On Christmas Day, fans will be treated to the long-awaited Gavin & Stacey reunion. The sitcom is written by James Corden and Ruth Jones, but while the former was living in the US, the writing partnership was put on pause. Apparently, the pair need to be in the same room as each other, with Post-it notes galore. For them, Zoom is no substitute for the real thing.
That doesn’t work for everyone. Some collaborators need to be apart. The first rule of creative collaboration is that there are no rules. People have to find their own particular method, no matter how messy, strange, contrary and idiosyncratic that may be.
Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer – writers and stars of the Australian romcom Colin from Accounts – are married to each other, but they write individual episodes separately, then do a pass on each other’s work.
Konrad Kay and Mickey Down are the childhood friends who created TV drama Industry together. Down says they are so close that he can not only finish Kay’s sentences, but he also knows what his writing partner will say before he starts to speak in the HBO writers’ room that now creates their hit show.
Richard Curtis and Ben Elton wrote the scripts for the Blackadder episodes apart, using word processors, then swapped discs, adding and removing jokes.
Writers, artists and composers do it alone, do it together, have designated roles, have none, shout ideas out to the other, sit at the same desk, live on different continents, never argue, or argue bitterly, love each other, come to hate each other, stay together, break apart…
I am a collaborator. I write psychological thrillers with my husband, Sean French, under the name of Nicci French. We’ve been doing it for almost 30 years, and yet in an important way, it remains a mystery to us. We are very different writers from each other, yet we have found a single voice that is not a mashup of the two of us, but something other.
We definitely can’t do it face to face. We spend months planning a book, working out its plot, its characters, its beating heart. We go on long walks, sit at the kitchen table with coffee, gradually building the shape of a book. Then we go our separate ways, because (for us) the actual act of writing requires solitude, where we can disappear into the mysterious labyrinth of the self.
Sean works in a shed in the garden and I work in an attic room. We write sequentially, passing the book back and forth, editing and changing each other as we go. To have someone else change your precious words, impose their own, can be hurtful and even humiliating.
Our abiding principle is trust. This is not a power struggle; it’s an attempt to explore the world together, with care and tact and courtesy. To write is to constantly risk failure. It’s a very self-exposing, vulnerable thing to do with another person. Shame sits in the shadows.
That’s what strikes me about all collaboration – its intimacy, its willingness to put yourself in someone else’s power, their willingness to be in yours. It’s rather like having an affair, and implicit in the whole delicate and complex psychological process is the possibility of betrayal.
Collaborations often end in breakups. John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote songs that were infinitely more than the sum of their two parts, transcending any of their solitary efforts. It was a miraculous chemistry that changed the history of music. Lennon once said he had been in love twice in his life – his first love was McCartney, his second Yoko Ono.
The breakup of the Beatles was a sad, hurtful unravelling. Later, McCartney insisted it was Lennon who wanted “a divorce”. And it was a divorce conducted in public. Once, they had written I Want to Hold Your Hand together, “eyeball to eyeball”. In the end, they wrote songs to each other: McCartney’s wistful Two of Us and You Never Give Me Your Money. Lennon savaging his old friend in How Do You Sleep?: “The sound you make is muzak to my ears”.
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To allow some access to the secret workings of your imagination feels risky. The recompense is what two or more people can create together. And there’s more of it around than is commonly supposed, although we have become used to thinking of creativity as solitary, especially since the Romantics.
Take Shakespeare: never mind the ridiculous debate around whether he actually was Shakespeare; what about the plays he co-wrote? Playwrights of his period, like modern screenwriters, constantly collaborated, rewrote, adapted. At least nine plays attributed to Shakespeare involved other writers, including Titus Andronicus with George Peele, Pericles with George Wilkins and Macbeth with Thomas Middleton.
The more you look in literature, the more kinds of collaboration you find. TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, the greatest poem of the 20th century, is substantially the creation of Ezra Pound, who brutally, brilliantly edited the original manuscript.
Philip Larkin’s input and advice to Kingsley Amis when he read the original version of Lucky Jim was so considerable that it’s been argued he is virtually its co-creator. The famously sparse style of Raymond Carver’s short stories was largely the creation of Carver’s editor, Gordon Lish.
And then there are all the lost collaborators, the largely female helpers in the background. When Wordsworth adapted a passage from his sister Dorothy’s journal and turned it into his daffodils poem, was that collaboration?
FR Leavis’s work of literary criticism, The Great Tradition, made his reputation, but until the book was delivered to the publisher, his wife, QD Leavis, had assumed she would appear on the cover as joint author.
It has been observed that the deterioration in the quality of George Lucas’s movies after he divorced his wife Marcia and of Peter Bogdanovich’s after he divorced his wife Polly Platt is no coincidence.
When the blind John Milton dictated Paradise Lost to his daughters, what might they have contributed?
