back
30 comments
A lot of online roleplaying is exactly that: two or more people cooperatively telling a story. (Disclosure: been roleplaying online for over 15 years.)

I am actually in the process of writing a tool that facilitates that process and allows one to edit, manage, reorder individual posts and paragraphs, and spatially order them on a timeline. I'll throw it at HN when it's ready enough.

There are also variants like questing (main writer(s) and a community of players who vote on direction and sometimes write short story add-ons), see SpaceBattles and SufficientVelocity forums. A lot of it is fan fiction (like most online writing) but there is original stuff in there:

https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/forums/quests.29/

https://forums.spacebattles.com/forums/roleplaying-quests-st...

Yeah, a similar case to the one in the article is the author "James S. A. Corey" of The Expanse fame. The pen name covers a pair of direct writers working together, and the additional indirect writing efforts over a few years of tables full of RPG adventurers.

(Re: your project. I've long toyed with tools in that way, but never quite finished one. Have you taken a look at Storium? That's currently the most interesting, currently released and used tool of such a type as I'm aware of. I keep meaning to actually find a game in it.)

What platform and tools are you building with, and how far in? I created a roleplaying iOS (swift) app and Vue website, both on a shared Elixir Phoenix / Postgres / Elastic Search backend which currently has 1.5k DAU / 50k daily messages exchanged that I haven't created such tools for yet. Possible collaboration? https://apple.co/2jV2ZOa
Common Lisp + Qt + PostgreSQL so far. I haven't seen your tool yet, but it does look similar to what I've been thinking of.
Yep. I used to be pretty active in the NationStates roleplaying community, and it could be anywhere from simple "each person just writes one's own posts" to "two or more people hopping onto Google Docs and writing what amounts to a chapter's worth of fiction".

I've been trying to get back into it, but writer's block is a bitch.

I just wrote - How does your tool differ from Scrivener?

But I think I get it now. Is the idea that your tool lets you take blog-style posts from multiple authors and let you rearrange those? (As opposed to a bunch of posts composed by yourself)

AFAIK, Scrivener is a single-player app. I want mine to be server-client by default, with stories accessible and editable by multiple people.
> (Disclosure: been roleplaying online for over 15 years.)

Where? I’ve stopped long time ago and miss it a bit. Care to recommend any sources?

Furcadia, Tapestries, online forums, nowadays also Discord as many forums died out.
Thank you!
I have written portions of a few novella-length chain stories on bulletin boards.

If you ran the whole board topic through a style filter and then edited it for consistency and continuity, one or two might even be somewhat readable.

My guess is that you need a number of editors proportional to the square root of the number of authors, and anything greater than two authors requires a style manual, character reference guides, and a story map. Otherwise it's kind of a disconnected mess, with dangling plot hooks everywhere.

In order to not kill the topic, you have to write it sort of like comic pages, where there's a miniature cliffhanger in the last panel, to get you to turn the page. Except you're goading the next person to pick up the story and carry it for a few more paragraphs.

If it goes on for long, you get a sense for which of the regular posters should be next. It's been a while since we had some expository dialogue, so everybody waits for X to post. Y likes to write thrilling action scenes. Z drops in romantic subplots. W inserts political intrigues. U throws in gratuitous plot twists. T is the troll that tries to kill all the characters and burn all the scene settings in every post. S explains, after every T post, about the recurring nightmares that one of the characters has every night.

Mainly, the fun is that you get to see the story unfold without doing all the work to make it unfold.

An earlier group-penned novel "Naked Came the Stranger" was published in the late 60s. It was written by a bunch of newspaper journalists as a joke poking fun at other novels of that era. It became a bestseller. Some years after it was published—when I was in my budding adolescence—I discovered it in my parents' library and devoured it although I didn't understand everything in the story. My mother was a bit aghast when she found it in my room.
A more recent homage to this is "The Diamond Club" by Patricia Harkins-Bradley which was created by listeners of a podcast as a parody of 50 Shades of Grey http://dctvpedia.com/The_Diamond_Club:_A_Novel
You can do anything with writing. There are no rules. Whether the world likes the outcome is a different story altogether.
Why would anyone want to do that?

It seems to me like humans have a basic desire/need to see their own creativity come to life and to truly take ownership over that creation without other people meddling. This human need largely goes unserved in our economic system which, in my mind, explains why someone would opt to work on open source software on a weekend writing more code, after having spent a 40-hour-workweek having written code, or to write a book about marketing, after having spent a 40-hour-workweek having worked in marketing, etc.

So, if you are going to go to the trouble of writing a novel, how on earth would it occur to you to not avail yourself of the opportunity to satisfy that need?

> Why would anyone want to do that?

