Collaborative Fiction - Recreational Collaborative Writing

Recreational Collaborative Writing

Collaborative fiction can be fully open with no rules or enforced structure as it moves from author to author; however, many collaborative fiction works adopt some set of rule on what constitutes an acceptable contribution.

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 Baen'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 Rettber's paper "Collective Narrative" discusses connections between avant garde literary groups and online collaborative fiction.

We've done things differently with different works, For our children's book, we had a complete outline. Each of us would write one section each week, and we would revise when we met. This method worked well. By the end, you really couldn't tell who had written what.