Writers and Collaboration, Part 4: Choosing Your Collaborators

A key factor in a writer working successfully with other artists is for the author to select good collaborators. To do that, you have to use a certain amount of objectivity, a kind of objectivity that does not always come easy to writers. Writers are emotional. We tend to lead with our feelings, not our rational minds. Feelings are a good guide in choosing collaborators, but they have to be steered by an objective appraisal of what would or would not produce a good work of art.

First of all, don’t choose a collaborator simply because that person is someone you love or like a lot. Yes, it’s great to work with people you care about, but your eight-year-old’s adorable drawings are probably not going to be the best illustrations for your writing. The last time a writer collaborated with his or her child to produce a great work of art was…well, I can’t think of any.

Likewise, spouses and best friends are not always the ideal collaborators. Most of us don’t choose our friends and loved ones for their artistic talent. Not only that, it’s difficult to judge objectively the work of those we love. There are many examples of writers collaborating well with their friends—the surrealist group in Paris, for instance, produced numerous amazing collaborations, such as the movie L’Étoile de mer by Man Ray based on a poem of Robert Desnos, or the wonderful lithographs that the artist Joan Miró created for poems by André Breton in the series called Constellations.

The photographer Alfred Stieglitz did a terrific series of portraits of his partner Georgia O’Keeffe, incorporating her paintings and sensibility in several of the photos. 

Alfred Stieglitz photo with Georgia O'Keeffe's hands and horse skull

But not all of us have friends as talented as Man Ray, Joan Miró, or Georgia O’Keeffe. If you do have a friend or spouse who is artistically accomplished, great! Collaborate with her or him. But don’t expect emotional closeness alone to produce a successful collaboration.

I think it’s often wise to choose as a collaborator an artist whose work you admire, but don’t necessarily socialize with. You might get to be friends in the course of your collaboration, but that’s not a crucial part of the process. The important factor is that you appreciate each other’s work, and that your artistic styles, themes, and visions harmonize and combine well together.

It’s also advisable to choose an artist who is at least as accomplished in his or her own domain as you are in yours. You want to grow as a writer in the collaboration, to learn from the artist(s) you’re working with. That’s not going to happen if the artist you’re collaborating with is much less seasoned than you are. In fact, choosing a collaborator who is not as accomplished as you are could produce a work of art that is not as effective as your own work, which doesn’t do much for your development as a writer.

The more I work with other artists, the more I feel that personality is also an important factor in choosing a collaborator. When I first began collaborating, I didn’t care about temperament. I just wanted to work with artists I admired. I realized through a series of negative experiences that the stress of working with someone who is difficult or egotistical or just plain selfish is not always worth the result, even if it ends up as a successful collaboration artistically. I know this seems to contradict what I just said about not choosing your friends as collaborators. I do think there is a happy medium, where you work with collaborators you admire and like, but who are not necessarily the people you are closest to.


Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry