The image of the author as a lonely soul who turns to himself in search of creative genius has taken on a kind of romantic tinge in our culture. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck have reputations as loners, outcasts, and staunch individualists. Truman Capote, Philip Roth, and JD Salinger take on the role of the eclectic recluse, earning them strange fame.
Self-Reliance is the title of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s masterpiece. Henry David Thoreau retires to Walden Pond to compose his reflections on life in America. And Emily Dickinson spends her life looking out the window at a society she is destined never to participate in, but perpetually influence.
So most of us are left with the idea that to be a great writer we must isolate ourselves from the madding crowd, chain ourselves to our desks and wither on our gables just to put words on the page. With these as our role models, we believe that authorship must depend on solitude. And the more time we spend alone, the more we discipline ourselves in the task of writing, the better writers we will be.
I’d like to challenge that notion with other examples of equally profound writers who lived dazzling, brilliant lives of interactivity, and thereby found their greatest inspiration. Homer, for example, the greatest poet in the Western world, whose twin epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, have influenced all subsequent authors to this day.
Homer (if he ever existed) was illiterate. He composed his poetry orally, taught it to apprentices called rhapsodists, who recited it word for word, and continued to do so for hundreds of years before finally teaching it to scribes, who recorded it in manuscripts of which we now have only fragments.
Virginia Woolf, author of Mrs. Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, and Orlando, among others, started the Bloomsbury Group. His was a home full of intellectuals, young people who met to discuss the important issues of their time and publish the results of the conversations.
These are not the models of authors working alone. They are collaborative writing at its finest, a model that is perhaps most appropriate for the professional, technical, scientific, and academic worlds where much of today’s writing takes place. Perhaps for the creative writer solitude can allow the imagination to rise, but for the more practical corporate writer, it seems to me that interaction, discussion and cooperation are more viable and productive modes of articulation.
In particular, three situations call for a team rather than a lone author. In the former, a project is simply too big for one person to complete on time. Many hands do light work. So call all hands to work, distribute the tasks and get to work.
In the third, a variety of opinions are solicited to achieve consensus on a complicated issue. This is a situation that requires diplomacy as many different interests are represented. The team must have the support of its members and its leader must not have obvious prejudices.
The second scenario is the one currently used by most corporate professionals. It is a collaborative writing situation that requires a variety of experts to weigh in on different aspects of the document. The problem most organizations face is that they currently use a linear approach to such documents. One person, far down the chain, writes the document, which then goes through many layers of revision before being completely rewritten.
That process is time consuming, demoralizing and counterproductive. By turning the specialized collaborative writing project into a true team effort, organizations can streamline the process, use their time and resources more efficiently, and train their staff more effectively. In the next blog posts we will talk about how to do it.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear about the collaborative projects you’ve worked on. What are his deepest beliefs about solo authoring versus collaborative writing? What works in a collaborative writing project and what doesn’t? Send me an email or visit my blog to leave a comment!