Elementary Writing

Many, perhaps most, of the greatest works of literature, across time, across culture, and across language, are explicitly attributed to groups. As collaborative writing has gained scholarly attention in the last thirty years, many texts long-considered to be the product of single authorship have been revealed to be the product of collaborations.

Literature from the millennium before the Renaissance tells us that early texts were the projects of communities, not individuals. We know that these ideas and texts were the property of God or mankind; they formed a sort of intellectual commons in which all new knowledge was based and into which all knowledge flowed.

Early Models of Collaboration Before the Eighteenth Century

To one degree or another, almost every major novel, play, or large-scale poem written before the end of the Renaissance is the product of multiple hands.

Before the rise and eventual dominance of the Romantic notion of authorship, the authorial role was often compared to that of a commentator, compiler, or transcriber. Contextualized in such a way, it is unsurprising that authors’ actions in this period were intensely collaborative.

Before Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, books were written, by hand, by individuals or in scriptorium. Books, which were extremely valuable, were made of high quality materials like velum, and were passed between owners over generations. Often, each owner or reader of a book would make marginal annotations. As books were copied by hand, changes and corrections were made; histories were extended to include more recent events. Books were designed, written, caligraphed, rubricated, illustrated, illuminated, bound, and decorated by large groups of individuals. Every book was a collaboration and no two books were alike.

Imperial Chinese Literature

China had no laws resembling Western intellectual property or copyright until the twentieth century. Chinese refused to adopt intellectual property policies because they were fundamentally incompatible with Chinese literature’s basis in a creative process that elevated and necessitated borrowing, synthesis, and quotation—in a word: collaboration.

Imperial Chinese literature was rooted in a conception of authorship that identified the author as a craftsman and a historian. Authors assembled and connected existing pieces of literature in the creation of new works; no good author, even one secluded in the woods, works alone. Consequently, originality was defined not in the context of a lack of influence but from a context of a rich meaningful interaction with existing knowledge.

In the absence of a meaningful collaborative literary process—with authors both living and dead—Chinese authors were doomed to inefficacy and unoriginality. This attitude toward literature is summed up with Isaac Newton’s famous phrase, “If I see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

To paint without taking the Sung and Yuan masters as one’s basis is like playing chess on an empty chessboard, without pieces.
Wu Li (1631-1718)

This famous thinker plainly decry the idea of solitary artistic creation.

The Talmud

In its simplest form, the Talmud is a compilation of ancient Jewish law and lore created by large groups of Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis between the late first and seventh centuries A.D. As such, the text’s relevance in the context of a discussion of collaborative creation and control needs no further justification.

Detailing the nature of the collaborative process that produced the Talmud is a tedious and confusing process attempted over centuries by historians and Talmudic scholars. Recently, these have included Hermann L. Strack, who published an English-language Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash. His books explain that it is clear that the creation of the Talmud spanned centuries, perhaps millennia, and in its current form represents the intellectual work of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rabbis, thinkers, and jurists.

With its conversational quality and with no beginning and (one must assume) no end, the Talmud exists as a text that is designed to be the product and material for a continuing collaborative process that ensures its continued organic growth.

The King James Version of the English Bible

Given this rich collaborative foundation, it should come as little surprise that collaborative efforts have been employed in the most revered translations as well. This is evident in the paradigmatic case of the King James Version of the English Bible: the most popular Bible translation and, by many estimates, the single most influential text in the English literary canon.

The committee assembled was catholic and intelligent on the whole, including most of the ablest men available, whether High Church or Puritan. This ideologically diverse group was divided into six sub-groups which met at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge.

Each location housed a group translating the Old and New Testaments. The scholar translated the text individually and in small groups. Groups came to consensus on a rendering that was then forwarded to a final committee of revisers. This final committee referred to works in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian and other languages making use of ancient and modern translations . . . and consulting the old manuscripts that were available to arrive the most informed decision possible.

KJV succeeded where singularly (or simply less collaboratively) authored translations failed because it was the product and process of intense collaboration. The freedom to collaborate not only ensured the persistent popularity of KJV over almost four centuries, but provided the foundation for several derivative translations including the popular Revised Version and the American Standard Version.

