Are Two Heads Better Than One?

I recently had the experience of co-writing an upcoming 90&9 article. It prompted me to ponder the meaning and mechanics of collaborative writing.

What does it mean when two people write an article or a book together? How is it supposed to work? Does one person provide the schematic grand vision and big ideas that are the building blocks of the work and the other grasp the ideas and wring them out on paper? Does one person provide a verbal skeleton and the other literarily flesh it out? Does one give birth to a tangle of worthy written ideas and other untangle and order them to make it coherent? Or do they both create a patchwork of equal bits of contribution that is sewn together as they go along?

Hmm . . . I did a bit of Internet trolling for answers and came across this gem on Wikipedia:

Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by two or more authors who take it in turns to write a portion of the story. A collaborative author may focus around a specific protagonist or character 'owned' by an author in a narrative thread, and then passes the story on to the next writer for further additions or perhaps a change in focus to a protagonist 'owned' by the next author. Alternatively, one author might write all the portions of particular subplots, and other narrative threads might be shared. Which author then integrates the whole and smooths the work into professionally submittable form depends solely on agreements between the collaborators, as does whatever percentages of remuneration are earned by each party.

Thanks for the enlightenment, Wikipedia. But wait, there's more! Apparently, co-authorship is looked upon more favorably and practiced more often in the sciences than in the humanities:

From an academic perspective, there is anxiety about collaborative authorial endeavours. Academics are concerned with being able to discover who wrote what, and which ideas belong to whom. Specifically in the humanities collaborative authorship has been frowned upon in favor of the individual author. In these instances, antiquated ideas of individual genius influence how scholars look at issues of attribution, tenure, etc. Collaboration scholars Ede and Lunsford note, "everyday practices in the humanities continue to ignore, or even to punish, collaboration while authorizing work attributed to (autonomous) individuals."

In other disciplines, such as the sciences, collaborative writing is the norm. In social sciences, such as library science, collaboration has increased dramatically over the past 25 years. Alice Harrison Bahr and Mickey Zemon’s study of academic journals came to the conclusion that “as evidenced in the sciences and social sciences, collaboration encourages author productivity and enhances article quality. As research becomes more quantitative, collaboration increases."

Interesting, all. I can't think of any fiction bestsellers or classics whose authorship is collaborative, but I have a plethora of textbooks, non-fiction books whose topics range from history to theology, and articles whose authorship, more often than not, is collaborative. So, what is it about fiction or writing in the humanities realm which makes collaboration less common but in more objective types of writing, it encourages productivity and enhances quality? Is it just the supposed egos of humanities eggheads in ivory towers?

Oh, all the answers I find just leave me with more questions. Let me take a stab at it. Maybe in the humanities, individual authors are more common and perhaps more valued because the focus is on input. Rather, the appreciation lies in the process, the ideas and techniques that flow throughout. The work is considered holistically. And in academic writing about works of fiction, interpretations are more subjective. Maybe it's hard to share in interpretations that are by nature individualistic. In the sciences, however, the focus is on output, the end result is what matters. What are the findings? What conclusions can be drawn? Perhaps, in this realm, the variety and amount of contributors make for a sharper bottom line.

But that doesn't exactly explain disciplines like theology or history, though. Though experimentation isn't part of the body of the work as in the sciences, these disciplines are easily divided by topic. For example, Smith will write about the Roman Republic, and Jones will write about the Roman Empire. In the humanities, not so much. Perhaps the elements that make up writing in the humanities realm are too cohesive and subjective to be divvied up.

Currently reading: Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin