Non-material beings and the excesses of collaborative writing

In a 1976 interview with Brazilian-Ukrainian author Clarice Lispector, the interviewer asks why Lispector is describing one of her fictional characters as though she is real. Lispector pushes back, claiming “but the person does exist, I see the person, and she orders me around”. Building on Lispector’s interview and the long history of writers detailing the influence of characters and transcendental beings on their craft, this paper puts into question current understandings of collaborative (creative) writing. Collaborative writing provides many opportunities to expand and challenge dominant Western and capitalist understandings of authorship, and yet, contemporary scholarship on collaborative writing tends to focus on human-to-human relations. Drawing on theories, ambiguities and gaps within feminist and post-humanist critiques of authorship and Donna Lee Brien and Tess Brady’s 12 overlapping categories of collaborative writing in “Collaborative Practice” (2003), this paper aims to expose the metaphysics of substance that determines who and what is seen as collaborator. Ultimately, I argue that collaborative writing should not be understood as a voluntary mode to enter or leave, but rather as a lens or intrinsic ethical component of authorship that needs to be continuously unearthed and expanded.