Collaborative Writing

David Trammel's picture

Ran across this article

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/the-transformative-ex...

which recounts the author's experience as a collabrative writer on a television show.

If you don't know of this type of writing, it usually involves a group of writers, who collectively offer up ideas, make suggestions on those ideas, change and resuggest ideas...well its kind of like a bunch of people making lunch really, where everyone is free to add or remove ingredients, and everyone sits down to sample the results.

The article reminded me of a brief period in the 80s, of "Shared Universes". Those would be collections of stories, often the result of the Universe's writer/creator having published their own book first, which many peopled enjoyed and wanted more of. Realizing that putting out a ton of stories themselves would be time consuming, these writer/creators would open their Universe to other writers.

One such comes to mind, it was a kind of sword and fantasy series "Thieve's World", set in a town name of "Sanctuary", and created by Robert Lynn Asprin. I enjoyed it highly. It was 12 full length anthologies with short stories by many of the top writers of the time.

I read very little fantasy now so perhaps Sophie can tell us if the tradition continues today. I am familiar with just two such, the "Grantsville Gazette" series of anthology from the "1631" set of alternative history books, and the one in the Honor Harrington military sci-fi Universe.

So maybe the tradition continues?

I know many of us have read "Retrotopia" by Greer and enjoyed it, finding the proposed universe he created someplace we would like to live in. Sometimes, having a prearranged foundation on which to lay our idea of a story can help a lot. It seems to me, that with the collective that is here on the Green Wizard site, we could easily lay quite a few firm stones in such a universe. Even those people who don't find writing the fictional stories themselves, could contribute with their knowledge and expertise in background material, writing short non-fictional tutorials themselves to post.

I will let this mull as I am off to Archon this weekend with Sohie Gale for our lecture on "Post Industrial Fiction" Saturday.

I only read one or two of the Retrotopia posts and wouldn't care to return to it, but that's just me.Unless you've lived in Chicago, it would make sesnse to build a world around St Louis. Plus you would have a homemade audience, as it were, and support from local libraries and bookstores. Are you interested in the green initiatives currently going on in Chicago? Do you know anything about Chicago neighborhoods or history? Unless you are interested in doing a lot of daytrips to Chicago, I'd say write local.

I did go on Goodreads and look for lists of favorite shared-universe series .Most of the series listed were a single writer like R.A. Salvatore writing novels set in some D&D world. There were also some long-running anthologies. There was a Heroes in Hell series, edited by Janet Morris, the Wild Card series, edited by George RR Martis, and the Man-Kzin series ed. by Larry Niven. Only the Wild Cards seems to be currently active, but these were fan favorites.

Glad you brought up the subject. When I was doing the crash review at B&N two weeks ago, I picked up a book, Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction by Orson Scott Card, Philip Athens, Jay Lake, and The Editors of Writers Digest. It was a 2013 book and Michael J. Verhole, one of the Eds of WD, did a unit "State of the Genre: Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 21st Century." He had a whole section on shared worlds and talked like it was still a big thing, with a lengthy quote from Lee Greenwood. I read a couple of the Thieves World books, but I've never been much of short story reader. And this was the first time in about two years I'd been in B&N, so I can't say I've been paying much attention to what's on the shelves, but even I noticed at big uptick in Star Wars paperbacks recently. Movie Tie-ins like the Star Trek and Star Wars books are "shared universe." And fan fiction 1) never goes out of fashion, 2) is a great training ground for writers who eventually develop their own characters.

So, I was going to suggest to YOU that if you bring in a group of writers like you hope, you folks might launch your own shared world centered in St. Louis. I've always enjoyed Hamilton's Anita Blake books and thought it might be interesting if you all trashed the city. The shared world might or might not include your Mike Hammer character.

In conclusion, I would suggest taking time to scope out the Huckster room and see how many contemporary shared world series are out there, and ask the dealers what's available.

David Trammel's picture

Good idea to take the time and look at what writers are offering. Most conventions I only have enough time to breeze thru, pick up a t-shirt or two, and take 30 for a back massage before getting back to the Costume Contest's run throughs, which last all of Friday and Saturday.

I am going to begin having monthly get togethers here in St Louis after the convention, primarily for any local writers interested in Post Industrial fiction, so perhaps we can get something going here.

While I do have a pretty good outline on how St Louis fares in my own "Universe", of which both of my stories that made the "After Oils" anthologies are set in, I was thinking along the lines of a Greer based "Retrotopia" shared Universe. If you are going to successfully market and sell a series of books, then it helps to have at least one high profile professsional writer who can attract attention.

I can even see a great place to set the sharing in, that would be Chicago. I beleive Greer mentions in "Retrotopia" that Chicago has fallen back into its early days of being a free wheeling town where anything goes. I could see any number of stories about living, working or even adventuring in such a hub of crime and ill repute, lol.

I would suspect the first thing to do would be to read the new "Retrotopia" book and do a bit of a Wiki on the political, economic and such, of the broken world of the United States of the story. Then you would want to do an open call for people to add things, like what their own state governments or cities might be doing. The contributers could also provide short profiles of any important events or important people.

People who want to write fictional short stories could then use these profiles as additional background for their own stories. As the collective Universe grows, people could flesh out the way that everything is happening.

I'll have to email John and see what his thoughts are about such a project during the Winter.

I'm surprised you don't remember the shared Star's Reach universe Anthology - Merigan Tales... he offered his novel as a ground and we spun off of that. It was interesting, but I think the frame was too broad to really feel like a shared universe - most of the writers seemed to go far away in both time and place from the novel... I loved reading Thieves World until it became dominated by just one writer... and there's another shared world book I read recently, but can't track it down. I love the idea of someone else doing the hard work of creating the setting, but then, I'm lazy.

I didn't get a chance to scope out the books in the dealer room. I don't know if David did. I'm not a short story writer. I'm more the ten-volume-will-I-finish-this-before-I-die writer.

However. On Sunday, after I had slept on it, my subconscious unveiled a whole Post-Industrial world to share. Has anybody seen Circus 1903?

http://www.circus1903.com/

They did the puppeteering for the Broadway play War Horse, and they decided to bring "elephants " back to the circus. Americans have always had itchy feet. They have always wanted to see what's over the next ridge, and even after oll, there will still be people who can't stay put. So I am thinking a theater troupe that travels the broken highways, bringing their wagons from town to town. Some stories can be told from the townie's point of view, some stories can be told from the troupers' view. I wrote out a list of some of the people in the troupe and a brief sketch of the structure , and that could be "canon," but the townies' stories could be--well, all over the map. I have a few ideas for stories...

If anybody would like to play, I can lay it out in greater detail.

I can't at the moment go look it up, but somewhere in After Oil is a short story similar to your idea, with a group of people bringing old TV entertainment (or maybe it was 8mm film) but actually it was a manual imitation of it... something like that. I agree we'll always have wandering entertainers...