The TLS is out with an essay on Ray­mond Carver and Gordon Lish, a new entry in a debate I’ve found inter­mit­tently fas­ci­nat­ing. For those who haven’t been fol­low­ing the story, the ques­tion at its heart is how much what we think of as Carver’s writ­ing was actu­ally the work of Lish, his editor. It’s been known for a long time that Lish’s edi­to­r­ial inter­ven­tions were exten­sive, but not until some of Carver’s early drafts appeared—first in a 2007 New Yorker fea­ture and then in Begin­ners, a pre-​Lish ver­sion of What We Talk about When We Talk about Love that’s included in this year’s the Library of Amer­ica Carver—did the read­ing public learn just how much Lish had altered Carver’s orig­i­nal work. (James Camp­bell, author of the TLS piece, notes that Lish had cut most of the sto­ries in Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love by more than 50%.)

As with every lit­er­ary debate, there’s a sig­nif­i­cant per­sonal back­story to the Carver-​Lish drama. It began with Lish’s orig­i­nal cham­pi­oning of Carver, which inspired him, it seems, to claim a pro­pri­etary inter­est not only in the author’s sub­se­quent career but also in the min­i­mal­ist style on which it so famously thrived. And the drama con­tin­ues to this day, nearly twenty years after Carver’s death, with an argu­ment between Tess Gal­lagher (his widow) and Knopf (his pub­lisher) over how much of the pre-​edited work should be released. (Lish seems to have stayed out of the fight, at least publicly.)

But the debate over the authen­tic­ity of Carver’s stories—the efforts to nail down to the third dec­i­mal place what per­cent­age of “his” work was really his, and what per­cent­age Lish’s—obscures what for me is the more inter­est­ing ques­tion: what if it’s simply the case that in writ­ing, as in so many other areas of life, sev­eral people work­ing together can pro­duce better work than a single person work­ing alone?

That propo­si­tion, I sus­pect, would shock no one who’s spent any time at a news­pa­per, mag­a­zine, or cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tions office, but it cuts hard against our ideas of what “creative” writ­ing is and should be. My friend Annie Dil­lard once wrote, in a slightly dif­fer­ent con­text, that “each writer is a one-​man camp, unal­lied and unarmed, a lone bivouac under heaven,” a state­ment that stands as a fine expres­sion of what we expect of our authors. (The ety­mo­log­i­cal link between the words “author” and “authenticity” is no acci­dent.) Let our writ­ers form cadres and coter­ies, we say, let them array them­selves in ten­ta­tive sol­i­dar­ity against the philistines of the world, but when it comes to putting words on a page, let them do it sep­a­rately or not at all.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that col­lab­o­ra­tion is a reg­u­lar fea­ture of most other arts, and not merely at the final stages of buff and polish but early in the primal arena of cre­ation. In music, movies, the­ater, and dance, col­lab­o­ra­tion is at least coequal with soli­tary pro­duc­tion, if not the norm. But in writ­ing the phe­nom­e­non is rare: Wu Ming does it, sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers do it, and I sus­pect every­one will be able to point to their favorite one-​off col­lab­o­ra­tive project as a coun­terex­am­ple. But these are only excep­tions that prove the rule, and are justly treated as the odd­i­ties they are. My ques­tion is, why the rule?