Does writing together make us more creative?

You write, “A wet ticket dries on the table.” The next person sees that line and sends the ticket somewhere you never had in mind. That is one pleasure of writing together: somebody else’s thought can turn yours in a new direction.

But does collaborative writing make people more creative? The research gives a careful answer. It shows how people develop and reshape ideas together. It does not show that writing a shared poem raises a person’s general creativity, or that a group will always make a better piece.

What happens when people write together

Eva Vass and colleagues spent a year observing creative writing by children aged 7 to 9 in English classrooms. They recorded 13 pairs on several occasions. The children offered images, picked up each other’s words, laughed, disagreed, and returned to what they had written. In some pairs, an idea even took shape while both children were speaking at once (Vass et al., 2008).

This is a close look at a process, not a contest between pairs and solo writers. Most of the work involved stories in primary school. It cannot tell us whether adults become more inventive after writing a few poems together.

Another study of children’s writing describes how talk becomes a shared text: one person suggests something, another changes it, and the final version belongs to both (Rojas-Drummond et al., 2008). It helps explain a familiar reaction: “I wouldn’t have written that, but now I know where to go.” The study concerned schoolchildren making multimedia stories, not people playing Rhyma.

There is a study about poems, too. In Finnish classrooms, 97 seventh-graders wrote on their own and in small online groups. The students tended to enjoy writing together more and said it helped them find ideas. Writing alone gave them more room to write about their feelings. These were students’ accounts and comparisons of their poems, not a test of whether their overall creativity improved. There was no control group, either (Kangasharju et al., 2024).

Does a group come up with better ideas?

Not necessarily. A meta-analysis of brainstorming studies compared groups discussing ideas aloud with the same number of people working separately. The pooled solo writers produced more ideas, and their ideas received higher quality ratings (Mullen, Johnson and Salas, 1991). When everybody has to wait for a turn, some thoughts disappear before they are spoken.

How people work together matters too. A review of electronic brainstorming studies found that online groups produced more ideas than groups talking face to face. Compared with people working separately, though, group size changed the result: large online groups had an advantage; small ones did not (DeRosa, Smith and Hantula, 2007).

Those studies counted ideas for brainstorming tasks, not poems. More ideas do not automatically make a better line. They do remind us to give each person enough room to write down a thought before it slips away.

Does collaborative writing teach people to write better?

There is evidence from second-language classrooms. A meta-analysis of 33 studies found that texts written together were, on average, more accurate than texts written alone. In a separate comparison, students who had first written collaboratively received higher scores for a later individual text. Other outcomes were uncertain, and some study designs reduced confidence in the pooled findings (Elabdali, 2021).

Grammatical accuracy and a score on a classroom essay are not the same as originality. These results cannot be carried over to poetry or used to promise that every participant will develop stronger creative abilities.

Try a small exchange

If you want to feel the process for yourself, agree on four lines with a friend. The first person writes about an ordinary thing: a wet ticket, a cup with no handle, an empty bus stop. The second sees only that line and adds another. Then swap again. Leave each other’s words alone until the end.

When you reveal the whole poem, ask: which line sent it somewhere neither of us planned? That question is more interesting than deciding whether the poem “worked.” For a starting point, borrow one of our prompts for a shared poem. For different rules, try these seven collaborative poetry games.

In Rhyma, people also add one line at a time and see only the preceding line. The full poem appears after the final turn. You can write in World or invite friends into a Circle. It is a way to try the game at a distance, not a method proven to improve creativity. Try Rhyma on Google Play.

The short answer

Writing together can give a text an unexpected turn. Each writer brings a different word, image, or objection. Studies describe that exchange in particular settings, especially classrooms. The broader promise that writing together will make people more creative goes beyond the evidence. You can still pass a line to someone, read what comes back, and notice where the poem changed course.

Sources

• Vass et al.: observations of children’s collaborative creative writing
• Rojas-Drummond et al.: children co-constructing spoken and written texts
• Kangasharju et al.: writing poems together and alone at school
• Mullen, Johnson and Salas: meta-analysis of group brainstorming
• DeRosa, Smith and Hantula: meta-analysis of electronic brainstorming
• Elabdali: meta-analysis of collaborative writing in second-language learning