Who is writing? Exploring writing as a human and more-than-human endeavor

The aim of this article is to explore how collaborative scriptwriting unfolds as a human and more-than-human endeavor by exploring the question: how do entanglements of human and more-than-human participants make a difference in the collaborative script writing of a school musical? With data from an upper secondary school musical project, the article tunes in with agential realism and thinking-with-theory to analyze three events from the collaborative scriptwriting. The article widens the perspective on authorship and discusses the question of who is writing by exploring collaborative writing as unfolding in-between human and more-than-human participants. The article points at how the entanglements of multiple human (students) and more-than-human (e.g. search engines, music, and movement) participants made a difference to the writing by offering a release of tension, humor, and ideas. These differences were highly engaging and affective, yet the students-with-laptop used different strategies when striving to convert the ideas into text. The article encourages teachers to consider how word-by-word-writing in collaborative writing might be counterproductive because it can stall the affective intensity and idea-ing in the writing.