Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

The stories of three fiction-writing collectives, on three different continents.
Three women typing on a single typewriter.
The notion that novelists should be solitary creators has long been deeply ingrained, but the success of the Alices, the Helenas, and Wu Ming challenges that assumption.Illustration by Ka Young Lee

It all started on a weekend away for the Booksluts, a Sydney book club with the motto “We’ll read anything.” Six of the group’s eight regular members were discussing “Crime and Punishment,” and talking about the club’s upcoming tenth anniversary, which they dreamed of celebrating with a Trans-Siberian Railway trip. They jokingly decided that they would fund the trip by writing a novel together. Much vodka had been consumed by this point, and plot discussions degenerated into mass hysterics.

But the next morning the friends went out and bought butcher paper and Sharpies and spent all day brainstorming. They decided that their novel would be a rural romance, set in the Australian outback, and agreed on the backstory of their heroine, a city girl who inherits the farm where her father—now mysteriously disappeared—grew up. Sparks would fly when she meets the handsome (and engaged) cattle farmer next door.

The Booksluts returned home with assigned scenes to write and unspoken doubts that the project would go any further. Everyone was surprised when the completed scenes began arriving, like clockwork, in their in-boxes. A few months, meetings, and reshuffles later, there was a core group of five women—Jenny Crocker, Madeline Oliver, Jane Richards, Jane St Vincent Welch, Denise Tart—a few of whom had writing experience (mostly in journalism or comedy), and some of whom had no writing experience at all. What they did have was practice, thanks to about a decade in the same book club, at picking apart novels and voicing their opinions to the group with confidence and respect.

For the next three years, they met as often as they could—usually at least once a week—and wrote in every spare moment they had, between full-time jobs and family duties. They figured out a system to manage the logistics and decision-making quandaries of group writing along the way. They took a road trip to the farming region in which their novel was set, far west of Sydney, and realized that they’d got a lot wrong: the soil was black, not red; the white stuff on the bushes wasn’t trash but cotton that had fallen off trucks.

The erotic passages were a struggle to write at first. They each submitted anonymous versions of the book’s first sex scene, an approach they later described as “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” but they quickly figured out who had written what—they knew one another too well—and they very vocally disagreed about what was legitimately steamy. (The scene that made it into the book blended all their versions.) With time, they lost their inhibitions about writing, or talking, about sex, but they remained cautious about how they labelled these scenes as e-mail attachments, in case their teen-age children got nosy. (“Washing Machine Instructions” was a good one, “because we knew no fifteen-year-old would open the document.”) They’re proud of the risks they ended up taking: their heroine masturbates early in the novel, often a no-no in traditional romance, and they included a controversial scene in which she has sex with her love interest in a cave above her father’s skeleton.

Friends and family were fascinated by the project but sometimes seemed to be betting on how long it would take for the group to fall apart. Yet, through house moves, job changes, and illnesses, the women kept writing, because it was fun—exhilarating, really—to create something together.

In late 2013, they sent their manuscript, “The Painted Sky,” to a major Australian publisher. It was the only place they submitted it, and they were stunned by the response: I read your book, could not put it down. The publisher was impressed with the novel’s unified voice and evocative descriptions. Next thing, they were picking out a pen name for their soon-to-be-published novel. They settled on Alice Campion—their publisher had recommended a surname starting with a letter that would be stacked at eye level in bookstores, and a first name with an Australian flavor (cf. Alice Springs).

To celebrate, the Alices, as they now call themselves, got matching bracelets made from antique typewriter keys, and immediately began working on a sequel.

Around the same time, in Cape Town, South Africa, three women—Sarah Lotz, Helen Moffett, Paige Nick—decided over a champagne-fuelled lunch to write a series of choose-your-own-adventure erotic novels. The “Fifty Shades” books were then in their heyday, and the women were annoyed that, after decades of feminism, the heroine of those books was the stereotypical “innocent virgin” being “broken in” by a man. They thought it would be fun to invent an experienced heroine who puts her sexual partners through their paces. They all already had busy writing-related jobs centered around creative collaborations with others—in advertising, as a horror/speculative writer (who sometimes wrote with a partner), and as a “recovering” academic/editor. They were all workaholics.

On the way home from lunch, one of the writers started composing a scene in her head; she didn’t stop writing until late that night. Then she e-mailed what she’d written to the others. Another member of the group, an insomniac, took up the baton. The third called her agent and pitched the premise to him. “This is either mad or brilliant,” he said. On the basis of the pitch, their first book, “A Girl Walks Into a Bar: Your Fantasy, Your Rules,” sold in twenty-one countries. They had just over a year to write three books in the series. For their pseudonym, they chose the compound Helena S. Paige. (“Helena sounded more porny than Helen, and Sarah only agreed to us including her initial,” they explained.)

