Hello.
Today I’m going to talk about something that’s increasingly come up in my thinking about writing. For a long time it was all about me, me, me and can I do this by myself and how do I get better at it? But I’ve realised more and more that collaboration is important and sometimes essential.
So this is about suggesting the idea that you might need a collaborator. That might be the sudden revelation that you have whilst listening to this.
So here’s my draft from undrafting of the section that’s going to be about working with other people. Any suggestions please drop them in the comments and let me know whether this is how you work or whether it’s worked for you in the past.
This is not a means of writing, but increasingly in my teaching I’ve made the suggestion to students that what they might need to do their best writing is a collaborator. What may be missing for your means of production of writing is another, a second person.
It’s conceivable that you write by hand and employ a typist, a Theodora Bosanquet, but that’s not what I mean.
Perhaps in order to do your best work, you need someone else who, in order to do their best work, needs you. Another version of that which I might use is, perhaps in order to do your best writing, you need someone else who, in order to do their best writing, needs you. Not sure which is better.
Malcolm Bradbury, who taught me at the University of East Anglia, Creative Writing MA, Malcolm Bradbury told me that he used to write commercial fiction with David Lodge. They set two typewriters up opposite one another, as if they were playing chess. They were writing to make money. This was hack work as far as they were concerned.
They’d have two American popular magazine stories on the go at once. Whenever one of them reached a stop, couldn’t work something out, they’d call out stuck, and the two of them would change places and resume work.
This arrangement seems pretty ideal to me if you’re handing over one section to another rather than writing the same thing at the same time on the same page with one of you maybe pacing around the room and the other one actually doing the typing.
So here’s a bit more about how collaboration might have a reason.
You may be good at initiating ideas but not at finishing them or vice versa. Perhaps your best talent is plotting, but dialogue is a struggle that someone else in the same writing space would delight in and be better at. Why not?
It’s a mistake to see writing as non-collaborative, any writing. There are auteurs like Chris Ware, who did the Jimmy Corrigan graphic novel, who control every single spec on a page, but for most novels, most stories, the agent, editor, desk or copy editor, cover designer, blurb writer, publicist and even the reviewers make essential contributions.
This isn’t to mention partners, children, first readers, writing groups and buddies, mentors and complete strangers overheard on public transport.
Don’t let your selfishness get in the way of your creativity. You may not be equally capable of the whole job. Perhaps you’ll be more completely fulfilled by only doing half the work or a quarter or the tenth.
The challenge now is finding that other person or those other people who completes not you but the work.
So the rest of this could become a bit of a list but I was trying to find examples of novels, books, comics, songs written in collaboration.
Now obviously with songs you think Lennon and McCartney, you think Goffin/King and it’s a natural thing that someone writes the words and someone writes the music or with Lennon and McCartney that they’re both capable of writing both and they’re just swapping verses and chucking in lines. That could be how a novel is written.
But in terms of novels, there are quite a lot of novels that have been co-written secretly, I would guess, whether wife or husband or editor or ghostwriter has come in and helped. But I think that there’s a limit to the number of novels that I can name and I could Google that were published that were written by two.
So for example, never read it, but Diary of a Nobody is always mentioned, George Grossmith and Weedon Grossmith. And then Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford collaborated on The Inheritors, Romance, The Nature of a Crime, which are always dismissed as being pretty bad.
The poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler did A Nest of Ninnies and their title suggests they weren’t taking it too seriously. And then there’s Stephen King and Peter Straub doing The Black House and writing under a different name.
Where collaboration really seems to come into its own is comedy writing. Much of the great British comedy was written by pairs by Galton and Simpson or Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong, Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson.
There’s a lot of writing that was done in pairs, but also say The Royle Family, Caroline Aherne, Craig Cash, Henry Normal.
I think that having someone in the room to laugh at your stuff if it’s funny and for you to be writing, speaking, and trying to make laugh —that clearly has a logic. But I think that there’s a logic to all forms of collaboration and all forms of helping one another out and getting one another through.
What are your thoughts? Is a collaborator what you need?
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