Revamped (with Inspiration Now?)

Read an interesting book (Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the scenes of a creative revolution) about the 3^rd Golden Age of Television which featured the showrunners of David (Milch, Simon, Chase), Matt Weiner and Vince Gilligan who are the auteurs of The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, respectively.

What I liked best was how these showrunners developed episodes (and thereby entire seasons) in the writing room. Though, each with a different style of managing his writers (damn near fascist some of them, catty – of course – and one, altogether laid back and open to letting writers manage themselves) they all agreed on one thing to help them really explore the story and penetrate its depths and bring to light the wonderfulness of emotional complexity: collaboration.

I don’t know if I agree. Yet, I am a writer of a different genre altogether. TV should be collaborative – after all, you need to produce amazingness at a breakneck pace. How else can you carve out a masterpiece unless you’ve got 5 or 6 heads working on it?

But novels are novels (ie different). Would Tolstoy be the same if he collaborated? Dostoyevsky? Yes, editors aside, novelists have sole ownership of their work. Their vision on the page (as selfish as it sounds).

I am not against collaboration, but I am against someone who I may be collaborating with to try and ‘write me out,’ or push my ideas aside and let theirs shine through. I am a non-confrontational type of person: I won’t fight. Instead, I’ll pick my fucking ball up and go the fuck home and write my own fucking novel. Suffice it to say: go fuck yourself.

But – you scoundrel – my psyche comments: readers provide good feedback to writers to help improve their works.

That’s why I’m torn. Even working solely on novels, you still require the feedback of others. Dare say, I think that’s collaboration. I guess the novelist should surround him/herself with good people who provide valuable feedback. Would those TV shows create such depth if the writers involved were not as good as their fellows? No, the writer room would be a fucking yahoo forum.