brennen
/
p1k3-wala


								Originally in reference to [[Story flows from character]], but we drifted and possibly trailed off.  I notice [[conversation does that]].


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								(For context, [[Brent]] had posted three questions intended to describe/create some characters.)


								Here's a question:  What does '''character''' flow from?


								I think character flows from action (or inaction).  What people do, or [[do not do]].


								I don't think you can define characters just by giving them a set of described attributes.


								Show, don't tell.  And all that.


								So...


								-- [[Brennen]]


								----


								I believe that attributes define action.  Take an angry man prone to violence -- Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, for example -- and put him in the same situation that a Zen Master is placed in.  Would they react the same?  Clearly not.


								Also, this is a writing exercise, [[not a philosophical question]].  We can debate whether this is the best starting point for writing until the heat-death of the universe, but the fact remains that this is ''a'' starting point, and isn't it better to ''carpe diem'' rather than try to align every duck to within a millimeter's tolerance?


								So, [[I say]], let's write something together, and let the chips fall where they may. -- [[Brent]]


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								All right. -- [[Brennen]]


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								([[Brennen]] then deleted the set of prompting questions and wrote two paragraphs that began a story.)


								Blast.  I should have been more clear about my intentions here.  Sorry about that.  Let me explain.  (Eventually I'll refactor this into the text at the top of the page, but for now, I think thread-mode works best.)


								Collaboration is based on context.  If two people are collaborating on writing a program, for example, they must both know a number of things, including:


								# What the program is supposed to do

								# Constraints on the final program ("It must run in under 10 seconds" or "It can't take up more than one megabyte of disk space")

								# The programming language the program is written in

								# The target operating system

								# Coding standards


								I believe that collaborative fiction writing cannot succeed -- or will only succeed very rarely -- unless all the writers understand the common context.  Who is being written about?  Where is the story going, at least in the short- to mid-term?  Are we writing a horror story?  A mystery?


								Let's contrast this with the traditional method of collaborative fiction, which is what I've seen most often.  In this method, the first person writes a line, sentence, or paragraph on a piece of paper, then hands it to the next person, who writes the next line, sentence, or paragraph.  This continues until the story comes to a conclusion.  Digital versions follow the same method; each author is simply required to add to the end of the file.


								In this traditional system, each person has ''complete control'' of the story temporarily, and can send it in ''any'' direction.  In my experience, this leads to frustration for each author, because as soon as they hand off the story, their direction and authorial control is compromised.  Any contribution may be (radically) altered at any time.  Worse, who's to say when somebody is making a contribution that improves the story?


								Contrast this to the system I'm proposing, in which the authors have a common context.  They know roughly where the story is going (and the characters involved), and can push the story in that direction.  Moreover, an author can slip in and change existing content to better reflect the direction of the story and/or the true nature of the characters, and that change will be instantly recognizable as a net positive or negative effect on the story.


								This is why I recommend that we define a context.  Who are our characters?  What's the setting?  What kind of story are we writing (or, more importantly, what kind of story are we ''not'' writing, e.g., "Let's not turn this into an action-adventure story")?


								Am I making any sense?


								-- [[Brent]]


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								(Responding to above...)


								''I'' should have made my intentions in posting the above clearer, especially since I didn't quite do what I set out to.  I'd hoped to "define" a few characters in a more evocative fashion than the simple listing of attributes; I didn't get much written.


								While I know we've got some philosophical differences, Brent's point about context is well taken.  I've been thinking about this kind of thing, lately, because I've been [[playing catch]].


								I believe it's entirely possible to collaboratively write something in the fashion Brent describes as traditional, ''if and only if'' context is implicit.  I have seen it work, beautifully sometimes - but it has to be between people who are really, *really* in tune.  I suspect this is why shared ''oral storytelling'' can emerge much more easily and gracefully than shared ''written fiction''.  (Yes, I realize that's an unsupported assertion.  But think about your life.)  It's certainly a big part of why collaborative fiction efforts on the web have tended to suck giant rocks - it's not just that most people cannot write, it's also that people who are really, truly, deeply in tune with one another (especially over an abstract, textual, anything-but-realtime medium of exchange) are not that common.


								Certainly establishing a more formal context is often useful and necessary.  Professional authors who collaborate on novels or share universes certainly make use of outlines and general shared world information.  There's more to be said on the subject, but [[Story flows from character]] is Brent's baby; I'm willing to play by his rules.  Mostly.


