Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

As a technical writer, I was used to working in a group of writers. Sometimes there would also be editors and project managers to help us. While writers might have individual documents that were considered theirs, it was always understood that the work was a collaborative effort.

That's very different from the way novelists usually work, alone until the novel is finished, when it goes off to a publisher (assuming the writer has a contract), at which point editors will get involved. Rarely writers will collaborate, but it's not very common. In the science fiction genre, the most successful collaborators are probably James S. A. Corey (Ty Franks and Daniel Abraham) with the Expanse series and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle with several best sellers.

But what about writing a novel as a group? Technically, it's now easier than ever with modern software tools. And writers' groups are fairly common now. So why doesn't it happen more?

That's one of the questions raised by this article in the New Yorker.

The pleasures of collaborative fiction writing can seem so bountiful that one might begin to wonder why anybody would choose to do it alone. The varied methods of working as a group—a mixture of talking it out in person (what the Wu Ming collective calls “free-form improv”) and writing in solitude between meetings—give people with different creative temperaments equal chances to contribute. Many of the co-authors said that brainstorming with their collaborators was a safe space in which no idea was too ridiculous and no suggestion would be disregarded. In place of the loneliness and perpetual self-doubt of the solitary writer, they had camaraderie and encouragement from others.

Many of them described being spurred to write better after reading a co-author’s excellent scene. They all felt accountable for doing the work, turning up at meetings, not letting the others down. When the group gets writer’s block, they see it not as evidence of weakness and failure but as a sign that they’re on the wrong path as a group. They cultivate an attitude of “upward compromise,” accepting that they need to do something radical to get the creative juices flowing again—“make it crazier,” or delete everything, or use an “uncanny element, or a plot device that no one else would.”

This all seems perfectly natural to me. I'm not a fiction writer, nor have I ever joined a writers' group, but given my background, it's something that would be more natural to me than most writers.