When The Writing Platform commissioned me to write an article discussing how working collaboratively – as I do from time to time – might have influenced my writing process, I wasn’t immediately sure.

[…] Working collaboratively? Of course much of being a writer and of the publishing process is collaborative even if it is not usually called that. Research and work done with other writers or with agents, commissioning editors, copy-editors, typesetters, proof-readers, designers, photographers, all the way down the line to readers; all of these can perhaps be thought of as collaborations of one sort or another. If you are starting out as a writer and think that you don’t like collaborating with other people, then you probably need to have a rethink and get to like it, as it is a fact of life even in what – to borrow a term from particle physics – might be called ‘standard model’ trade publishing. But in publishing as in physics the standard model is no longer the whole story. The book trade is changing fast, as are the ways that people read and engage with writing, and the book trade is not the only place where such changes – economic as much as technological – are being felt.

It was useful to have a space to think through some of the actual activities and processes that ‘collaboration’ might entail, whether in my work with Blast Theory on Ivy4evr or working on Missorts, my permanent soundwork for the city of Bristol.  Read the whole piece here.