								-- [[Brennen]]


								'''Agreed''' that context must be at least implicit.  However, [[Story flows from character]] is emphatically ''not'' my baby.  By posting it on the wiki, I have made it everybody's.  There is no such thing as ownership on a wiki. -- [[Brent]]


								'''Not sure''' about that last - one of the reasons I'm interested in playing with a wiki, after all, is to find this stuff out.  My gut tells me that there may be no such thing as '''a direct enforcement mechanism''' for ownership on a wiki, but that people nonetheless feel some kind of proprietary interest in content and act upon it, and that '''this is not entirely a bad thing'''.  You got the ball rolling here, so I'll try not to subvert your intentions for [[Story flows from character]] to the point of rendering it an exercise in futile cross purposes.  Also, ''a'' wiki is not always ''this'' wiki.  We can work with [[whatever conventions]] or lack thereof we feel like.  Yes, that means repeating mistakes, but this is an attempt to learn things, not a project to build something that will stand the test of time. -- [[Brennen]]


								Fair enough; and it's true that people naturally tend to feel ownership for what they create.  However, I feel that on a wiki, personal ownership of specific content stands against the fundamental tenets of [[why wiki works]].  It's fine if people feel personal ownership of the wiki's content as a whole; I want to discourage the idea that people's content is their own holy ground.  For example, I intend to seriously refactor this page, which means that individual contributions will be integrated into a (hopefully) flowing argument.  This cannot be accomplished if we each hold our own content sacred.  So, there's a balance to all this -- and I think we're all in violent agreement about this -- which I want to ensure we all understand. -- [[Brent]]


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								(I don't think this belongs on this page, but this discussion has been sort of meandering anyway and I wanted to add in my change where it would make at least a little sense.  Feel free to move, delete or whatever).


								Time for a new voice to chime in, if you don't mind.


								You're forgetting what I consider to be the prime example of collabrative fiction (both successful and unsuccessful): Television.  Television writing, with the notable exception of a handful of shows like ''Babylon 5'', is done collaberatively.  There is a staff of writers who each take on different episodes of the show themselves.  As Brent pointed out, there's a common context for the story, which holds the thing together.  Often, to be fair, there's a "show runner" of some sort, who is sort of the Keymaster for the whole shebang, but the heavy lifting is done by the writing staff.


								Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are excellent examples of this.  Joss Whedon makes sure the story as a whole stays on the tracks, but the flavor of any individual episode is dependent entirely on who's writing it that week.


								And yes this does have a point.


								Brent pointed out that context is important to collaberative fiction working, but part of that context should not only be what type of story, but the structure of the story as well.  Who's gonna write what, and when, and all of that.  I think that as important as narrative context is to collaberative fiction working, phsyical structure is just as important.  I brought up television in regards to this because to some degree, the best collaberative fiction that isn't written by a specific Writing Team is more or less serialized fiction.  In other words, you've either got to be 100% in tune so that breaks between one writer and another are not evident, or choose a format where the tonal breaks are SUPPOSED to be there.


								-- Saalon


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								Interesting points, but I wouldn't go so far as to make assumptions about all collaborative fiction based on what we've observed in past collaborative fiction efforts (as Saalon does in the last sentence of the last paragraph there, "you've either got to be...").  I think that Wiki allows for a fundamentally different type of collaborative fiction than we've previously seen.


								I certainly hope that this collaborative fiction doesn't require a Keymaster.  Wiki history supports my hope, I think:  The most successful wikis (in terms of reputation, longevity, popularity, etc.) -- such as [[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki/ Ward's Wiki]] and [[http://www.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia]] -- were started by people who consciously did ''not'' seek to be a "show runner."  I look at apparent failures like WhyClublet and see that the creator did.


								The question becomes, how much context do we need?  I intend to answer that on [[Story flows from character]] by gathering context until I feel there's enough, then venturing out and seeing what works.


								-- [[Brent]]


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								Clarification:  My "you've either got to be..." statement was not an assumption about collaborative fiction so much as a philosophy of fiction as a whole.  I'm not saying you either need to be a coherent book or a television show, but I am saying that for an audience member not to be jarred, you've either got to be very smooth and not have the breaks typical of much collaborative fiction (and how you accomplish this is where making assumptions about how it CAN or SHOULD work can be dangerous) or come up with a format where the breaks are supposed to be there, for whatever reason, and thus the user is intrigued by the changes in tone rather than rattled.


								And when I say this is a satement about fiction as a whole, I mean it.  This is equally important for something written by one person.  If you're going to be shifting tones in your story, either [[be wicked smooth]], or have a good reason for the tonal shifts that the audience can understand and follow without difficulty.  If your story shifts from third to first person in every other paragraph, you might have a problem;  if you do it because your character is a schizophrenic and the whole story really IS in first person, but the character has a tendency to think of himself in third person...well, that could be interesting.


								(As a side note: I'm interested by the experiment of a story without anyone specifically holding the Keys to the Vision, and would like to see it tried.  Still, I'm also extremely dubious it can work, because it's my belief that someone's vision is integral to all great art.  But I like to have those beliefs challenged, so consider this a ringing endorsement for experimentation)


								-- Saalon, who is not saying he's definitely right, but he feels strongly enough to jump up and down about it, because he's like that (IOW: Annoying, nagging, jerk).