Can You Write a Novel as a Group? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#21

Post by tokai » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 6:52 PM UTC

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.

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#22

Post by beardedman » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 7:12 PM UTC

You can do/create anything as a group. Whether it will be good is another question.

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#23

Post by jseliger » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 7:17 PM UTC

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.

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#24

Post by phoe-krk » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

jeffwass wrote: post #19

phoe-krk wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#25

Post by phoe-krk » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

laser wrote: post #11

phoe-krk wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#26

Post by phoe-krk » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 7:35 PM UTC

rpastuszak wrote: post #7

phoe-krk wrote: post #4

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.

> (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.

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#27

Post by aussiegreenie » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 8:26 PM UTC

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.

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#28

Post by yellowapple » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

phoe-krk wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#29

Post by WorldMaker » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

phoe-krk wrote: post #4

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.

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.)

Re: Can You Write a Novel as a Group?

#30

Post by mncharity » Thu, Sep 05, 2019, 1:36 AM UTC

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.