If an alien comes to Earth, seems plausible the thing they'd be most surprised by is that books are usually written *by one author* We wouldn’t build a skyscraper alone. Are we really so bad at cognitive coordination that we can’t coordinate 20 authors to write a fantasy novel?
All the writers I know, including myself, extensively mine other people in conversation for ideas, insights etc and to refine their existing ones. But they’re the only one spending all their time and energy doing that as a job, then writing down the results.