Though novels written by three or more people are rare, the Helenas knew that co-writing duos are not uncommon, and that other forms of artful entertainment (TV shows, movies, plays, songs) are usually the product of collaboration. They didn’t think novels should have to be any different—especially in a genre like erotica, where readers aren’t necessarily seeking a distinctive view of the world but are looking for an engaging, arousing read with an unexpected plot twist or two.

They started relay writing, and soon hit some obstacles. One of the writers found that she froze every time the heroine was about to have sex. (“Sex scene goes here,” she’d write, after doing the buildup.) Another was suffering from temporary partial retrograde amnesia after being hit on the head during a home invasion. (“When I regained parts of my memory, four months later,” she likes to joke, “I discovered with amazement that I’d co-authored an erotic novel!”) They often resorted to choreographing the sex scenes to see which bits should go where; on one occasion, they realized that their heroine would need three arms to manage all that they had her doing in a particular encounter. They banned “lady garden” from their vocabulary of euphemisms, bought a pink cock ring to see how it worked, and formed a pact that, if any of them died during the writing process, “one of the others would immediately decamp to their computer and delete their browser history.”

Happily, they discovered that they had complementary skills: plot mistress, workhorse, ruthless editor. It was gruelling, and insanely fun. It was a project that none of them would ever have dreamed of doing alone. They started calling one another the Elves: as in the Brothers Grimm story “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” writing a novel as a group, when it’s going well, can feel almost magical, as the book seems mysteriously to grow and grow overnight, quite apart from any individual effort.

The notion that novelists should be solitary creators has long been deeply ingrained. More than twenty years ago, a group of Italian men set out to debunk that idea. They were part of an artist-activist network called the Luther Blissett Project, which took its name, for convoluted reasons, from an English soccer player who’d had a brief, disastrous stint, in the early eighties, playing for A. C. Milan. The L.B.P.’s biggest chapters were in Bologna and Rome, and they collaborated mostly on counter-cultural pranks against the mainstream-media establishment. At a meeting of about fifty L.B.P. collaborators in 1995, somebody suggested that the Bolognese chapter co-write a novel, as an experiment. Four men—Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Luca Di Meo, Federico Guglielmi—volunteered, and got down to work on what they called a “meta-historical” novel.

For inspiration, they looked to past art coalitions in Italy, such as surrealism. The men were all from working-class backgrounds, and had put themselves through their university studies of philosophy or history by doing precarious jobs, from working in the kiwi plantations near Bologna to being mailmen or night couriers. None of them had previously written a novel, but they were used to collective effort as a means of resisting authoritarian and capitalist power structures. It felt natural to them to write fiction together, too. They hoped that a co-written novel might better resist being commodified.

They all loved to obsessively research historical periods, so they decided to build on this process to write their first novel, “Q.” They took notes on sixteenth-century Europe—the Reformation, the Peasants’ War—then connected the dots, “improvising on the material during long conversations,” refining characters, scenarios, story lines. They drew on cinematic terms to define the phases of their work, dividing their “script” into “narrative sequences.” They leavened the dense historical material by writing what is, essentially, a thriller: the main character, a religious reformist, is pursued across Europe, during a thirty-year period, by a spy from the Catholic Church.

When “Q” was published, in 1999, under the “multi-user nickname” Luther Blissett, it became a best-seller in Italy, sold around the world, and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. Afterward, the group added a fifth member, Riccardo Pedrini, and they decided to call themselves Wu Ming—a name sometimes used by Chinese dissidents to sign political tracts, which means “Anonymous” or, if pronounced differently, “Five Names.”

The Wu Ming collective went on to write more meta-historical novels together, among them “Manituana,” set mostly in the American colonies in the lead-up to 1776, and “Altai,” set in the sixteenth century and narrated by a Venetian spy catcher turned fugitive. They also pursued solo or duo side projects, with the group’s approval; Wu Ming 4, for instance, founded an Italian association for the study of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work. All of the original Italian editions of their books can be electronically downloaded at no charge: “Q” was a copyleft publication; some of the books are now available under a Creative Commons license.

