Collaborative practice : categorising forms of collaboration for practitioners

Collaborative works are intrinsically different than books written by one author alone...the decision to collaborate determines the work's contours, and the way it is read. Books with two authors are specimens of relation, and show writing to be a quality of motion and exchange, not a fixed thing. (Koestenbaum 1989: 2) Faced with the prospects of a collaborative writing venture, a contract and a tight deadline for our collaborative text The Girls Guide to Real Estate (Brady & Brien 2002) we realised that our understanding of collaboration had not been much more than a general motherhood concept tossed about with nods of approval but rarely unpacked. In setting out to write our collaborative text we needed more insights into the various forms of collaboration and more to hang our authorial hats on than those feel-good pegs. In addition, at a time when collaboration is increasingly becoming part of a writers' working life, and as teachers and practitioners of writing, we felt we needed more understanding of the collaborative process in general. A survey of the literature found that much of the discourse concerning collaboration clusters the various diverse forms in a way which was unhelpful to us. One form of clustering, for instance, was so broad as to render all art and writing collaborative -which has a point, of course, but is not useful to us here. Another concertinaed together ghost-writing, biographical writing and the formation of literary movements, as collaborative processes of the same ilk. (Clemens & McCooey 2000, Chadwick & D. Courtivron 1993) While we have no problem in recognising that these are all kinds of collaboration, such generalised groupings did not allow us enough scope to unpack the processes and issues relating to our specific form of collaboration. We felt that any analyses of collaborative writing which would be useful to the practitioner first needed to separate out the various forms of collaboration occurring in the arts, in general, and in writing in particular. This separation needed to be in terms of authorial intention and credit, along with expected outcomes and goals. In other words, the division of various forms of collaboration needed to be made from the creative practitioner's point of view and not from that of the text's reader or critic. It needed to come from where the writer is standing looking outwards through the text, not from where a reader looks inwards towards the text. Consequently, we found it necessary, in the first instance, to devise a series of categories of collaboration. In doing this, we have, to date, isolated twelve separate forms of collaborative practice. It should be noted that any given work, at various stages of its development, can move or slide from one form of collaboration to another. This movement between categories generates its own concerns, which are discussed below.