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

One in the Other: A Surrealist Game for Writers

One in the Other is a game invented by the Surrealist group in Paris in 1953. The game (called l’un dans l’autre in French) started when the poet and group leader André Breton struck a match and decided to describe it in terms of a lion. He said something like, “I’m a lion with a mane of fire, I’m a lion that lives in a little box with a herd of other lions, etc.” The game evolved from that spark.

Paul Hammond describes the rules of the game in his book Constellations of Miró, Breton:

“The rules of ‘l’un dans l’autre’ are straightforward. Let’s assume there are four players gathered in a room. Player 1 leaves the room and mentally chooses an object (object A). Players 2, 3, and 4 debate amongst themselves and come up with another object (object B). Player 1 reenters and is given the name of object B. Player 1 then has to improvise a description of object A—without naming that object—but solely in terms of object B. The game ends when one of the other players divines what object A is.”

The game is based in part on an idea of the ancient alchemists. According to alchemy, each thing contains the seed of every other thing. Lead can contain gold, to cite the most famous example of alchemy. But this applies to all things—a beach blanket can be seen as a cluster bomb, a cube of cheddar cheese can be thought of as a baseball glove, etc.

How can writers use this game for inspiration? The game can be played by a group, such as a workshop, as a warm-up for a writing session. But an individual writer can also assign himself or herself a game of One in the Other, plucking two contrasting objects out of the subconscious, and then knitting them together through metaphor. The result can sometimes be worth saving or expanding on.

The 19^th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud prophetically titled one of his prose poems, “Alchemy of the Verb.” In that poem, Rimbaud says, “For a long time I’ve bragged of possessing every possible landscape…” In the imagination, all landscapes are ours. With One in the Other, each thing is connected to every other thing.

When the Surrealists played the game, they used the first person to become the object that was also the other object: “I’m an hourglass, a part of which, contained in a larger hourglass, is gradually disengaging itself and cutting all ties. I’m opaque, reddish, and elastic. The red sand I contain is turned upside-down every second. I function for an average of several decades.”

The two objects in the example I just mentioned are a baby being born and an hourglass. I find the game also works if the person who is “it” just says, “I’m thinking of an hourglass…” etc.

Here’s an example of One in the Other that I came up with, choosing the random objects “lips” and “a manhole cover.”

I’m thinking of lips you find in the street

I’m thinking of lips that form a perfect circle

I’m thinking of lips with a name molded into them

I’m thinking of lips poured from molten steel

I’m thinking of lips so heavy it takes a strong person to open them

I’m thinking of lips that reveal a world beneath our world

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
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

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer