"We have a plan": Collective work in writing a single authored manuscript

On the night the group was going to talk about my book’s final body chapter for the first time, I was exhausted in body and mind. When I got to the meeting I found that most of the group was already there, and that they had pre-planned. They could tell I was losing steam; my chapter written in relative haste was sloppier than usual. They knew what had to be done to the chapter because we had been working together for eight years and they had read nearly everything I had written in that time. They knew how to confront the issue, because over those eight years they had learned all of my secret insecurities about my work, my writing, and my ability to succeed.

I completed my book manuscript by having a professional community of long-standing, which was engaged in my scholarship, and by seeing my ideas and writing through their comments. My short talk will discuss the value of collective, long-term working groups in the completion of large scale, seemingly individual accomplishment. I will consider how the professional value of originality often serves to isolate young scholars from productive, even collaborative, scholarly relationships, and will argue that good scholarship thrives on informal, productive scholarly collaboration while often perpetuating a vision of individual genius.