Post Copyright Authorship and Collaboration

Especially prompted by the rise of copyright in Britain in 1709, the eighteenth century introduced a new concept of individualized authorship based on the idea of a creative genius working alone. This idea—one at odds with collaborative, collective, or corporate creation—has remained widely influential despite powerful arguments made by theorists like Foucault and Woodmansee and a growing body of evidence that collaborative and collective creation is more effective than individual work.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this community-based concept of authorship and the mechanisms for literary ownership, production, and control were overhauled. At that transitional point, legal changes saw literature become the property of individuals. It is at that moment, and others like it, that the following history is centered. Through major transitions in the nature of the mechanisms of control, collaborative writing has evolved and persisted.

Peter Jaszi and a growing numbers of legal and literary theorists argue that it is copyright, a system designed to allow economic and political control of literary knowledge and expression, that has enshrined Romantic creativity in ways that have been difficult to challenge.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the mechanisms for collaborative writing took explicit form in the creation of coterie groups of authors that acted as forums for idea interchange, discussion, manuscript circulation, critique and small-scale publishing.

The most famous, and consequently most well documented, is the now famous “Cockney School” that included, at different times in its life, the company of Shelly, Byron, Keats, Hunt, Reynolds, Smith and Hazlitt. Through their letters and correspondence, it is clear that each of these poets turned to associations and interactions within the group as a means of cultural production.

The group’s collective work included the production of commonplace books, collaborative projects, and “contest” poems as well as major individually attributed efforts which were executed in the context, and with the assistance, of the members of the group through a system of manuscript circulation and revision.

Over time, the popularization of Wordsworth’s concept of ideal authorship has strengthened and reinforced copyright to the detriment of collaboration. Contemporary authors cannot collaborate in the same unapologetic fashion in the context of more rigid technological, social, and legal systems of control. As the publishing industry has been reshaped by these powerful and lucrative systems of control reinforced by the discourse of Romantic authorship, it ultimately shaped the dominant systems of literary production.

Contemporary Industry Collaboration

Joint authorship is steadily increasing in popularity and influence. Empirical studies have shown that instances of joint authorship—a measurement taken by tallying books and articles with more than one person on the byline—are becoming increasingly popular and prominent While these collaborations are important in highlighting the persistent power of collaborative writing, they are hindered by the hostile climate of control and authorship created by copyright.

In an article written for science-fiction authors on How to Collaborate without Getting Your Head Shaved, Keith Laumer, an author and collaborator, ends his short piece with the advice, “if you possibly can, write it yourself. Collaborations, like marriages, should only be undertaken if any alternative is unthinkable”.

In an article for Writer, Leonard Felder points out that not only should potential collaborators first agree to a division of royalties and payments, but that they must have “a written agreement on . . . the way your names will be listed on the book’s cover”.

Unfortunately, this advice is all perfectly sensible in today literary climate. While many of these articles also mention the potential benefits of joint-authorship, they explicitly, and accurately, approach the collaboration as a business relationship; their emphasis is on avoiding the pitfalls of such joint work.

Collaborative Writing: An Annotated Bibliography list hundreds of articles establishing the prevalence of collaborative writing in corporate, industrial and academic reviewing, storyboarding, translation, usability testing and the production conference papers, documentation, policies and procedures, proposals, and technical reports as well as more traditional forms of literature like novels, plays and poems ([Speck1999]).

This bibliography reflects an explosion of academic literature around collaborative writing over the past three decades; it covers nearly 1,000 sources written during the seventies, eighties, and nineties. In turn, this discourse reflects the growing popularization of explicitly collaborative writing. It reflects a shift in attention toward collaboration rather than a change in the prevalence of collaborative writing itself.

Conclusion

History has shown that the importance and power of collaborative creation is one of the most powerful mechanisms for the creation, organization and dissemination of knowledge. The dominance of the Romantic notion of authorship has forced us to ignore both the importance and power of collaborative creation and the effect that this type of ownership has on collaborative models. We need not ignore the power that ownership and individualized control bring to the table, but we should not dismiss collaborative work because it’s incompatible with the ideology that lets us control, and amass fortunes, from our ideas and from those of others.

The fact that joint-authorship and collaboration can function, and even experience massive growths in popularity, in this hostile environment, is testament to the power of collaboration. Without a strong system of control shaping the landscape of literary creation, there is no guessing what other works we might enjoy.