
Can You Write a Novel as a Group? - lermontov
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/can-you-write-a-novel-as-a-group
======
phoe-krk
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.

~~~
laser
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](https://apple.co/2jV2ZOa)

~~~
phoe-krk
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.

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logfromblammo
I have written portions of a few novella-length chain stories on bulletin
boards.

If you ran the whole board topic through a style filter and then edited it for
consistency and continuity, one or two might even be somewhat readable.

My guess is that you need a number of editors proportional to the square root
of the number of authors, and anything greater than two authors requires a
style manual, character reference guides, and a story map. Otherwise it's kind
of a disconnected mess, with dangling plot hooks everywhere.

In order to not kill the topic, you have to write it sort of like comic pages,
where there's a miniature cliffhanger in the last panel, to get you to turn
the page. Except you're goading the next person to pick up the story and carry
it for a few more paragraphs.

If it goes on for long, you get a sense for which of the regular posters
should be next. It's been a while since we had some expository dialogue, so
everybody waits for X to post. Y likes to write thrilling action scenes. Z
drops in romantic subplots. W inserts political intrigues. U throws in
gratuitous plot twists. T is the troll that tries to kill all the characters
and burn all the scene settings in every post. S explains, after every T post,
about the recurring nightmares that one of the characters has every night.

Mainly, the fun is that you get to see the story unfold without doing all the
work to make it unfold.

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Wistar
An earlier group-penned novel "Naked Came the Stranger" was published in the
late 60s. It was written by a bunch of newspaper journalists as a joke poking
fun at other novels of that era. It became a bestseller. Some years after it
was published—when I was in my budding adolescence—I discovered it in my
parents' library and devoured it although I didn't understand everything in
the story. My mother was a bit aghast when she found it in my room.

~~~
jccalhoun
A more recent homage to this is "The Diamond Club" by Patricia Harkins-Bradley
which was created by listeners of a podcast as a parody of 50 Shades of Grey
[http://dctvpedia.com/The_Diamond_Club:_A_Novel](http://dctvpedia.com/The_Diamond_Club:_A_Novel)

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jhunter1016
You can do anything with writing. There are no rules. Whether the world likes
the outcome is a different story altogether.

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stakhanov
Why would anyone _want_ to do that?

It seems to me like humans have a basic desire/need to see their own
creativity come to life and to truly take ownership over that creation without
other people meddling. This human need largely goes unserved in our economic
system which, in my mind, explains why someone would opt to work on open
source software on a weekend writing more code, after having spent a 40-hour-
workweek having written code, or to write a book about marketing, after having
spent a 40-hour-workweek having worked in marketing, etc.

So, if you are going to go to the trouble of writing a novel, how on earth
would it occur to you to not avail yourself of the opportunity to satisfy that
need?

~~~
laser
Because humans are social animals, and far more people seem to have a need for
social contact than to see their own creativity come to life, as evidenced by
what most people spend their free time doing (not writing code or books, but
enjoying time with family and friends). A creative social activity viewed as
an enhanced social activity instead of a degraded creative one is perhaps the
perspective you're looking for?

~~~
stakhanov
No, not particularly what I'm looking for, but it's probably to do with my own
personality traits rather than any universal truth... You make a valid point.

But the thing about human desires is that, typically, you want to fulfill
_all_ of them, and you can easily satisfy the need for creativeness by working
on a book solo for a couple of hours, then satisfy the need to socialize by
helping your significant other out cooking a meal and raising a child.

To speculate a bit further: I would suppose that lack-of-creative-outlet is
more likely to be unmet as a basic human desire in most people than lack-of-
socializing, although I do grant that loneliness is on the rise.

And, last but not least, if the goal of writing the novel is to write a _good_
novel, there's an argument to be made that creative endeavor is what it's
actually _about_.

------
mncharity
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.

------
jseliger
_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/](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.

------
jonshariat
I remember doing this with a friend via email in college.

The rules were loose but you would write about a paragraph of the story and
email it back. The experience was unique. You had some control of the story
but not full control. You were both along for the ride and the story felt
unique.

------
johnrgrace
Being overly focused on the "lit fic" genre they've overlooked the Wild Cards
series, one of George RR Martin's projects.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards)
25+ books, a pending TV show. Most books being mosaic novels with individual
chapters written by specific writers, some standalone novels.

Disclosure I've been a publisher of works in this series, but the glue that
has kept this project together is their contract. If an author kills or
damages a character they give up their share of revenue which stops people
from painting characters into impossible corners.

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tokai
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.

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AndrewStephens
This is unusual but not that rare. When I was younger I wrote half a hard-
boiled detective novel with a friend, alternating scenes every week or so over
email. We even had a rule that we wouldn't discuss the direction of the plot,
which lead to some amusing twists.

Plenty of books and more that one author (sometimes credited, sometimes not).
Things like movie tie-in or spin-off novels might pass through several hands
to ensure brand-consistancy before being published.

This group seemed to have a lot of fun (and success). I am slightly jealous.

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aussiegreenie
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.

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coldcode
I worked on one at StarText in 1983 or 1984, a bunch of people wrote various
chapters most of which were almost unrelated to other chapters, then I wrote
the final chapter somehow bringing all the parts together. I'm sure it's long
gone to bit dust.

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ohiovr
reminds me of this
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Nights)

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

