Lord of the reads: +5401
On 3 and 4 October we will be working on a project with some other London-based organisation to write, edit and publish a novel is record time.
The story is gong to be based around some allotments and the character linked by the fact that they all have an allotment.
We have 12 main writers, but we’re looking for lots of other people to help us out with the story, including contributing to a wiki chapter for the novel.
I’d love to hear about anyone’s experience with any collaborative writing projects – what worked best? Have you got any ideas for ways that writers can collaborate?
Anna
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On 3 and 4 October we will be working on a project with some other London-based organisation to write, edit and publish a novel is record time.
The story is gong to be based around some allotments and the character linked by the fact that they all have an allotment.
We have 12 main writers, but we’re looking for lots of other people to help us out with the story, including contributing to a wiki chapter for the novel.
I’d love to hear about anyone’s experience with any collaborative writing projects – what worked best? Have you got any ideas for ways that writers can collaborate?
Anna
Hi Anna
I’ve been involved in a few collaborations. The problem I’ve encountered is that it’s very hard to get a cohesive story out of it. Each writer makes assumptions about how the plot will progress, and how other characters will react to his character. Also, the quality of writing can vary, and I’ve found that the finished piece needed a lot of editing to make it readable.
Oops – just noticed this happened over a week ago. How did it go?
Hi Gerald,
Thanks for your comment! We did encounter the challenge that you mention above, but tried a few things to get a cohesive story in the end. We chose a structure for the story which we thought would work well with collaborative writing – this was having each writer taking on a character who either owned a plot in the same allotments or came across those allotments. In the collaborations that you have done, did you have writers writing into the same document online e.g. google docs?
For the 24hr Book, when writers were penning dialogue between their characters, they were doing it in real time and often talking (via skype, phone or across computers).
We also had a crew of editors come in at the end to copy edit and proofread the work.
You can see whether you think it was cohesive by taking a look at it here: http://www.completelynovel.com/books/76736
Hi Anna
After I posted, I actually looked at what you’d done, and how you’d done it. You were far more organised than the bunch I wrote with – we were basically organising ourselves.
LOL! I’ve just found what we wrote! http://bloggingtonavenue.blogspot.com/2003_12_19_archive.html is the intro to it.
No, we didn’t have Google docs back in those dark ages, so what I did was to create a blog with multiple users. It was a work in progress, although when it started to fizzle out, I was unhappy with how certain authors were developing the storyline, and were taking it down tracks that were conflicting with others. We didn’t have much discussion between ourselves, though, which was a problem.
I’ve started reading the book, and it looks very good. A very successful experiment, IMO.
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