Collaborative fiction

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Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by two or more authors who take it in turns to write a portion of the story. A collaborative author may focus around a specific protagonist or character 'owned' by an author in a narrative thread, and then passes the story on to the next writer for further additions or perhaps a change in focus to a protagonist 'owned' by the next author. Alternatively, one author might write all the portions of particular subplots, and other narrative threads might be shared. Which author then integrates the whole and smooths the work into professionally submittable form depends solely on agreements between the collaborators, as does whatever percentages of remuneration are earned by each party. Thus, since royalty payments may outlive the individual authors, these matters are generally agreed to in advance, using written contractual terms, while the collaborators are outlining and designing the fictional work. An example of a collaborative writer who uses this technique is Eric Flint.^[1]

1 Origins
2 Forms of guidelines
3 Role-playing games
4 See also
5 External links
6 Further reading
7 References

[edit] Origins

Collaborative fiction seems to have grown from two distinct sources. Traditional fiction writers and writing circles may experiment in creating group stories, such as Robert Aspirin's Thieves World and MythAdventures. Writing games for collaborative writing have a tradition in literary groups such as the Dadaists and the Oulipo. The advent of the internet has seen many such collaborative writing games go online, resulting both in hypertext fiction and in more conventional literary production. For example, the Bean's bar forum, known as 1632 Tech, has been a prime force behind the many works in the popular alternate history 1632 series under the aegis of Eric Flint — especially The Grantville Gazettes. Author and scholar Scott Rettberg's paper "Collective Narrative" discusses connections between avant garde literary groups and online collaborative fiction.^[2]

The other source for collaborative fiction came out of the practices of table top and computer roleplaying gamers and related 'fandom' activities. Table top roleplaying has always been an exercise in collaborative fiction, but with more structured rules. Gamers of this variety may naturally wish to practice the more creative aspects of their craft 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 depth' by third party computer game, science fiction, anime, and similar companies.

[edit] Forms of guidelines

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 constitutes an acceptable contribution.

Common rules deal in

Enforcing a specific genre
Not killing off or otherwise permanently changing a major character owned by another author
No God Mod'ing, i.e., not making a character a God, invincible and never wrong when all other characters are not similarly endowed
No writing for another author's characters, unless agreed by the 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.

[edit] Role-playing games

Role-playing games can be seen as a form of collaborative fiction, and some games are played with the specific goal of producing stories.^[3] This is particularly true of online text-based role-playing games (OTBRPGs). Most of the OTBRPG groups have a board of editors that approves characters and resolves disputes.