Collaborative Fiction

From Virtualsoil

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Collaborative fiction is a form of writing together where each author writes a portion of the story, or writes focusing around a specific protagonist they own, and then passes the story on to the next writer for further additions or perhaps a change in focus to a protagonist owned by that author.

Collaborative fiction can be fully open with no rules or enforced structure as it moves from author to author, however most collaborative fiction adopts some form of 'writers guidelines' on what is or is not an acceptable contribution.

Common rules deal in:

  • Enforcing a specific genre
  • Not killing off or otherwise permanently changing a major fictional character owned by another author
  • Sticking to a certain 'point of view'
  • Keeping a certain pacing, theme, or style emulation
  • Keeping up grammar and spelling and staying to a certain language
  • Sticking to rules regarding adult content.
  • Staying with the story.
  • Minimum and / or maximum word counts per contribution.
  • Restrictions on or requirements to work together outside the story over plot and other elements.
  • Restriction on who can contribute and how often when the work is being put together in an open area such as an online forum or mailing list.


Collaborative fiction seems to be growing from two distinct camps. On the one hand you have traditional fiction writers and writing circles choosing to experiment in creating group stories. The growth of the internet has seen an explosion in these groups. The other main camp has come out of the mix of table top Role-playing_games and computer role-playing games gamers and related fandom activities. Role-playing has always been an exercise in collaborative fiction, but with more structured rules. It has been an almost natural evolution for gamers of this variety to try their hobby out without using the heavy structure of gaming engines. For computer roleplayers and genre fiction fans, much of the push has come from the effort to create fan fiction for popular characters designed by but not explored to 'satisfactory depths' by third party computer game, science fiction, anime, and similar companies.


See also

Examples

  • Collaze introduces a new model for collaborative fiction writing. Most of the group writing projects use commonly available forum software to accept small chunks of submission from various users. So far this type of writing has been fun but has not generated any publication quality work. Collaze works differently. It breaks a story project into synopsis, chapters, characters, and plot ideas. Any user can start a project by providing a title and synopsis. Once published, a project is open for contributions, allowing users having different levels of writing competency to contribute. Users not keen in writing a full chapter have the option to add plot ideas and character sketches, which don't have very strict word requirements. They can also submit alternate titles for the story. A chapter however, has a minimum requirement of 1000 words, and is targeted towards more serious writers. Writers are free to use the plot ideas and characters submitted by other readers or writers. The same chapter can have contributions from multiple writers. There is a 30 day period for each writer to better his/her work based on the reviews from readers. Once the 30 days are over, the contribution that is rated best is selected as the chapter and the next chapter is opened for contribution. Readers and writers always have access to a built-in dictionary and spell-checker.

External links

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