Do you have any examples of pieces that were written collaboratively? Do you keep a history of changes and discussions? How do you determine the direction of the story, is there a single leader who makes the big decisions, or is it more egalitarian?
Do you have any examples of pieces that were written collaboratively?
In addition to In Fire Forged (in which I did first-round micro, in addition to contributing to worldbuilding), I give a last pass micro to Lighting Up the Dark (rational Naruto fanfic). I contributed a little to the Second Secular Sermon, although verse is really not my thing. I also have a partnership with Gram Stone that includes looking over each other’s LW posts.
Do you keep a history of changes and discussions?
In Fire Forged has a Skype group, which keeps an archive of our discussion. Since Google Docs aren’t the final publishing form, you can keep comments around, although in practice, once we’ve resolved an issue, the comment/suggestion usually goes away, so things don’t get more cluttered. If you’re interested, this is the Google Doc for this piece. But Google Docs doesn’t keep a changelog, I have no desire to look back at one, nobody I’ve talked to has indicated any desire to look back at one, so there is no history of changes.
How do you determine the direction of the story, is there a single leader who makes the big decisions, or is it more egalitarian?
I more fully discussed this here, but the tl;dr is that experience indicates a single-leader setup usually works best, and is also the only setup I’ve come across. That said, it’s egalitarian in the sense that the primary author doesn’t give any special consideration to the words they’ve written or the ideas they’ve had; in the end, you want the best ideas expressed by the best words on the page. I can’t imagine the author who would pass up improvements to their creative baby just because they weren’t the ones to come up with them.
Interesting! I’d love to try it in my spare time.
Do you have any examples of pieces that were written collaboratively? Do you keep a history of changes and discussions? How do you determine the direction of the story, is there a single leader who makes the big decisions, or is it more egalitarian?
In addition to In Fire Forged (in which I did first-round micro, in addition to contributing to worldbuilding), I give a last pass micro to Lighting Up the Dark (rational Naruto fanfic). I contributed a little to the Second Secular Sermon, although verse is really not my thing. I also have a partnership with Gram Stone that includes looking over each other’s LW posts.
In Fire Forged has a Skype group, which keeps an archive of our discussion. Since Google Docs aren’t the final publishing form, you can keep comments around, although in practice, once we’ve resolved an issue, the comment/suggestion usually goes away, so things don’t get more cluttered. If you’re interested, this is the Google Doc for this piece. But Google Docs doesn’t keep a changelog, I have no desire to look back at one, nobody I’ve talked to has indicated any desire to look back at one, so there is no history of changes.
I more fully discussed this here, but the tl;dr is that experience indicates a single-leader setup usually works best, and is also the only setup I’ve come across. That said, it’s egalitarian in the sense that the primary author doesn’t give any special consideration to the words they’ve written or the ideas they’ve had; in the end, you want the best ideas expressed by the best words on the page. I can’t imagine the author who would pass up improvements to their creative baby just because they weren’t the ones to come up with them.