Flying Solo, As Author, For a Change

Sometime this week or the next, my fourth book, Brave New Pitch: The Evolution of Modern Cricket (HarperCollins India 2012), will make its way to bookstores and online book-sellers. My fourth book differs in one crucial regard from those that have preceded it: I have not co-authored it with anyone; its jacket lists but one name, mine, as the author. (Summing up, the blurb says: ‘In Brave New Pitch, Samir Chopra takes a hard look at cricket’s tumultuous present, and considers what could and should lie ahead.’)

This is a novel feeling, a journey to a strange land. Flying solo?

I like collaborators. Not dastardly Vichy-types but the diverse set of co-authors that have brought my writing projects,  thus far, before Brave New Pitch, to fruition. While working on my doctorate I carefully managed my awe of my Putnam Prize-winning adviser while drawing upon his genius to help me navigate the complexities of mathematical logic. My dissertation–on new models of belief revision that accommodated inconsistent beliefs and relevance-sensitivity–bore my name on its spine but the stamp of his exacting attention to detail.

And then there was the military aviation historian whom I did not meet until after the publication of our book (a history, the first, of the India-Pakistan air war of 1965).  We talked on the phone and generated a blizzard of emails (he lived in India, I in the US and Australia); his presence was always palpable in constantly redefining my notion of good history. We used no sophisticated file sharing software; we simply maintained a repository of book chapters, and sent the other an email when we edited a file. It worked; somehow, at the end of it all, we had a book, a good one.

Later, while working on a book about the liberatory potential of that gigantic collaboration called the ‘free software phenomenon’,  I found a co-author four floors down from me; we went biking, drank beers, went on double-dates, and squabbled endlessly over writing. Every single sentence was negotiated, an exhausting experience essential to the form and content of the final work. We stored our files online, worked on them together. And I mean ‘together’; we put four hands on the keyboard, and miraculously, managed to write that way.

Later, while working on a book on how current legal theory could and should accommodate artificial agents, I negotiated with a collaborator who often preferred long periods of autonomous activity in isolation. For the first time, I used software for writing collaboration; it wasn’t perfect but it introduced some much-needed structure to the writing process. I became an expert at change-tracking software; I became used to repeated iterations and pass-throughs of chapters in response to close readings by my co-author.

I’ve negotiated many power relationships in these partnerships; from dissertation advisers to good friends (deleting either’s sentences requires sensitivity and tact). Each collaborator has enriched and complemented me, and, in becoming part of my cognitive resources, has been an essential agent in my self-realization. The muses only visit while we work; mine include my collaborators.