Funny -- I had the opposite response when reading the headline: I can't understand why collaborative authoring isn't ubiquitous in the industry. One of my favorite parts of watching a blockbuster movie is the credits: I sit there as all those names scroll by just marveling at the accomplishment that this huge group of people collaborated on. ("What a privilege", I often think, "to be able to work on that team.") I am writing a novel now (mostly solo, sadly), but the best chapter in the book was co-written with my daughter. My creative juices run deepest when they are mixed with someone else's.

Writing plays is the counter-example that comes to mind first. Say "Beaumont" to an English major and he will respond "Fletcher", whether or not he has read their plays. Shakespeare collaborated on at least one play. (Two Noble Kinsmen?)

The Goncourt brothers wrote novels together until the one's decline and death--the linked piece mentions duos as more common.

Why would writing with someone else necessarily leave the need unsatisfied?

Because humans are social animals, and far more people seem to have a need for social contact than to see their own creativity come to life, as evidenced by what most people spend their free time doing (not writing code or books, but enjoying time with family and friends). A creative social activity viewed as an enhanced social activity instead of a degraded creative one is perhaps the perspective you're looking for?
No, not particularly what I'm looking for, but it's probably to do with my own personality traits rather than any universal truth... You make a valid point.

But the thing about human desires is that, typically, you want to fulfill all of them, and you can easily satisfy the need for creativeness by working on a book solo for a couple of hours, then satisfy the need to socialize by helping your significant other out cooking a meal and raising a child.

To speculate a bit further: I would suppose that lack-of-creative-outlet is more likely to be unmet as a basic human desire in most people than lack-of-socializing, although I do grant that loneliness is on the rise.

And, last but not least, if the goal of writing the novel is to write a good novel, there's an argument to be made that creative endeavor is what it's actually about.

Has anyone seen an "overview of the design/possibility space" for group writing?

For illustration, single authors have interacted with support communities in a variety of ways, from blogging almost complete chapters, to discussion forums brainstorming plots and characters. What are some others? And how does single and group authorship blend, given early readers, and writing groups, and collaborative research, and so on?

I don't have a feel for the design space. This post prompted the thought that it's richer than I'd been considering.

I've failed at creating social infrastructure for a hobby project around transformative improvement of science education content. It seems clear I'd need a diverse hybrid of multiple support processes, but the path to minimum viable process has been a challenge. So I'm hoping for "oh... that's an interesting possibility I'd not considered" fodder, as I found this post to be.

in 1969, twenty-five Newsday journalists published an erotic novel called “Naked Came the Stranger,” under the name Penelope Ashe, with a deliberately inconsistent style—the group’s ringleader wanted to prove an ironic point that any book could succeed if it was filthy enough. (The novel became a best-seller; the hoax aspect, revealed a few weeks after its release, was a boon to publicity.)

Someone wrote a hilarious oral history of Naked Came The Stranger: https://www.wnyc.org/story/naked-came-stranger-oral-history/. It's all writing and presumably SFW, as well as being an amazing story—and perhaps an amazing story about recognizing market conditions, then capitalizing on them.

I remember doing this with a friend via email in college.

The rules were loose but you would write about a paragraph of the story and email it back. The experience was unique. You had some control of the story but not full control. You were both along for the ride and the story felt unique.

Being overly focused on the "lit fic" genre they've overlooked the Wild Cards series, one of George RR Martin's projects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards 25+ books, a pending TV show. Most books being mosaic novels with individual chapters written by specific writers, some standalone novels.

Disclosure I've been a publisher of works in this series, but the glue that has kept this project together is their contract. If an author kills or damages a character they give up their share of revenue which stops people from painting characters into impossible corners.

I lurked around when The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra was written. It was absolute chaos, but very entertaining. The collaborative environment was extremely hostile though still productive. The open google docs text was repeatedly vandalized and deleted. With version control handled ad hoc by the authors. Even the (self)publication process ended up running in parallel with multiple different covers and prints (and lot of accusations of people profiting from printed copies).

I don't know if you can call the book a novel, or even readable. But there is an attempt at a plot somewhere in the mess of Tao Lin flavoured chan-style prose.

This is unusual but not that rare. When I was younger I wrote half a hard-boiled detective novel with a friend, alternating scenes every week or so over email. We even had a rule that we wouldn't discuss the direction of the plot, which lead to some amusing twists.

Plenty of books and more that one author (sometimes credited, sometimes not). Things like movie tie-in or spin-off novels might pass through several hands to ensure brand-consistancy before being published.

This group seemed to have a lot of fun (and success). I am slightly jealous.

What a silly question...what do they think "writers rooms" do? Most movies and TV is written in writers rooms.

There is not enough money in novels to bother but it is trivial if needed.

I worked on one at StarText in 1983 or 1984, a bunch of people wrote various chapters most of which were almost unrelated to other chapters, then I wrote the final chapter somehow bringing all the parts together. I'm sure it's long gone to bit dust.
reminds me of this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights
You can do/create anything as a group. Whether it will be good is another question.