In Italy, the distinctions between “high” and “low” art are less stringently gate-kept than they are in the English-speaking world, the Wu Ming group says. While their various collaborative projects are often described as avant-garde, their metahistorical novels are proudly situated at the popular end of the literary spectrum. They read a bit like books Dan Brown would write on acid. Chapters end with cliffhangers; “Altai” tells of a man who “had seen bodies pulped by the artilleries of Ippolito d’Este, embarkations by Ottoman pirates, throats slit, corpses with half a face and one wide-open eye.”

Today, Wu Ming consists of three members: Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 2, and Wu Ming 4. They meet once a week, at Wu Ming 2’s house, in Bologna, from 9:30 A.M. to 1 P.M.—while their partners are at work and their kids are at school—and write and rewrite in the days between meetings, sharing their research via e-mail. When they’re deep into a novel, they meet every other day. They now manage to live off their writing; even though their books can be downloaded for free, physical sales are robust, especially in Italy.

The novels are part of a broader Wu Ming ecosystem: they’ve collaborated with a street artist and a magician; they are the inspiration for the Wu Ming Foundation, which runs “itinerant” factory-storytelling workshops; they participate in other collectives, including one that co-hikes and co-writes narratives critical of the traditional machismo of mountaineering (and also “decontaminates” mountain sites where neo-Fascist clubs have held rallies). They call themselves a “band,” and have produced records; they have described their book tours as “almost gratefuldeadesque.” But they refuse to be photographed or to go on TV, as they dislike the cult of individual celebrity that surrounds authors.

Their novels have been panned now and again, often by more conservative Italian critics. Wu Ming 1 translated lines from the negative review he finds funniest and e-mailed them to me. “In literature, four brains grouped together to write a book equal zero brains, maybe less than that,” the reviewer wrote, adding that their work is “a fruit salad of comic books, old movies, TV clips, screenplays gone mad, foreign phonebooks,” plus descriptions of “old-time paintings and raving imitations” of the adventure novels of Emilio Salgari.

The pleasures of collaborative fiction writing can seem so bountiful that one might begin to wonder why anybody would choose to do it alone. The varied methods of working as a group—a mixture of talking it out in person (what the Wu Ming collective calls “free-form improv”) and writing in solitude between meetings—give people with different creative temperaments equal chances to contribute. Many of the co-authors said that brainstorming with their collaborators was a safe space in which no idea was too ridiculous and no suggestion would be disregarded. In place of the loneliness and perpetual self-doubt of the solitary writer, they had camaraderie and encouragement from others.

Many of them described being spurred to write better after reading a co-author’s excellent scene. They all felt accountable for doing the work, turning up at meetings, not letting the others down. When the group gets writer’s block, they see it not as evidence of weakness and failure but as a sign that they’re on the wrong path as a group. They cultivate an attitude of “upward compromise,” accepting that they need to do something radical to get the creative juices flowing again—“make it crazier,” or delete everything, or use an “uncanny element, or a plot device that no one else would.”

The Alices worried, initially, that readers wouldn’t know what to make of a “weird five-headed” author, or would think that they were “gimmicky.” They wondered, too, if the fun they had might dampen the reception of a group-written work. “With a novel, people seem to want proof you suffered while writing it,” they said. But everyone they met was intrigued by their group-creation story. Book tours for all three groups were a riot. Even turning up for readings in empty regional libraries wasn’t soul-destroying, because they weren’t there alone. Sharing the responsibilities of publicity has other advantages: the Wu Ming members, by taking turns, manage to attend around a hundred and fifty events each year to meet their readers across Italy; the Alices and the Helenas were able to continue working their day jobs while promoting their novels.

So why are group-written novels so rare?

There is, of course, a financial disincentive: divvying up advances and royalties means it’s not likely to be a lucrative endeavor. (Then again, neither is writing a novel by yourself.) There are also entrenched assumptions about what a novel should be that serve as a deterrent. Film and TV scripts depend on many people with different skill sets—producers, directors, actors—to bring the final creation into being; as a result, those scripts are a blend of artistic and technical elements. But novels aren’t generally viewed as technical documents that can be broken down into their constituent parts; they’re more often imagined as being written from the heart. People tend to doubt the “sincerity” of a group-written novel for this reason, the Alices believe. “It’s hard for the culture to get its head around this idea of shared hearts,” they said.

People also tend to assume that a committee could never create a consistent voice in a medium that often foregrounds interior states. The authors of two infamous group-written novels from the past didn’t even bother aiming for synthesis: “The Floating Admiral,” which was published in 1931, was written by thirteen members of the Detection Club, including Agatha Christie and G. K. Chesterton, with each author taking on different sections, without much overlap; and, in 1969, twenty-five Newsday journalists published an erotic novel called “Naked Came the Stranger,” under the name Penelope Ashe, with a deliberately inconsistent style—the group’s ringleader wanted to prove an ironic point that any book could succeed if it was filthy enough. (The novel became a best-seller; the hoax aspect, revealed a few weeks after its release, was a boon to publicity.)

