The intellect is a fifth wheel…
-Henry Miller, in conversation

He might have said the ego is a fifth wheel. Or self-consciousness is a fifth wheel. Or self-criticism is a fifth wheel. When you write you want to become a conduit, a channel, a pipe from muse into matter. You as a writer do not exist. Only the writing does.

Erica Jong

When I first started to write, as a teenager in the suburbs, I
wanted to be a novelist. I thought that writing books in a
room on my own was all I would do. The work was self sufficient.
For me, as a young man, that was the point. There
were no intermediaries or interpreters - the reader just read
what you wrote. Some people, I guess, become writers
because they're afraid of others or addicted to solitude.
Perhaps they read a lot, or drew or watched television alone
as children. Being with others might be the problem that
isolation can solve.

However, when you are writing at last, the same questions
appear repeatedly. Why am I doing this? Who is this for?
Why write this rather than that? I'm sure people in other
professions don't have an existential crisis every moming.
It's as if you are seeking any excuse to stop. You can, of
course, grow out of these questions, or tire of yourself and
your own preoccupations. Or you can hope that collaboration
will push you past them. A director will have different
doubts and fears. You want to see how others work, and -
why not? - be changed by them.

What will you think or say if you free associate, if you let
your mind run without inhibition? There are plenty of anxieties
there. What, then, will it be like making mistakes, saying
daft things, having strange ideas, in front of someone else?
Will you be overwhelmed or forced into compromise by the
other; or vice versa? Will you feel liberated by them, or will
new fears be aroused? Which fears might they be?

The challenge of collaboration is to find a process where
both of you can be fearlessly foolish; to see whether your
union will be a dilution or expansion of your combined
abilities. Youwant to be surprised by the other; not limited
by them. Neither of you wants to waste time pursuing an
idea that is uninteresting.

However, collaboration is like friendship or like writing;
you can only start off with a vague idea of where you are
going. After a bit, if you're lucky,you begin to see whether or
not there is a worthwhile destination ahead.

I can think of scores of good collaborations. The ones that
come to mind are from dance, or theatre, or music. I think of
Miles and Coltrane; Miles and anyone; and of Zakir Hussein,
John McLaughlin and Jan Garharek; of Brian Eno and David
Byrne. The list could be endless.

It would be amistake to put the purity of isolated creativity
on one side, and collaboration on the other. In a sense all
creativity will be collaborative: the artist works with his
material, with his subject and with the history of his chosen
form.

As weIl as this, most artists, I assume, relish a certain
amount of the unexpected, of chance and contingency of
something odd but useful that might just turn up. What did
you see, hear, say yesterday? How might it be incorporated
into the present work? Something going wrong in the right
way can be fruitful. Another person could be the 'contingency'
that helps this to happen. Maybe all artistic activity
is a kind of collage, then, the putting together of various bits
and pieces gathered from here and there, and integrated
into some kind of whole. How are the elements selected or
chosen? I don't know. It has to be an experiment.

Hanif Kureishi