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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!

Q. What is a WikiStory?
A. A WikiStory is a collaborative story in which the entire story's contents can be edited by anyone.

Q. Sounds like fun, where do I begin?
A. Just start writing! You could read what's already been written, and contribute to that if you'd like. Or if you'd just like to share some ideas, pick a spot and start writing! Don't worry if it doesn't go with the story, someone will probably re-write it in order for it to fit. If you need help with text formating, try TextFormattingRules.

Stories and Projects

Stories:

BearAndDragon (started by SusanEdwards)
TheFelsonStory
[CarpeWiki:GeschichtenWald] (German, started by OliverGassner with a group of 12-14 year old pupils)
LavenderSky

Wikis:

WriteHere - A wiki devoted to collaborative writing.
SoLaSI - A wiki devoted to thinking about the potential and problems of collaborative creativity.
[Eversea]
The [Fiction Wikicity] - Browse existing stories or participate in collaborative construction of new fiction.
[WikiStory.com] - WikiStory.com allows you to write a short story together with other authors or to write one alone but share it with and receive feedback from thousands of others.

People doing this

Possible Problems

stories are started from a small nucleus without clear goals
authors do not really collaborate but write their story within the story
- attempted solution for the first two items: [the WikiStory.com Guidelines system]. The Guidelines system encourages people to state a direction of a story so that authors can work together towards a common goal.
(technical) when to story grows over multiple pages, there is no natural way to keep it together and separated from other stories
- attempted solution: [Subpages].
there are no clear expectations or rules, the authors do not know what freedoms they have (edit only their own writing, change that of other authors)
the authors have to act as a team, so they must be able to rely on each other and they must have a common view of the goal the want to achieve (have fun for a few hours or write a book within a year)
- Again, the common goal can be stated using the [WikiStory.com Guidelines system]. I personally think it's okay for, say, a person to only contribute a few paragraphs to a year-long novel project. They could be valuable paragraphs. (Though I agree that the length of a writing peice may influence the style of writing and how a person writes, and thus a common view remains important across all levels of input.)

Possible Solutions

develop a set of clear rules that help the authors to collaborate
(technical) use a hierarchical wiki so that parts of the story can be kept in subpages within a branch of a wiki.
Use a rhizome structure so that the independent minded can add their own nodes that end up being linked into a larger overall structure. This is discussed in detail at [SoLaSI:WikiRhizomeTheory]. We've also been discussing it over at community wiki at CommunityWiki:MattBowen.
Offer a variety of Projects/Project Pages for writers to work on/at with stated goals and discussion areas. This way, everyone knows what they are getting into.
[WikiStory.com Guidelines system].

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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