Collaboration

Today, as I was reading the very fine Story Bones blog where Mr. Buchheit had a some commentary about collaborative fiction project being organized on Polybloggimous. It sounds like an interesting project. Basically, he’s gathering a group of people to all work on a story linking one blog to another as the story is written. Each person will need to write 500 to 1,000 words for their portion, AND change some fundamental of the story i.e., a sex change for the main character, a change of seasons, etc. etc. He explains it much better than me. Go on, take a look.

Anywho, I decided, what the hell, I’ll give it a shot. So I signed up and I’m very interested to see how this will all work out. Once sign ups are over (this Sunday I think), the author order will be chosen at random and the story will begin. Each author will link to the previous post, and the following post so the story can be read from one blog to another. It looked like there were a lot of people that wanted to participate the last time I looked.

I've worked on collaborative projects before. They can be fun and they can be frustrating. One I worked on, my friend gave me the story that he had been thinking of and then I would write and bring it to him and he might add a little something but I did most of it. Then it turns out the story he was thinking of was completely different from the one I was thinking of and I totally lost interest. The other one, another friend began a story and emailed it to me with the instructions to write for at least half an hour and send it back and we couldn't talk about the plot at all. That one was much more enjoyable, trying to write the other into a corner and see how he got out of it, seeing what twists and new plot devices the other would throw in there. We went back and forth for over a year and ended up with just over 31,000 words before things kind of ground to a halt. Life just got too busy. You can see what we did with that here.

So, anyway, I'm looking forward to this collaboration thing. Not only will it be interesting to see the outcome, I could always use another excuse to get some writing done.