You have a lot of creative license as a GM, but sometimes your vision for an epic campaign doesn’t always meet the expectations of your players. It’s important to make an imaginative world a two-way street, where the players help to evolve the world in which they play.
One way to set-up this collaborative story telling from the start is to use it to create the PCs’ back stories. Once everyone has sat down and introduced their character to the group, go around the table once more and have each player say one thing they know or have heard about the other PCs.
The party’s paladin could reveal that she’s actually the wizard’s childhood friend and the wizard could disclose a failed romantic relationship that has created an uneven tension between them. It’s these kinds of details that makes the party relations feel a lot more real and create complex motivations for the group to stick together.
Of course, there’s a lot of potential for abuse. One character could invent a detail that puts all the other PCs several thousand gold pieces in debt to her or drop a tale that goes against another player’s vision for his character. But, every time I have seen this collaborative method used, it has never ended with a bad result. Players actually want to work together and are eager to support one another in their heroic tales.
So, the next time you get ready to start that campaign or introduce a new player to the group, don’t wrack your brain trying to come up with plot hooks to weave the characters together. Just sit back, let the players do some of the work, and watch them have fun with it.
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I started Dungeon Mastering with secondhand AD&D materials in 1996 and have run a vast number of D20 campaigns, from cliche' medieval adventures in a kingdom made of Lego bricks to fighting zombies and the mob in the mid 1930s. I try to make the gaming experience as enjoyable, fast-paced, and easy to play as humanly possible. 
Totally agree. I NEVER let a player make a character without my being there. It’s always a collaborative process, and helps the GM make the character a very real part of the world. The player wins because plots and subplots then gravitate around his character.
I never get tired of this topic. If I’m running a game with more than two players I’d NEVER want them creating their characters in a vaccuum. With two at least you can throw them together easily enough, but I still prefer the link to be there from the start.
As for the GM being involved, that’s practically a must for me.
I prefer to get in on the ground floor as a GM, but I’ve had to several times (due to problems coordinating with players) bring in someone and conjure up their relationship on the fly. It’s not the preferred way, but can definitely be done if you have strong hooks in the surrounding environment/world to bring people in with.
For my groups, we tend to always talk to each other about what we’re doing, so much so that I’ve developed a habit of stipulating, clearly, if for one reason or another I DON’T want them to know each other when they start.