Twice as nice or double the trouble?

RemainEvelyn 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?

Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan and novelist Nicholas Sparks have collaborated on Remain, a supernatural love story.

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