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Comment by ptudan | Hacker News Reader

I'd say literature come to mind the most.

A Tale of Two Cities, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Beowulf, Pride and Prejudice were the first ones that come to mind, though there are of course many more. Wish I knew more of the non-western classics

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This is such a fascinating observation to me. Why has literature largely resisted team based creation? Writing teams exist for other mediums, but literature is almost exclusively written by a single creator who then loops others in after the work is completed.

A counterexample is The Expanse series [1]. Its author is listed as "James S. A. Corey", but that's actually a "pen name" for two people who work collaboratively [2]. But as you say, such examples are the exception.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_S._A._Corey

Seems like there are a good amount of two person writer teams though (in other mediums as well such as screenwriting). But teams of say 5 do not seem to be writing many novels.

Could be down to marketing - we like the idea of an "auteur" with a unique voice when we read a novel. Or it could be that having a consistent "voice" (or writing style I suppose) is a feature most people enjoy having in a novel.

I guess it depends on how you view this. Almost all books are edited by someone professionally. So it's not the sole work of the author. They are also published and marketed and yada yada. If you say okay all that stuff and even editing doesnt count you still have huge best sellers that are team based works.

All those book for sale at your grocery store? They sell massive copies and are not written by the author. Douglas Preston, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and all those romance novels... A lot of those are written by someone AND someone else. In practice they are written by someone else and they slap a big name on it to sell copies. Those books keep the literature world running even if they are not great art.

Literature already is team based.

I'm pretty sure the only reason we don't recognize this, while we do with movies, is that there aren't rules governing who's credited and what their credit looks like, as there are with movies. You don't get "Story by X, written by A, B, & C, based on characters by Z", and instead one or maybe two names are on there—you do sometimes see a writer credit (separate from the more prominent "created by") on some of those long-running series where the original author stopped somewhere along the way, or two listed for outright collaborations between known authors.

If book writing operated under the same rules as screenwriting, this would all be a lot more visible.

You might be surprised about screenwriting - the rules are mainly just about the money. Script doctors could potentially be doing anything from some minor rearrangements to whole rewrites. A lot depends on how much they care that their name is or is not on the piece.

That makes sense. You see people thanked in books but its pretty rare to see any specifics other than an editor or publisher.

> Literature already is team based.

Don't forget editors. Maybe in some cases their impact is limited, but in other cases whole story lines are excised thanks to them. That's basically their job: to smoothen the narrative.

Most written works probably would look very different if not for the editor.

It might be profit margins. TV writers make more, and have writing teams. Book authors make less, so maybe it’s hard to split that and still live off of it.

And they do already split some of the work for the text with people like editors.

The RAM of a collaborative group can't store a whole story very well. Even a single author has trouble keeping all of the loose ends tied together, but when you have to traipse over everything in a conversation at <39 bits per second, it's very hard.

There is another example of this effect: mathematical proofs typically have just a few contributors, and very often one. But mathematics has an overall consistency that allows different people's proofs to be simply glued together at the "edges", unlike literature where that doesn't work at all.

The writing for shows is team based. Its just not this way for lit. I think it's just a cultural habitual thing. No real logic behind why.

Japan still uses fax machines. No logical reasoning behind why.

>The writing for shows is team based.

Your typical TV show has more plot holes than cheesecloth, though. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

I think it's fair. Lit has tons of plot holes. It's just not talked about as much and less noticeable. Harry potter, for example, has tons of plot holes.

When things cost money to produce, funders get more input. That said many TV and film projects are the vision of a single auteur, when the auteur has the pull to get total creative control from funders or else funds his own project. It’s just that this person is a director or executive producer instead of a writer.

As others have said, it's more of a crediting thing than the actuality.

Brandon Sanderson, a modern fantasy author, is famous for having an entire corporation of editors, storyboarders, and researchers. But only his name goes on the book.

I've studied Shakespeare a fair bit, his plays were certainly not written truly solo. But as the lead creative, alongside with humanity's love of hero worship, only his name stood the test of time.

The most efficient way known to share the idea for a story between two minds is to write the story, which obviates the need for collaboration.

I think this is how software development should be done as well. Software, like literature, requires one to hold all the context in order to avoid contradictions and to get things to fit together.

I think in most cases the best software is made by one or two individuals rather than large teams.

And don't even get me started on how much faster it is. Scrum is the mind-killer.

In software, as in writing, you have editors which request changes during the review process. Nowadays one person can't hold the whole program in his head. Some people lack soft-skills and so they pursue the myth of the solo developer.

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