My blog started out as a solo project, but it is increasingly morphing into a full time collaboration with my wife Johanna. The first essay she edited was “Childhoods of exceptional people” and the first one we co-wrote was “Dostoevsky as lover.” We haven’t really figured out how to attribute the work properly, since I do all the typing and write in first person (we dislike prose written in first person plural). But as a general rule: if the piece is well-thought through and researched, that means Johanna has been in the driver seat. For example:

“Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born”

“On agency”

“Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process” was her idea, but we couldn’t agree on how to write it, so I ended up finishing it alone. One day, we’ll do her version and it will be much better, I fear.

The pieces that I write on my own tend to be more emotional in tone:

“Looking for Alice”

“Sometimes the reason you can’t find people you resonate with is that you misread the ones you meet”

It is fascinating to co-write pieces: it is a bit like I’m the subconscious oozing with ideas and images, and she is the prefrontal cortex, looking at things, evaluating, noticing logical holes and things that need to be deepened. It is like a merging of heads. But it is also time consuming, and tends to generate 5-10x more words than end up in the final draft. And when I get tired, I goof of and write something more emotional. That gives me more flow, but it doesn’t transform me the way that our collaborations do. I can’t get over how sweet it is that we get to do this!