Twice as nice or double the trouble? The rise of co-authored novels

Evelyn Waugh is credited with saying “I never can understand how two men can write a book together. To me, that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.” Tom Clancy called co-writing “the ultimate unnatural act”. Real literature, we’re told, is born from solitary genius.

But co-writing has a home in almost every other form of artistic writing, and we’re seeing it increasingly in fiction. Is the archetype of literary talent – hunched over a typewriter, chain-smoking and wringing prose out of blood, sweat and tears like Ginsburg, Woolf or Burroughs – still worth defending?

Co-authored books, assumed to occupy the realm of “lesser” or genre fiction, are treated with something between disdain and suspicion, as if the purity of authorship is somehow diluted; collaborative fiction tends to be associated with books that rely on formulaic elements. The collaborative approach’s bad rap isn’t helped by the industry of brand name authors who appear in huge letters at the top of the cover while some lesser known scribe gets a “with ____” credit in smaller text at the bottom (along with a suspicion they’ve actually done most of the work).

Among the 425 million books he’s sold worldwide, James Patterson, the 800-pound gorilla of the movement, has co-written with more than 30 co-authors. But that hasn’t stopped contemporary Stephen King calling him “a terrible writer” (as Patterson claimed in 2009) and that “I don’t respect his books because every one is the same”. Many agree – his work has also been described as “paint by numbers”.

Of course, the way Patterson works might actually vindicate the lone writer figure – according to a 2015 Vanity Fair article (which described him as “the Henry Ford of books”), he doesn’t actually write. He issues a detailed outline to his collaborator, then revises the manuscript as many times as necessary.

Sydney author Candice Fox, who’s co-written with Patterson nine times, likens the process to two people organising a wedding. “We pick our strengths and then there’s a thousand phone calls and emails,” she says.

But however much (or little) respect collaborative fiction has, it’s not going anywhere. You couldn’t think of two artists from distinct creative aesthetics, but mystery thriller director M. Night Shyamalan and romance author Nicholas Sparks co-wrote Remain, out now and with a film adaptation coming this year. Then there’s Gone Before Goodbye, from thriller maestro Harlan Coben and actress Reese Witherspoon.

Fox is in good company – in 2018 Patterson co-wrote a novel with Bill Clinton (though one wonders if some unnamed scribe did the actual writing – it’s difficult to imagine a former US president hunched over a laptop at 2am, stressing over a crushing deadline).

Most other written art forms not only invite but demand co-writing; it’s rare to see fewer than four or five names behind an academic study, simply because the credited scientists have performed the experimentation, not written the text. We’ve also seen how many writers get on-screen credits in movies and TV, but even that barely scratches the surface. Rewriters and script doctors make a very good living without being credited, and producers, directors and actors can all order their own rewrites to punch up genre elements or dialogue, all of it overseen by the labyrinthine rules of on-screen credit imposed by Hollywood unions.

Then there’s non-fiction, where one party might be the topic expert and the other might be the wordsmith, defined but separate skill sets combining for a book that’s as much about the information as the prose.

Perhaps that explains the squeamishness about fiction coming from more than one writer. Unlike a movie or a research project, the words on the page are the product. And when we invest in art – which we do when we buy and/or read a novel – we might expect it to be the pure vision of a sole artist because we assume the competition or compromise of too many voices have diluted the quality.

But maybe it’s time to shrug off the lone genius myth – as a 2024 Financial Times story said, literature has “become snooty about collaboration”. If you read writing blogs or talk to authors who’ve done it, the upsides of co-writing are beyond doubt, from the reduced workload to making you accountable for getting out of bed and going to work.

Whether co-writing in a literal sense (doing a chapter each and rewriting each other) or alone, no author exists in a vacuum. Writing partners Ali Berg and Michelle Kalus have had such a successful collaboration that 2025 marked the release of their fourth book, Love Overdue, and constant input from others was a critical part of Berg’s former career in advertising copywriting. “The best work comes from bouncing ideas off someone else, so to me, writing novels together just felt natural,” she says.

Berg might even be highlighting one of book publishing’s dirtiest little secrets – that not even the lone geniuses of literary history worked alone. As Anna Funder’s Wifedom revealed last year, George Orwell’s work was immeasurably influenced by his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

Australian author Justine Larbalestier, who now lives in the US with husband and co-writer Scott Westerfeld, agrees writing isn’t at all solitary. “If you look at the acknowledgment page of the average novel there’s usually 30 or 40 people,” Larbalestier says. “They’ve been involved in various ways, and usually quite intimate ways.”

Most writers co-write before they even plan to do so, Larbalestier adds. The pair, who had individual careers before working together on their first “official” collaboration The Mortons (set for release in July), say they’ve been critiquing each other’s work since day one. “It’s like co-parenting is a lot easier than single parenting,” Westerfeld says.

And that’s all aside from the power of unconscious communication we learn when we really know a co-writer (or spouse). “I think I already have a little lobe in my brain which says, ‘Oh, Justine’s not going to like this’,” Westerfeld says.

Fox talks about a past novel (not one of Patterson’s) where editorial contributions were allowed from major territories including Germany, the US, Britain and Australia. “I ended up with two and a half thousand comments in the margin that I had to deal with,” she says, laughing.

But there’s one more caveat that might trip up co-writing devotees. We don’t read literature just for plots, but by hearing a story told in a voice we love. Writers all have one, but how can you meld (or force) different ones together in a single novel? Berg says that her and Kalus read, re-read and edit each other’s work so much it’s almost like a third distinct collaborator arises. “We often can’t remember or recognise who wrote what by the end,” she says.

Fox also reminds us that being a novelist involves writing in different voices anyway – and it can change between or across books or even mid-scene with point-of-view shifts. “I have a lot of first person characters in my standalone books,” she says, “and I want them to all sound different.”

Even when she writes with Patterson, she sometimes takes on a voice more like his – and vice versa. “He can kind of take on my voice, particularly by allowing my sense of humour to come through.”

Co-writing can be akin to marriage. Berg describes the necessary ingredients as “Trust, humour, commitment and the occasional tough conversation. We both carry our weight because we’d be devastated to let the other one down, and we can keep writing when one of our worlds expands or implodes. Between us, we’ve had five babies during our last two books, so tag-teaming has been essential.”

So our bias against co-writing might be one to chalk up alongside the innate preference for unprocessed foods (science will tell you some processing methods increase nutrition or food safety). As readers or publishers we “just know” a single author is better ... but we might still be entirely wrong.

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