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Coauthored Literature - TV Tropes

  • ️Mon May 03 2021

Written literature is usually a solo endeavour. This is another way to say, "books usually only have a single author". This isn't always the case, though. The hows of collaboration depend on the people involved. It can be as impersonal as one person giving the other an outline or as close as lifelong partners hashing the entire thing out together. At its best, coauthored literature supports each author's strengths and shores up their weaknesses. At its worst, the authors get in each others' way and produce something incoherent, if they make it to publication at all.

Works by House Pseudonyms are a subset of this, as it groups multiple authors of a work, therefore making its works automatically coauthored, so listing them here is redundant and unneeded. But since it's not specific to literature, its examples also go here.

Similarly, Outlived Its Creator works must be co-authored, because the work must outlive its original creator by having a second one. But since that trope is not specific to literature, its examples also go here.

Books usually aren't authored by entire teams as in Loads and Loads of Writers, but it's happened. If one author contributed rather less than the other, that's a Nominal Coauthor.

Examples:

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By Creator 

By Work 

Fanfiction

  • Paradoxus: While the primary writer is Bloom_Farella, she acknowledges the contributions of Daybreak, Popsicle, and Crowgirl as co-authors. The four came up with the general idea of the fic and all work refining its worldbuilding, characters, and plot.
  • PokéBattles: The community was tight-knit enough that some of the versions were collaborations between authors. Arguably, the network's policy of one version per unique combination of authors encouraged this—Got an idea that doesn't fit into your current version but you want to do more than one battle for? You need to find a coauthor or two for it that you're not working with elsewhere.

Literature