As Anna pointed out in her post “Collaboration Proclamation,” the myth of the Wretched Scribbler persists because it makes the art of writing seem sacred, important, and mysterious. By the same logic, collaboration seems to cheapen the experience of writing, and to diminish the worth of the final product. But history tells us different! If you look behind many of the most important written works over the centuries, you’ll see not one impassioned, enlightened writer, but many.
Consider one of the great pieces of writing in modern history, the Declaration of Independence. Famously authored by Thomas Jefferson, this pithy document is actually a great example of the benefits of collaboration.
It is true that Jefferson was the sole author of the Declaration... in a sense. He even had a genuine Wretched Scribbler episode: for seventeen days, he labored over the draft in a hot, cramped room on the top floor of an isolated house on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Surely he’s the textbook definition of the tortured author, alone in the garret, scribbling away on a sacred text?!
Well, yes, kind of. But augment that mental image with these facts:
- Jefferson was one member of a Committee formed to draft the Declaration. The other members elected him to write the actual draft after a series of meetings where they discussed their ideas and decided what should and should not be in the draft (sounds a lot like our own Bright Idea Process!)
- After Jefferson completed the draft, both John Adams and Benjamin Franklin edited and reworked it. In fact, it was Franklin who wrote the timeless opening lines — in Jefferson’s draft, it opened “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable…”
- The draft was then presented to the Continental Congress, who made several more major changes to both the content and the style of the Declaration.
There are dozens of other examples of collaborative writing. Ezra Pound’s collaborations with TS Eliot and other high-profile Modernist poets are legendary; Truman Capote and Harper Lee famously wrote and rewrote significant portions of one another’s’ work. The Jewish Talmud was written by large groups of rabbis collaborating together over the course of several centuries!
Collaborative writing has taken many different forms over the years, and yielded some pretty impressive results. I, for one, am glad not everybody is attached to that myth of the solitary author.
