8.1: Introduction

Rebecca Ingalls

“Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.”* The speaker in the song, “Yesterday,” laments his loneliness, but the mastermind behind one of the most successful and most covered songs in music history was actually a team of two individuals: Beatles members John Lennon and Paul McCartney. While they might have made it look easy, and while the rewards were huge, these collaborators worked diligently and systematically to create, share, and merge their ideas into what we know today as “Hey Jude” and “Eleanor Rigby.” In one of the later interviews that Lennon did with the mainstream press, he was asked to describe his collaborations with McCartney: “[McCartney] provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes” (Sheff 136–37). Lennon referred to this process as writing “eyeball to eyeball”:

Like in “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” I remember when we
got the chord that made that song. We were in Jane Asher’s
house, downstairs in the cellar playing on the piano at the
same time. And we had, “Oh you-uu . . . got that something .
. .” And Paul hits this chord and I turn to him and say, “That’s
it!” I said, “Do that again!” In those days, we really used to
absolutely write like that—both playing into each other’s
nose. We spent hours and hours and hours . . . We wrote in
the back of vans together. . . . The cooperation was functional
as well as musical. (Sheff 137)

In this merging of minds between artists and friends, one would write a verse, and the other would finish the song; one would start the “story” of a song, and the other would see the plot through (Sheff 139–40). Ultimately, this collaboration would form the core of a band that would produce countless number one hits, sell over one billion records, and reinvent rock and roll (“The Beatles”).

For Lennon and McCartney, the writing stakes were high: deadlines, fans, their integrity as musicians, a potentially galactic payout of profits and stardom. So, it wasn’t just casual loafing around and making up songs; it was inspiration and creativity that had to happen, or they wouldn’t achieve and sustain the success they hoped for. In order to create together, they had to establish and rely on some important elements: an openness to one another’s independent interests and experiences, an ability to communicate productive feedback, a trust in their shared goals. With these components of collaboration working for them, they were able to establish a process of tuning in to one another’s skills and creativity that was so powerful, Lennon could still remember the moments of inspiration, the words they exchanged, and the obscure locations where it all happened. Together, in their collaborative song writing, they were an even greater musical force than they were as solo writers.

In addition to this famous duo, there are many other famous writing collaborations that have produced some celebrated work in popular media: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (Good Will Hunting), Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Simon and Garfunkel, the Indigo Girls, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dog, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the Farrelly brothers (There’s Something About Mary), Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. On a global scale, writing teams have produced memorable Presidential speeches, garnered funding to fight worldwide diseases like AIDS, laid down the philosophical foundations of entire nations, and, yes, made hilarious comedy that has resonated across cultures. They have demonstrated over and over again the tremendous advantages of composing together, and the fruits of their collaborative labors are still growing today.

Your writing classroom can be a laboratory for collaborative work. Though you may be most accustomed to writing on your own, the high-impact, innovative possibilities of collaborative writing can spotlight and enhance who you are as an individual, and how creative and original you can be, when you allow your ideas to mix and develop with others’ ideas. This chapter aims to encourage and support your collaborations from beginning to end by offering insight and tools that you can use to engage work that is challenging, productive, and even enjoyable. You’ll learn about some mindful, structured strategies that focus on planning, communicating, and working with a diversity of perspectives in a group of equal members. You’ll also hear from students who—like you—have experienced the ups and downs of composing with others, and who have found something unique in the spirit of working together.

Why collaborate? you might ask. What’s in it for me? The collaborative work that you take on now in college prepares you for the challenges of higher stakes teamwork that you will encounter in your professional life. The realms of publishing, medicine, law, scientific research, marketing, sales, education, architecture, engineering, and most others show us that collaborative work, and very often collaborative writing, is key to expressing the voices of employees to one another, creating productive change, following legal protocols, communicating with clients, and producing cutting-edge products. Whether it’s the composition of a patient’s medical history, a legal brief, a plan for a company’s expansion, a proposal for a city playground, an application for federal research funds, the instruction manual for repairing a submarine’s navigation system, or a marketing campaign for a new computer, the requirements of many professional writing tasks necessarily call upon a group of people to create, revise, and polish that writing together. The combined efforts of individuals with specific expertise and common goals help to produce the highest quality writing for audiences that expect nothing less.

And, for those of you who have the kind of Lennon-McCartney hopes of making a giant impact on your world, you never know where the ideas of a few smart students working together may lead . . .