vulnerable, but was quickly reassured by the compassion expressed by my classmates who seemed to really care about the girl in the story.

Later Erin gave me a note from a boy in another class who wanted me to know that I was not alone. He had gone through a similar experience and even though we did not know one another, he reached out to me. From that moment on it was not just my story, it was his…and it could be anyone else’s.

My real advice for people who want to get along better with others is to get over yourself. Your problems, opinions, ideas and issues are yours so they only seem bigger and better than everyone else’s.

There were moments of disagreement amongst the Freedom Writers before, during and after writing the book. We always dealt with everything in the open though, so issues rarely had time to fester and become toxic. Erin was always a great leader that way, never afraid to tackle whatever was a weak point.

So not only did we place ourselves is a vulnerable position when sharing our stories, we were further exposed when hashing out personal feelings and attitudes toward each other. We became a therapy group of sorts wallowing in the muck of who we were to collectively become better people and by extension a better team.

I don’t think there are many people the emotional fortitude for what the Freedom Writers went through. The beauty of starting out so young is that we learned to get over ourselves early; the process is probably too painful for most adults. There are few people who are real with themselves, let alone an entire group of people. As our core group has become smaller, we have also become closer, respecting one another based on our deep connections based on honesty, compassion and commitment to the group.