What to Look 4 in a Writing Partner?

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  • #46
    Re: What to Look 4 in a Writing Partner?

    Originally posted by jonpiper View Post
    It just occured to me that no great works of literature were created by writing partners, if I'm not mistaken.

    If novelists can write great novels by themselves, why do screenwriters need writing partners to write great screenplays?
    Because it's a craft more than an art (writing a novel requires both), and sometimes different sensibilities and talents need to come together to make the end product work. Look at Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. Wilder could bring the East European wit and antic imagination to a script, while Diamond brought his American know-how and knowledge of the language. The result is the perfect storms of "The Apartment" and "Some Like it Hot".

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    • #47
      Re: What to Look 4 in a Writing Partner?

      Jake, you're highly qualified to answer the question since you write stories in both forms.

      I've heard others agree with what you say when you consider screenwriting more craft than art, but it seems to me that to write a truely great screenplay, a screenwriter has to get beyond the craft, has to get into the art of the creation. I wonder if a writing partner allows ones art to manifest itself.

      It seems to me that perhaps the time constraints forced upon a screenwriter may be the reason for writing partners and collaborators.

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      • #48
        Re: What to Look 4 in a Writing Partner?

        I think you make a very good point, jon. But if you look at the great screenwriting partnerships (and you could do no better than to look at Billy Wilder and his various teams), you'll see some true masterpieces:

        "Double Indemnity"
        "Some Like it Hot"
        "The Apartment"
        "Sunset Boulevard".

        All were written by Billy Wilder and his partner. They simply went to their office on the lot every day and hashed it out, paced the floor, joked around, made small talk, but in the end they turned out gold. I'd recommend Cameron Crowe's terrific book of interviews with Wilder. He discusses how his partnerships worked at great length.

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        • #49
          Re: What to Look 4 in a Writing Partner?

          "If novelists can write great novels by themselves, why do screenwriters need writing partners to write great screenplays."

          Sorry, Jake, I didn't mean to argue that screenwirting teams couldn't write a masterpiece. Your examples certainly are masterpieces.

          Initially, I wondered why relatively few novels are written by partners while quite a few screenplays are. I'm occasionaly confronted by these kinds of questions for no apparent reason?

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          • #50
            Re: What to Look 4 in a Writing Partner?

            I gotcha, jon. I'm very fond of how the great English novelist Henry Green defined a novel: "a long intimacy between strangers".

            Writing a novel is essentially a solitary business. A novelist tends to have one mine that he or she constantly digs at, which is why Proust once wrote that all great writers essentially write the same novel, only under different titles. He didn't mean that literally, but novelists tend to have certain themes they keep returning to. I can very easily define the themes of all of my books, and can see the preoccupations that lie behind each one. But it took time before they started to fall into place for me.

            The origins of these lie in what defines me as a person, a mixture of my East European ancestry, my cultural roots and upbringing, my childhood--in short, my life experiences which, of course, are unique to me.

            So that writing a novel is sort of like digging into one's psyche, into both the dark and light areas, and also those places which you don't completely understand yet; memories, for instance, which remain mysteries to you after many years. You may tell a story that'll appeal to perhaps millions of people, if you're lucky, but it's a story that came out of the collaboration of only you and yourself.

            On a technical level, a collaboration between novelists (though there are some notable exceptions: Boileau-Narcejac, the French writers who wrote under that one name, including the story from which Hitchcock's "Vertigo" was adapted; and the English writer Nikki French--a husband-and-wife team--come to mind), unless it's a practiced and well-oiled unit, will almost always produce work that, like so many movies, is genre-based (thus fitting into certain formulaic patterns, i.e. the detective novel, the thriller, a tale of horror) and more story-based than character-driven. What you tend not to get are the great masterpieces of the form, which are typically driven by a single-minded vision (as we see in Tolstoy, Proust, Dickens, et al.).

            I'm not sure I'm answering this in exactly the way you'd like, but it's a complex topic, and, on your part, a great question.
            Last edited by Jake Schuster; 12-19-2007, 08:13 PM.

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            • #51
              Re: What to Look 4 in a Writing Partner?

              Thanks, Jake. Your explanation brings the answer much closer.

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