Collaborative (Novel and other) Writing
While goofing off over the holiday weekend (if you are in the US) why not write a novel with a bunch of friends. If you want to, check out Glypho, "A fun new way to read and write novels."
Over pumpkin pie on Thursday with a writer (screen plays, novels, non fiction) we talked about the dynamics of shared online writing, of wikis and whiteboards, and passing of versions of Word documents. As a mediocre writer, I appreciate the improvements others can offer to my writing. As professional writer, my friend was less sure. She gets paid to write, so having someone else mess with her writing doesn't jive.
I have had some fantastic co-writing experiences. And some that were miserable. Currently I'm working on a large piece with two other people. Quite frankly, it has taken us about a year to get our writing rythm down. Part of it is time and scheduling. But the other part is how we open up ownership between us; how we react to major edits or changes made by each other; and how we gracefully segue to subsequent iterations.
We are mostly using Word docs with markup. We are not writing fast, so the passing around of versions is ok.
On another project four of us are creating a FAQ for a community of practice we belong to. We are actually getting the FAQ started and are role modeling some possibilities for wider engagement by the community. We are drafting our FAQ in a wiki, with the longer term plan of moving "completed" FAQs to our open source CMS, Zaraya.
I'm loving editing in the wiki, as is at least one other in the group - who was a skeptic. I'm enjoying that he is enjoying it. It is like watching a tapestry form.
Do you write collaboratively with others? How? What tools? What practices?
Categories: collaborative_writing,
posted by Nancy White at 8:28 PM
4 Comments:
Nancy, the most wonderful experiences I've had are writing collaboratively using Tools/Track changes. Getting into a text she started, or having her get into a text I started was a fantastic experience of inhabiting and jointly designing a whole new world for those moments we were exchanging documents until we had the finished thing. It needed a fast turn around of the document (at least once or twice a day) and no justification of what changes we were making or accepting/rejecting (except for really big doubts).
But I've had enough other experiences to realise that a person's underlying philosophy of collaboration is a crucial element. If someone sees collaboration as the sewing together of different parts of a whole text, then they tend to see "your" changes as criticisms, comments, suggestions or corrections to "their" piece of text. If, like me, you see collaboration as jointly inhabiting and designing a text you feel disappointed if someone isn't getting into your text and weaving their words into yours and moulding together a joint product. So while I see writing in someone else's text or someone writing in mine as involvement and integration, others see it as interference or criticism.
A month ago I set up a Wiki space for a group of people (known to you) who are jointly writing a story. No amount of explaining or modelling could persuade these five people to "interfere" in any one else's text. (I stopped my own weaves as they were perceived as Corrections). As a result you got five different pieces of text placed linearly into a Wiki. Full stop. And now the group is meeting face-to-face to see who is going to take the five different pieces of text and try to sew them together. I think that is a wonderful story of how a collaborative tool is used for a familar paradigm.
I'm nodding in recognition of your experience, Bev. When I found my co-authors totally changing my text at first, my inner voice said 'well, if you wanted it that way, why didn't YOU write it!' Then I realized that each step, each iteration was a piece of the whole. Without going through the first door (my first offered text) the second door would have been different, or even "less."
I think we mistake these two things: collaboratively writing and splitting up a writing task.
This is not about the task, but about the written piece. It is a subtle, but sometimes tricky shift for us.
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Hi Nancy, interesting subject ;-)
I wrote several papers and articles collaboratively in the past and all experiences were 'easy' except the current one.
The past experiences were 'easy' in the sense that in our groups we wrote together without feeling the need to reflect on how we were doing it and how we were experiencing it. We simply did it and were happy with the steps and the final results.
The dynamics of 'participation' and 'reification' happened easily, we did not notice it happening.
The experience I am doing now October-November 2005 instead is a strong 'perturbation'. By 'perturbation' I mean that something happened in the cycle of 'participation' and 'reification' which led me to finally find myself thrown out of the cycle: no more able to participate and no more able to make sense of the reifications.
I never thought a lot about collaborative writing before, but surely I will did it now!
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