Taking Turns

"One-word-at-a-time" was one of the first types of collaborative writing that was explored at the Fiction Wikia. Participants were supposed to take turns adding one word at a time to a growing story. This type of collaboration is a good way to get new participants involved with wiki editing. A serious problem with this type of collaboration is that it only takes one person who is trying to be "random" to derail a developing story. I previously made this rather harsh statement:

"We really need tools that allow collaborators to choose exactly who can participate in a particular story writing effort. If someone is causing trouble, they must be excluded from the collaboration."

Another type of "taking turns" collaboration is "One-paragraph-at-a-time". According to the rules that were established for this collaboration, authors "don't discuss the plot with other authors". Such a restriction puts a serious strain on the process of collaboration. In my experience, good writing collaborations are built on good communication between authors. For example, live internet chat is a good tool that can be used by collaborating authors.

An option for writing collaboration that falls between "One-word-at-a-time" and "One-paragraph-at-a-time" would be to have authors take turns writing one sentence at a time. A recent experiment at Twitter comes close to this, but uses Twitter's arbitrary 140 character size limit for successive contributions. The collaboration is called abookduct. Using Twitter to do a writing collaboration that can be coherently sustained through time is a serious challenge. Before I could participate I had to create a document where I could put together the individual tweets all in one place. Hopefully there will soon be a website where these growing stories from Twitter can be compiled (update: see this website). In any case, this is an interesting example of how to use social media to start writing collaborations and find potential collaborating authors.

I suggest that tweets starting with

#abookduct #001a #m

can contain information about the story (not actual story content). "m" is for "meta", and a meta-tweet helps authors of the story communicate useful information that can aid in collaboration. For details on how to participate see abookdect.com.

Image. Sierpinski pyramid by Peter Bertok. License: Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0

Video options

I made a simple animated gif for the Wiki fiction stew collaborative fiction project. The wiki stew story includes some science fiction themes such as an extraterrestrial arriving on Earth. The animation is just a little teaser with a barely visible spaceship seen near a building. The animated gif can be seen here.

I often find myself making animations with unusual dimensions. I was wondering how the Blogger video upload feature works and if it might be customizable for unusual video shapes and sizes. When I tried to upload a video using the Blogger interface, it indicated that it was contacting Google video, but the first time I tried it, my FireFox browser crashed.

Searching online, I found some indications (also) that there are range of options for the Google video embedded video player, including automatic start for videos and endless looping, which are two features that I like and use for animated gifs. I uploaded a video direct to Google video and pasted the embed HTML code provided by Goggle into this blog post (see to right). Since I am using a Macintosh computer, I had to use Gears. After I had Gears on my computer I was able to upload a video (see below, with the Blogger icon on the player).

The original videos were QuickTime format 216 pixels wide by 278 pixels high. The default for the Blogger player was 320x266. As you can see, I have not found an optimal way to customize the width of the player windows to match these narrow videos, but the auto play and looping do work! For some reason the video uploaded via Blogger by default only shows a black image before the play button is clicked.

New collaboration: start your characters

We started a new collaboration today. The project is called "Wiki fiction stew" because each participating author creates a character and throws it into the pot. The plot is then constructed around the characters and each authors writes the part of the story that describes their own character.

I'm not sure how this will really work. It seems likely that participants could select characters that will never have much scope for interesting interactions. I tend to make characters who are "out of this world" for my science fiction stories (for example, the image shown here is a character from "The Start of Eternity"). An alternative approach would be to first select a general topic/setting for the story and then have participants make sure they select characters that are suited for the story.

Image. The image of the alien (above) is licensed under the GFDL. Thanks to Hervé Cozanet and Susanne Kauz for copyleft images used for making this alien!