[[Brennen]] writes that the [[collaborative fiction]] experiment failed because "for me (this) will probably go under [[just not feeling it]]."

<[[Brent]]> The problem I had was that we created an ''uncommon context''.  That is, we each contributed elements that we didn't all necessarily understand.  I have no experience with bands, so I didn't feel comfortable with contributing when band-specific content was needed.

This might work better if the context were, for example, a fantasy setting.  In that case, all the supporting elements can be invented and specified by the contributors.

<[[Brennen]]> At this point, I believe that shared context is a necessary but not sufficient condition for collaborative writing. Unless the definition of "context" is extended to include the mental states, personal histories, perceptions, interests, styles, and stylistic sensibilities of the writers, which I think would be overburdening the word and is not really what Brent is talking about.

There is a metaphor for this sort of thing that often crops up when authors talk about working together in shared universes. "Letting us play in his sandbox"  is the phrasing I think I have read most often. Brent's suggesting that we define a sandbox, and then proceed to collectively play in it. Sometimes I suppose this works, but very often it is insufficient, and most often it's just not what really happens. I think the metaphor is so apt because if I try, I can remember the dynamics of childhood play and actual sandboxes (or backyards, bedrooms, dollhouses...). Whether I wanted to play with someone else had as much to do with the ''way we were playing'' as it did the specifics of where we were playing, or even what we were ostensibly playing *at*.

My problem with this fiction was, more or less, that I just didn't want to play.  I don't think that Brent and I really have the same things to say, or want to go about saying them in ways that are compatible on the level that's required for sustaining the play of a shared story.  Play always has an element of power dynamics (if you watch little kids, the extent to which it's directly about the exercise of power is amazing), and between people with even slightly antagonistic or just differently angled perceptions, that power struggle is quite likely to tear the story apart altogether.

...

To extend the thoughts here, that bedrock of speculative fiction generally termed [[willing suspension of disbelief]] is as important for a ''writer'' as it is for a ''reader'', becomes extraordinarily visible in any kind of fictive play, and must be central to writerly collaboration. Authors have to suspend their disbelief in one another because they are telling the story as much to one another as to any other prospective readers. Maybe this means that they need not agree absolutely on whether the emotional and physical entanglement of two characters is altogether positive or moral, or even what aspects of that entanglement are most important - but they ''must'' find consistency in terms of whether that entanglement is likely or even possible, and what its actual ramifications in terms of characters and their actions would be. And neither of them can afford to trigger, too blatantly, the greater susceptability of the other to disbelief in something which simply does not bother him.

Otherwise it's like playing with the neighbor kid that you are slaying dragons in the general vicinity of a castle, except that the silly bastard keeps pointing out that your sword is not a sword, it is a stick, and anyway he would rather shoot the dragon with a laser and keeps insisting that he can fly because he is wearing a rocket pack. This isn't about a shared set of understood facts so much as it's really about aesthetics. Of course you are both proceeding from absurdity, but you and he both know that they are incompatible absurdities and eventually one of you is going to have to give in, or you're just going to take your stick and go home.

None of this has to happen ''consciously'' to derail an effort at writing a shared fiction, but I suspect that it describes a lot of the underlying dynamics.