[Home]CollaborativeStoryWriting

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Every now and then people try to use wikis to write stories together. This page may gather experiences from different wikis and look for ways to achieve the desired results.


Hello, and welcome to an experimental wiki storytelling endeavor!


Stories and Projects

Stories:

Wikis:

People doing this

Possible Problems

Possible Solutions


Discussions

Story Writing at Meatball

I have never been 100% sure of what is OnTopic for MeatballWiki. But my reasoning for starting the project here was that I likened a swarm of WikiStory writers to an OnlineCommunity. Since MeatballWiki "deals with online culture, especially how people online come together naturally in groups", I thought that maybe people would come together naturally to have fun evolving a story.

I think the main problem is that MeatballWiki does not have enough fantasy fiction writers to give your story the necessary momentum. Don't be discouraged by that. Instead, if you are interested in pursuing this, would you be interested in starting a new collaborative fantasy writing wiki? That would be very cool. -- SunirShah

Perhaps MeatballWiki has the experience to help people to get this going by its meta-capacity. -- HelmutLeitner

I haven't ever been thinking about it 'til Susan came along with the BearAndDragon stuff. I first reacted in a way analytical, then started a disturbing new story in it - no, obviously I'm not the cooperative type of writer. From my part rather wikiconversation will boil down to a tellable story than the attempt to make a tellable story using wiki will turn out a result. I do see all wikiconversation as one big story. Recently the term of WhirlOfMeaning? came back to my mind (never elaborated nor on http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Whirl_Of_Meaning nor in my head) . There is no direction no "Stringenz" in the story, except in what you can tell what has changed in the overall views of a problem within time. Nobody knows the middle of it. We get an idea about it comparing the different points of views on it. You do not move toward the middle of a problem, you move sideways. Alone your path is an eternal orbit. Together you move sideways as well. But together - watching each other move sideways - we can create the gravitation that finally makes us approach the unknown middle. It's tolerance and the will for integration that makes us advance. Has nothing to do with collective writing, me know. At least not with such with a beginning, a middle part and an ending, not at all, right. -- MattisManzel


A "simulacra pastiche" hypernovel

I wonder if anyone knows of a novel that is entirely simulacrum (aside from Ulysses) and pastiche. I was reading PatternRecognition? by WilliamGibson, and this page on CollaborativeStoryWriting, and I am thinking back to HyperPolis, and I had an idea.

Based on the early Web Art where a script went off into the net and pulled random images, text, etc. and arranged them randomly in a collage, why do it randomly? Why not build a story entirely from fragments of other people's lives?

There certainly is enough dramatic material on LiveJournal alone, but the whole Web at large has so much of people's LifeInText that can be reconstituted into some "simulacrum of the zeitgeist," to use latté terms. Or in other words, a terribly unique story of the totally average.

The tension in this technique is that there are archetypes of people, since we are all mimics, but it is built from individuality that is singled out for its uniqueness. The characters in the story may eventually normalize to some average representation of an archetype, but only at a high level. The closer you get, the more you see the individuals that composite that archetype, and how they may not actually fit the archetype.

So, I would use a line found on some website to add to a character, or steal a story from someone else's personal life. And then link back to the original source, which is how I think the RightToSample should work in a DigitalNetworked world--and it's the "OpenSource" (um, literally) way of writing, versus the Mark Twain technique of hiding his plagiarized sources so he could make himself appear as auteur.

Like a Monet; lilies at a distance, blobs of oil up close.

A for instance. Via LiveJournal:charles I found [this] image:

And I thought the line about being reincarnated with greener eyes was fantastic. By itself, it is just a line, but put together with a thousand other similar lines it can form a portrait of a character. So, if I went on an anthropological dig through LJ perhaps I could find some other poetic dreamers whom I could rip off aspects of their lives.

Another vignette, [I don't even like porn sites] would fit in well with a cube dweller character.

I mean, there are all these interesting little bits of life that are simply digital flotsam.

I wonder how that would work in terms of legal liability though, but there are now an awful lot of CreativeCommons blogs. -- SunirShah

Principia Discordia was cut 'n' paste, as is Schott's Miscellany, but I don't know of a novel that does that. Working all that digital flotsam into a recognisable plot might be the difficult bit. --MartinHarper

The live-journal culling idea. When done right, it can be really neat -- for a print execution of this idea, check out __The Laramie Project__ by Mosés Kaufman. Hopefully SoLaSI will have some discussion of DocuDrama? up shortly, and feel free to work on this project at WriteHere, if you'd like. For the legal issues, you may want to look at http://wikilegal.wiki.taoriver.net, though that's not entirely on topic. -- MattBowen


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