Collaborative Fiction - Commercial Collaborations

Commercial Collaborations

There have been times when we've woven our thoughts from paragraph to paragraph, sentence to sentence, word to word, so tightly that even we don't know who wrote what anymore. It's a comfortably unorganized process and wonderfully inspiring.

Traditional fiction writers and writing circles have experimented in creating group stories, such as Robert Asprin's Thieves World and MythAdventures - such approaches date back at least as far as The Floating Admiral in 1931. There are many highly regarded collaborations, but also some collaborative work produced as spoofs or hoaxes such as Naked Came the Stranger, which was allegedly written to illustrate the point that popular American literary culture had become mindlessly vulgar. Collaborative writing can greatly increase motivation and speed of production for authors. Debbie Dadey and Marcia Jones are quoted as saying that books in the Bailey School Kids series take between "two weeks to two years to write". However, the process can also be slow and methodical: of collaborating with the novelist Edwin O'Connor, Edmund Wilson wrote "In writing alternate chapters with Ed, I very soon ran into difficulties. He would not always accept my cues of my methods, and I found my narrative blocked. I suspected that this was deliberate and that we were playing a game of chess, and this suspicion has been corroborated by Mrs. O'Connor's telling me that, in sending back Chapter 4, Ed had said to her with satisfaction, "Well, I guess I've got him now" ". Collaborative authors commonly publish under a joint pseudonym, such as Judith Michael, Lewis Padgett or Grant Naylor, particularly if they intend to only write as part of a collaboration, or if their other work is in a significantly different style than their collaborative work.