mardi 29 juillet 2014

The Importance Of Collaboration Fiction

By Sharron Cantu


One may wonder why team writing endeavors are undertaken. It seems contrary to the benefit of being an independent author and presenting a unique book without suffering the influence of others. However, there are various benefits that can be found in collaboration fiction. Sharing creative control almost harks back to oral tradition where individuals all contributed to stories.

Collaborative works are produced for a number of different reasons. They can be attempted as an educational exercise thus helping all the participants to develop their writing skills. Writing groups often produce such stories. It is also done for commercial purposes where experienced authors decide to work together for various reasons.

When working together in this way, as with any other project requiring people to work together, everyone has to relinquish total control. The unique skills and ways in which each individual works have to be taken into account. Each individual has to be open to encouragement as well as criticism. This can only happen if there is mutual respect. If there is a creative synergy between authors, this can speed the process of writing and increase the motivation of each person.

A major difficulty when collaborating is to integrate all the efforts in such a way as to produce a consistent style. In order to do this there must be a level of mutual respect and egos have to be put to one side. One author may have stronger skills in one area than another and it makes sense when collaborating to use the particular talents of each author. One author may be better at driving a story along whereas another may be better at working on finer details like fine tuning dialogue and settings.

The division of work is done differently in each case. Some collaborations are looser than others with no plot outline from the beginning and authors contributing randomly, as and when they can. Others are very structured with the basic plot being brainstormed at the beginning and each author knowing exactly what they are responsible for, whether it be developing a certain character or writing specific chapters. Sometimes each author will write sub-plots and they will only be interwoven at the end.

Various problems can arise when a group of authors collaborate on a story. One person may feel that the workload has not been evenly distributed or that his or her suggestions are consistently ignored. Another may want to take over and tell everyone else what to do. A clash of egos can result in disaster.

The world of gaming has resulted in some collaborative writing. This is probably due to the role-playing nature of many of these games where characters constantly interact with one another. Other attempts in collaborative storytelling have been done at online websites where a story is begun and then driven forward by visitors to the site.

Collaborative works have the advantage of the experience of all the voices involved. They can also suffer from the fact that more than one person is involved, particularly if there is no creative synergy, trust and respect. The best of these works are very good, offering the richness of many voices.




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