What it's like to collectively write a novel
"Alice Campion" is the pseudonym used by a group of Australian writers -- who, back in 2013, published their first collectively-written book, The Painted Sky. Five of them wrote the first book, and four continued on to collaborate on Alice Campion's next one, The Shifting Light.
In The New Yorker, Ceridwen Dovey profiles "The Alices", as they call themselves, as well as some other groups of collaborative novel-writers. And Dovey asks an interesting question: "So why are group-written novels so rare?"
Aesthetically, of course, the challenge is whether a group of people can all write in the style of a single person. The Alices seem to have pulled it off -- at least, according to their publisher, who loved the "unified voice" and couldn't put it down. And as Dovey points out, plenty of collaborative art surmounts this challenge. Scripts for TV shows are products of writer's rooms, a lot of songs are co-written, and everyone figures out how to work in single style.
There are some intriguing technical challenges in collaborating on a text as long as a novel. Version control is a nightmare; you've got to keep so many little contributions that I'm almost surprised the Alices don't use Github. (Instead, they appointed one of their group to be "the 'sacred kow,' or Keeper of the Words", fulfilling a function sort of like Linus Torvalds in the early period of Linux.)
The thing is, these technical and aesthetic challenges are all surmountable. The real reason more novels aren't written collaboratively, Dovey argues, are cultural. Collaborative writing violates western society's Romantic ideals about novelistic creativity being solely an individual act:
There are also entrenched assumptions about what a novel should be that serve as a deterrent. Film and TV scripts depend on many people with different skill sets-producers, directors, actors-to bring the final creation into being; as a result, those scripts are a blend of artistic and technical elements. But novels aren't generally viewed as technical documents that can be broken down into their constituent parts; they're more often imagined as being written from the heart. People tend to doubt the "sincerity" of a group-written novel for this reason, the Alices believe. "It's hard for the culture to get its head around this idea of shared hearts," they said.
[snip]
"People have a prejudice about literary style," one of the Wu Ming members has said. "They think each author has his or her own voice, one voice. We think that each author, be it individual or collective, has many voices." Still, like the Alices and the Helenas, the Wu Ming collective has adopted an approach that has a unifying effect: once a scene has been written by one person in the group, it is rewritten by someone else, then handed on again for rewriting to another member. This continual rewriting breaks down any claims to ownership of characters or scenes, and means that each author has to adapt his or her personal input to the overarching style of the group. (The first scene in "The Painted Sky" was reworked fifteen times by the Alices before the novel was submitted for publication.)
While the Alices and the Helenas regard the ability to suppress one's ego in order to co-create as a particularly female superpower, the Wu Ming group operates on a similar principle: "Writing together implies being humble." You have to accept, they said, that "you aren't carving your words in stone or marble, you're writing them in sand with a stick." They insist that the general inability to see the possibilities of novelistic collaboration has everything to do with ideology. "It is all about capitalism, all about expectations you have in the marketplace of ideas, of books, of the publishing industry," they said, "not about the novel being intrinsically more difficult to write together."
(CC-4.0-licensed photo of four of the Alices courtesy Wikipedia)