“People have a prejudice about literary style,” one of the Wu Ming members has said. “They think each author has his or her own voice, one voice. We think that each author, be it individual or collective, has many voices.” Still, like the Alices and the Helenas, the Wu Ming collective has adopted an approach that has a unifying effect: once a scene has been written by one person in the group, it is rewritten by someone else, then handed on again for rewriting to another member. This continual rewriting breaks down any claims to ownership of characters or scenes, and means that each author has to adapt his or her personal input to the overarching style of the group. (The first scene in “The Painted Sky” was reworked fifteen times by the Alices before the novel was submitted for publication.)

While the Alices and the Helenas regard the ability to suppress one’s ego in order to co-create as a particularly female superpower, the Wu Ming group operates on a similar principle: “Writing together implies being humble.” You have to accept, they said, that “you aren’t carving your words in stone or marble, you’re writing them in sand with a stick.” They insist that the general inability to see the possibilities of novelistic collaboration has everything to do with ideology. “It is all about capitalism, all about expectations you have in the marketplace of ideas, of books, of the publishing industry,” they said, “not about the novel being intrinsically more difficult to write together.”

There are frustrating elements to the process, naturally. Version control became such a nightmare for the Alices that they eventually elected Denise Tart as the “sacred KOW,” or Keeper of the Words. She spent huge amounts of time monitoring characters’ ages, plot continuity, family trees, even the floor plans of houses. (At one stage, they realized that they’d all visualized the farmhouse differently.) She carefully saved named and numbered versions of scenes and took notes during meetings, so that the group could assign revisions. Tart, the others say, can still remember the zodiac signs of every character from their books, and has been known to send group e-mails commemorating the big life events of their characters. (“Today is the anniversary of the day Nina and Heath bonked in the cave!”) The Helenas also established some basic rules up front, one of which was that when there were disagreements the majority would rule, and “no sulkies” were allowed if someone didn’t get her way.

The worst aspect of group writing—an experience shared by the Alices and the Wu Ming collective—is the pain of losing a member over a falling out, or creative differences. When the Alices had almost completed their first novel, after years of working together in “remarkable harmony,” one of the group, Madeline Oliver, who had founded the Booksluts, disagreed with the pace of the final editing, and thought that the group shouldn’t just accept the initial terms offered by the publisher. Her objections were overruled, and she felt that she was subsequently sidelined from the group. She refused to go to the book’s launch, “feeling that I couldn’t play ‘happy families’ when I’d been so brutally excluded.” She did not join the others to write the second Alice Campion novel, “The Shifting Light,” which was published in 2017.

“The collaboration was both one of the most exciting and inspiring times of my life, and one of the most painful,” she said. “It hasn’t soured me on collaborative writing, not at all; in fact, it taught me the importance of managing my own expectations and being honest.” She is now writing a memoir about the experience.

Three of the Alices subsequently co-wrote an e-book guide to group writing. In it, they recommend formalizing the terms of engagement before getting started, in case things go pear-shaped. The e-book includes samples of a Code of Conduct (No. 1: I am committed to seeing this book through to completion; No. 12: I will maintain my sense of humor), and a Joint Authorship Agreement, which makes explicit what the group should do if an author drops out, and what terms govern the future use of the group’s pen name.

The Wu Ming members have also struggled with keeping their group intact. Wu Ming 3 dropped out of the collective, in 2008, because he was going through what he described as a “difficult personal situation,” with no apparent grudges. Even so, it wasn’t easy. The remaining members have described losing him as “disorientating, to say the least. There was a crisis.” They said they had to start over in establishing a natural group dynamic to “work, write, and interact.”

In 2015, Wu Ming 5 also decided to leave the group, after what sounds like several years of growing estrangement. Things got messy when he published a book as Wu Ming 5 even though he was no longer officially part of the collective, and gave media interviews in which he said that he didn’t identify with the group’s work ethic and public stance. (He also posed for photos.) “It was a little baffling, more than painful,” one of the others said, and “embarrassing,” too, because it was all out in the open. The remaining Wu Ming members decided to formally distance themselves from him, informing the press that they “disliked both his behavior and the book itself, which had nothing to do with our poetics.”

They haven’t seen him since.