There's been much talk this year of creative collaboration. In a sense it's nothing new. Even a one-person stage show involves collaboration between artistic disciplines. But perhaps the art form that has always seemed the individual's special preserve is the novel. Even if an editor like Maxwell Perkins helped shape the novels of Fitzgerald, we acknowledge only one author of The Great Gatsby.
This year I've been involved in a project that challenges the idea of literary solo-flying – I'm one of 15 writers engaged in creating a collective novel. The writers' group comes from a programme called Dark Angels, named after one of my books, which began as a way to improve business writing through the use of literary techniques – imaginatively far beyond the confines of plain English.
The three founders of Dark Angels – myself, Jamie Jauncey and Stuart Delves – thought it would be a challenge to write a collective novel. But what did we mean by this? To be honest we didn't know, but we started exploring possibilities. Our workshops are about taking risks with writing, stretching people while discouraging preciousness. This seemed the right kind of spirit for a collective novel.
We talked about novels from which we might take inspiration: Matthew Kneale's English Passengers, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and we kept returning to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The Faulkner novel is a simple story but is told through the perspectives and first-person narrations of many characters. This suggested a way to turn the biggest problem – the impossibility of maintaining a consistent tone if the storytelling relay has to pass from one writer to the next – into an advantage. Fifteen diverse voices could form the distinctive style of the novel.
That was our starting point, and we created a two-page outline that transferred the story and location from Mississippi a century ago to contemporary Britain. We then found an evocative place to stay for a long weekend – a country house called Balavil in the Scottish highlands – and invited a dozen writers along to join us in our collaborative writing challenge.
Despite the old stereotypes about lone scribblers in garrets, we discovered that writers can have a great time together. We went for walks, we ate and drank well, we sat around log fires, but mainly we worked hard.
We started with characters. Our story outline identified 15 characters by roles: the mother, elder son, doctor, undertaker and so on. Through exercises we then fleshed out our characters so that they gained names, back stories, personalities and motivations. Before long we were each writing short pieces in the voices of the characters we were creating.
The effect of collaborating as a group developed essential qualities of empathy – with our fellow-writers and with the sometimes dysfunctional fictional characters we were exploring. It's good for your humanity to see other people in this way. You might achieve that through solo novel-writing but collective writing seemed to accelerate the process and deepen the experience.
There are such surprises along the way too. If two minds are better than one, 15 minds multiply the effect of seeing things differently. We were often caught by the surprise of an unexpected phrase, a character insight, a story twist.
The undertaker, for example, whom I'd originally imagined simply as a character telling one small episode in the story, outgrew those limitations. In the mind of Jonathan Holt, the undertaker Callum became the main driver (literally) of the story. This compellingly creepy figure demanded a creative response from the writers whose characters were now sharing the white van driven south, with their mother's body in a coffin in the back.
After the weekend, my task was to detail the story outline day by day through the coffin's journey. This meant being specific about when and where each character was to take the floor. This detailed storyline was crucial to our collaboration. Each writer was in control of his or her own character but there was a necessary discipline in the storyline. Everyone stuck to that; it was possible for the story to develop but we had a narrative backbone. The relative rigidity of that approach might seem at odds with the desire for free-flowing imagination, but the discipline enabled the collaboration to succeed.
As each writer wrote their individual chapters, ready for stitching into the whole, we each took on further collaborative roles. Our publisher is Unbound, which uses crowdfunding to publish its books. This in turn thrusts other roles onto writers who become involved in tasks such as marketing, publicity, film-making (watch our film here) and project management.
Those roles are good challenges for writers too, increasing the sense of collaboration to influence every aspect of the making of a book. And, of course, none of this would have been possible without the enabling power of the internet and emails to ease communication.
The book is now almost funded. Soon it will go into further stages of editing, design and production. Our working title, as homage to Faulkner, has been As I Died Lying, but that might change for publication. Creative collaboration means that there is always another possibility, another unforeseen surprise. That's the joy of it.
John Simmons is one of the founders of the Dark Angels writing programme – support the novel here
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