I resuscitated a 20-year-old-website that was somewhat popular back in the day called storysprawl.com. It's private now, but I have friends join me on Sunday nights to write chapters together - we join Zoom, we write, we read them to each other. It's kind of like choose-your-own-adventure combined with round-robin fiction: Read chapter one, there are choices at the bottom, make a choice. If the next chapter is written, keep going, and if it's not, you can write the next chapter yourself and create choice labels at the bottom (if it's not The End) for other authors to follow up on in the future. It's stupid fun - our main story is now 128 chapters with an average story length of 11 chapters. I'm able to do math to project that this particular story will probably end up around 600 chapters and 1000 pages before all the storylines are completed.
I'm keeping the site private for now because I can't be bothered to see a lawyer and get my legal policies/checkboxes in place, but on Friday I did host a live event where I read chapter one aloud, had viewers vote for what choice to take, and continued until we hit an ending. It worked well, it was just a facebook event for friends, and eight people showed up out of my 200 friends which is pretty good. I'll probably do it again and open the event up to the Public. I'm hoping I'll attract more interested authors, I can always slowly give them access to the site.
(If anyone here likes the idea of contributing silly creative writing - third person, past tense - feel free to message me.)
Collaborative writing can be great fun - I used to contribute (on occasion) to collaborations on Usenet poetry groups (when taking a break from tweaking the trolls). I wish you all the best for taking this project forward!
neat project! the collective writing process seems intimidating to me, although i've always secretly wanted to dabble in fiction writing.
> "I'm keeping the site private for now because I can't be bothered to see a lawyer and get my legal policies/checkboxes in place..."
not to belittle what you've built, but i really lament how much legal considerations overhang our collective psyches, especially on the internet, and how much we believe in legalese and lawyers to protect us from potential issues. both the risks and the protections are unduly outsized in our minds.
by default, we each own the copyrights to our own words. posting our words on websites should implicitly give those websites permission to display (perform) those words (or not). we shouldn't need pages of jargon to spell that out, and no amount of expensive precognition is going to ward off even most potential misconstruals (malicious or not).
I agree... 20 years ago I had no qualms about putting the site out. But now even aside from IP policy, there's privacy policies, child policies, GDPR... and I'm not sure if there are shelves below which I don't have to worry about that stuff. At some point soon I'll find a lawyer that can help me figure that out, because I would definitely like to just have the site out there for people to visit even if I'm not going to market the heck out of it.
My wife is doing something along the lines (ba-dum tss) with a friend of her: i am keeping a REALLY old version of "legend of the green dragon" online for them and they write a huge fantasy story together on a daily basis. They should get that printed in a book some day :)
That's one of the things that drives me about the site. I just think it would be so fun to have some of the stories eventually "completed", and then I could get them printed. Even if they don't "sell" and are just vanity projects, it'd be fun to have a series of StorySprawl books on my shelf. I actually do have two of the stories completed so far, but they are both pretty lousy. :) But if I ever get some serious time off, I could see myself diving into a markdown/pandoc/latex/docbook thing to start auto-printing them.
It is really fun to make books - I've also read some lengthy popular fan-fiction works, and when they get popular enough, people pop up to make underground books out of them. My wife printed out the six-book "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" series for me from a github repo for Christmas. Looks nice on my shelf!
I'm keeping the site private for now because I can't be bothered to see a lawyer and get my legal policies/checkboxes in place, but on Friday I did host a live event where I read chapter one aloud, had viewers vote for what choice to take, and continued until we hit an ending. It worked well, it was just a facebook event for friends, and eight people showed up out of my 200 friends which is pretty good. I'll probably do it again and open the event up to the Public. I'm hoping I'll attract more interested authors, I can always slowly give them access to the site.
(If anyone here likes the idea of contributing silly creative writing - third person, past tense - feel free to message me.)