Can writers actually write together? Can writers jam together the way members of a rock or jazz band might, to create something better than any of them could have produced working alone?
One very good writer, Anthony Lane of the New Yorker magazine, doesn't think so. I discovered this while flipping through a back issue of the New Yorker where I found his review of The President is Missing, a thriller co-authored by Bill Clinton and James Patterson. In his assessment:
“Writing, like dying, is one of those things that should be done alone or not at all. In each case, loved ones may hover around and tender their support, but, in the end, it’s up to you.”
Anthony Lane’s snarky and thoroughly enjoyable review (available here outside the paywall) has no doubt that the mediocrity of The President is Missing is further evidence that writing is, ultimately, an intensely personal and private craft. All this stuff about "creative collaboration" is nothing more than marketing fluff.
Yet further on into the same New Yorker issue I encountered Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s speechwriter. Rhodes' story offers a counterpoint, an example of one man elegantly and effectively channeling another’s thoughts:
“The journalistic cliché of a “mind meld” doesn’t capture the totality of Rhodes’s identification with the President.”
And how was this mind meld achieved?
"(Rhodes) came to Obama with an M.F.A. in fiction writing from New York University and a few years on the staff of a Washington think-tank…
he joined the campaign as a foreign-policy speechwriter in mid-2007, when he was twenty-nine…
he was sixteen years younger and six inches shorter than Obama…
he became so adept at anticipating Obama’s thoughts and finding Obamaesque words for them that the President made him a top foreign-policy adviser, with a say on every major issue…
he rose to become a deputy national-security adviser; accompanied Obama on every trip overseas but one; stayed to the last day of the Presidency; and even joined the Obamas on the flight to their first post-Presidential vacation, in Palm Springs, wanting to ease the loneliness of their sudden return to private life….”
This mind meld doesn’t seem like a creative collaboration, which suggests some sort of parity between the collaborators. Ben Rhodes has intentionally muted his own voice to amplify that of his master. This can’t have been entirely easy for a smart and ambitious young man like Ben Rhodes, however much he admired President Obama.
“(Rhodes’) decade with Obama blurred his own identity to the vanishing point, and he was sensitive enough—unusually so for a political operative—to fear losing himself entirely in the larger story. Meeting Obama was a fantastic career opportunity and an existential threat.”
 |
| Tversky and Kahneman in the 70s |
They were close friends. They had sharply contrasting attitudes and styles, there was never any question of a mind meld. Tversky was extroverted, optimistic, hyper-organized, a wise-cracking military hero before becoming an academic. Kahneman was a worrying, bespectacled, introverted pessimist who couldn’t find his way around his own office. But their differences made their work better. Tversky’s optimism gave them resilience and Kahneman’s worrying gave them rigour.
Their partnership worked, but at a cost. Here is what Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein had to say:
“The low rate of output was one of their strengths, and is a direct result of their joint personality traits. Kahneman’s constant worry about how they might be wrong combined perfectly with Tversky’s mantra: “Let’s get it right.” And it takes a long time to write a paper when both authors have to agree on every word, one by one.”
But the eight papers they published between 1971 and 1979, working in harness in a period of extraordinary creativity, won Kahneman the Nobel Prize, and would change their field, and perhaps the world, forever. (Amos Tversky tragically died of cancer at the age of fifty-nine before he could share the Nobel).
BTW…I’m reading The Undoing Project, Micheal Lewis’ book on Kahneman and Tversky. It’s going well. Right up there along with Money Ball, Liar’s Poker, Boomerang or The Big Short.
The most successful creative collaboration I came across while Google-researching this post is someone I’m much less likely to have read than Micheal Lewis, Dan Kahneman, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. This is Alice Campion. Her widely acclaimed bestseller is called The Painted Sky.
Alice Campion is actually a group of Sydney housewives called Jenny Crocker, Madeline Oliver, Jane Richards, Jane St Vincent Welch and Denise Tart.
Their writing adventure started when their book club (Booksluts: We’ll Read Anything) went on a weekend away. After much vodka had been consumed, they made a pact to fund the Booksluts' tenth anniversary celebrations by writing a novel about a city girl who inherits her father’s farm in the outback, meets her rugged, handsome cattle-farmer neighbour, and sparks fly!
To their own surprise, the Booksluts did come home to Sydney, wrote their novel, sent it to a publisher, got it published and watched it climb to the top of the bestseller charts.
They describe their creative process as a genuine collaboration, without any one Bookslut doing the heavy lifting. They actually experienced mind meld.
They describe their creative process as a genuine collaboration, without any one Bookslut doing the heavy lifting. They actually experienced mind meld.
 |
| The Booksluts behind Alice Campion |
This mind meld happened partly because of how well the knew each other; e.g. their initial plan to write the sex scenes individually and mail them into the group anonymously didn’t work because everyone instantly knew who had written each passage. They knew each other too well for anonymity.
And in the process they seem to have a had more fun collaborating than the Clinton-Patterson, Obama-Rhodes or even the Kahneman-Tversky duos. Cheers to the Booksluts!
I might just get out of my comfort zone and pay Rs 1,967.69 to download The Painted Sky onto my Kindle.
