Hey all
It’s the new year and I have a question for you. Do you think it’s possible for a group of people to collaborate on a novel?
In the world today many things are open source, with all kinds of people contributing their unique skills to bring a better product to market. Think about the Internet itself. I don’t think it would have come into being had it not been for a group of nerds determined to create the darned thing.
It needed a crowd to make it happen.
Can the same thing be done with a novel? Is “we better than me?”
Let’s start off with why it might make sense.
Unless you’re Jonathan Franzen, if you’re a writer of fiction, the chances of an advance are practically nil. However if a group did it, you’d be spreading the time and risk around.
What if you had the writing of a novel broken down into a chain of command? And what would that chain look like?
First somebody has to have the idea. Let’s say it’s an historical piece about Sir John A Macdonald pushing the railway through Canada and all the trouble he runs into.
That person posts their idea and looks for other writers (say three) to build a very loose structure.
Then it goes to the researchers (two) who hit the libraries sifting through piles of source material, pulling out intriguing details nobody has heard of before.
Now’s it’s back to the structure folks who sexy it up; and then off to the wordsmiths who write the sentences.
Everyone on the team reads the novel, does a final critique and it’s finally in the editor’s hands (two) and product creation is complete.
Do you think it would work or would it get nasty?
Do you think a group of people, here I’ve got nine or ten, could write a good story?
Or do you think there is something in fiction that requires one person to see it from being a tiny seed of an idea all the way to a book inhabited with living breathing characters.
In olden days I scoffed at this product notion, insistent that a book required a single focused vision to make it truly feel alive. I felt that you couldn’t strip a novel down to simply the sum of its parts and build it like you would a deck.
There is a point to all of this. When Night Town is out the door, I begin on another novel that I’ve already written a first draft of. I’m currently noodling about possibly doing it open source.
What do you think? Do you think a collaborative fiction model would work? It hasn’t really been done before. At least nothing that readily springs to mind.
Let me know your thoughts…
C
I think this is an interesting idea but not on a book that you have already fleshed out in a first draft. It would be kind of like opening up a committed relationship to other partners. It’s one thing if you enter a group collective from the get go and share and develop ideas together. However, I think bruised egos will be the result of letting other partners jump in to a partially made bed. That’s my two cents for what it’s worth….
I remember a collaborative novel – a pretty steamy one from the late 60s called, Naked Came the Stranger. Was a best seller – every chapter had a different author. (I was too young to read though, of course!)
I think individually written novels produce very different novels than collaborative ones. This is not to say that I think one method is “better” than the other, I just think that you need to always keep in mind what you hope the finished product will look like. By its nature, collaboration brings different backgrounds, perspectives and goals to a novel. I think this is an interesting idea, but as Paul said, for a trilogy that already has so much of you in it, it might be very challenging to completely re-open it. Unless you are looking to change the style of writing, I love the idea of having a consistent voice through an entire trilogy. I fall in love with books for not only the stories they tell, but for the unique style/voice of the author. My two cents!
After a period of reflection, I too have come to the conclusion that writing a novel with one or more individuals would likely end up a verbal blood bath. Just the idea of who owns the story (every writer believes the story is their own baby) would be enough to set it off.
You know, I think that it’s this sense of parenting or authoring a book, a painting, any kind of creative act really, that makes it well nigh impossible to share the process. You just get too ownery (if that’s even a word) and all protective.
However, I think that it’s this focused love and commitment to characters and their lives that summons the magic.
I don’t know that a group of people assigned 5 hours of work on a novel per week (one hour every week between 9 and 10 AM say) could do that.
It sounds more like piano lessons or something.
But maybe I’m also nuts and romanticizing writing which is definitely in the realm of possibility.
Thoughts???cb
ordered via mosaic books, a five minute walk away, print on demand, will arrive in a week and a half, 20.50, paperback. Very much look forward to finally reading it!