By Itto and Mekiya Outini
Despite the enduring popularity of the lone genius archetype, there’s no sound reason that writing should have to be a solitary vocation. Many artforms hinge on collaboration—music, theater, and dance come to mind—and while it’s true that a book can be written by one person alone, that doesn’t mean it should be.
To write, publish, find an audience for, and achieve financial stability through the pursuit of literature requires a far wider range of knowledge and skills than naturally occur in most authors. For example, you’ll need to master a variety of rhetorical and literary techniques so that you can write for different markets, and you’ll need to learn how to communicate your vision persuasively to agents, editors, publishers, readers, critics, and other stakeholders in each of those markets, whether you want to or not. You can dedicate years of your life to researching, learning, and refining those skills at the expense of whatever you really love. Or you can find someone who already has them and invite them to join your team.
The key to any successful partnership is that participants must pool their strengths and run cover for each other’s weaknesses. If you write beautiful sentences, but find plot development challenging, you might want to team up with someone who lacks an ear for poetry, but will happily “Yes, and” with you until the cows come home. If you generate lots of raw material, but fall in love with every precious word, find someone who will gently help you send your darlings to a ranch upstate. And if accountability is your bugaboo, then consider pairing up with a Marine.
Speaking of which, we recommend diversifying the range of lived experience within your partnership. If you’re from a city, seek a collaborator raised on a farm. If you speak only English, team up with someone who knows other languages. If you read only classics, find someone who keeps a finger on the pulse of the contemporary literary scene. And if you lean left politically, find someone—gasp!—who leans right. Or vice versa. Given the times in which we live, such a partnership may sound unthinkable. Fair enough. But the more unthinkable it sounds to you, the more you need it.
Internal diversification can, of course, generate friction. Don’t let it stop you. Some degree of disagreement over the direction a project ought to take is healthy. It enables what programmers call “opposition-based learning,” where algorithms prone to getting trapped in “local optima”—that is, solutions that are good but not great—are forced, by competition among different problem-solving methods, to strive for the best solution possible.
If your disagreements do get out of hand and your project cannot continue, don’t sweat it. Drop it. Start another. You can always return to that first project later, either together, after cooling down, or individually, each taking the basic template and developing it in whichever direction you choose. There’s no need to be protective. Goethe’s Faust, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, and Wells Tower’s Harald all arose, after all, from the same basic situation, but three more divergent characters, and three more different narratives, are difficult to name. Don’t let your ego kill the art. And don’t be greedy.
The principle of diversification, with all its benefits and costs, applies to the world beyond the text, too. Many talented writers cringe at the idea of marketing and imagine money mainly as a plot device, whose handling, in the real world, is best left to others. Historically, to deal with this problem, formal partnerships have emerged between people who call themselves “writers” and others who call themselves “agents,” “editors,” “publishers,” etc.; but the worlds of writing and business are both many-splendored, and there’s no reason whatsoever that two writers can’t team up: one, say, who’s always coming up with new ideas for plots and characters and marketing campaigns, but can’t ever seem to sit still long enough to implement them; the other who has a new idea once a year or so, but can always summon up the discipline to put words on paper and implement those labor-intensive campaigns.
For all the value of collaboration as a means of covering for your weaknesses, it would be a mistake to imagine that’s all it can be. The best partnerships also amplify the partners’ strengths. It’s always nice to have someone around to talk to, brainstorm with, bounce ideas off of, and send your rough drafts to without fear, and while online writing groups and MFA cohorts may occasionally meet these needs, they’re usually insufficient. Even setting aside the specters of envy and competition that haunt so many professional circles, you can rest assured that no one besides your collaborator will want to hear about your project at three in the morning—and we all know the best ideas show up at three in the morning.
Whenever we work together on a project, we discuss it at length before, during, and after drafting. More often than not, we don’t even realize that what we’re doing is brainstorming until after the fact. This kind of organic idea generation, difficult to achieve when you and your partner are not fully immersed in the same project, is, in our experience, the most fruitful. We’ve been writing collaboratively for over four years. In this period, our work has flourished in ways it never did before, quantitatively as well as qualitatively. These have been the most productive years of our lives.
We want that for you, too.
Hopefully, in the coming years, more writers will begin to form creative partnerships. Fear, jealousy, envy, hatred, competition in its pathological form, and social isolation are all very real, but they are not excuses. If anything, they are the reasons we must work together—slowly, cautiously, in fits and starts at first if need be, but always in good faith and with determination. If we let these forces ride us, we will assuredly destroy the arts, and then ourselves. So let’s not let them. Let’s join hands—two here, three there: we’re not trying to alienate any introverts—and see what can be made.
Bio: Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published in outlets around the world and received support from MacDowell, the Steinbeck Fellowship, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books and co-hosting the podcast Let’s Have a Renaissance.
