Should I Work On My Weakest Area?

The main reason I am only a co-author is that I use my best friend to compensate for my weakest area, the conceptual side of storytelling. I'm a good writer, but I'm not a fantastic storyteller.

I suffer from blank-slate syndrome: when I sit down to write something without a detailed plan, I find myself at a loss. Plot hooks, on the other hand, I can do. If I know what the plot's going to be, I can draft it up no problem.

In contrast, my friend is a visionary and a storyteller. He invents interesting characters and makes their personalities bounce off of one another, he uses vivid images and re-visits themes. In other words, he makes all the pieces fit together.

That is a skill that I have never demonstrated to myself that I have. Even in collegiate studies, when I was faced with writing a story, I resorted to looking at science fiction artwork created by an artist friend and writing stories based on the setting they depicted. The stories I wrote, moreover, I did not consider that their pieces fit well together, regardless of the skill with which I made them.

In the discussion that led up to the early termination of my last solo project (the one with IP difficulties), my co-author suggested, as he has many times, that I strike out on my own. This time, though, he specifically suggested that instead of compensating for my weakness, I should develop it in the hopes of making it not-weak.

This is a difficult question without a clear-cut answer: should I work on my weakest area? There are two basic approaches to this question. 1) Because it is my weakest area, my time is better spent doing what I am naturally good at. This is the approach I have favored. The other approach is this: 2) Skills at which you are weak should be developed. This is a costly approach, but the idea is that, afterward, the weakness will be gone.

This over-simplified description is leaving out non-measurables such as the individual's capacity to learn the weak skill, the start-up cost (money/time) of the learning, and the availibility of compensation aids. The superior answer seems very situational. I don't know what's better for me in my situation, but at this point I feel that my hand has been forced, and my next step must be to select a project and begin work.