Notes from The Literary Consultancy's conference 2013 - Writing in a Digital Age: Collaboration
One of the discussions at last weekend's conference revolved around how the digital age has facilitated many collaborative projects pushing the boundaries of technology and narrative.
Projects that were mentioned were:
1. Watershed, a cultural cinema and digital creativity centre in Bristol UK.
Watershed is a cross-artform venue and producer, sharing, developing and showcasing exemplary cultural ideas and talent. They produce work that cuts across film, music, theatre, design, visual art, and the creative and technology sectors.
The media studio is involved in development and research into new digital technologies.
Sandbox is a programme the studio has developed. Slingshot's 2.8 Hours Later game came out of the Sandbox programme: http://slingshoteffect.co.uk/ourgames...
Last year Sandbox worked on a project called REACT: a collaboration between the Universities of the West of England, Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter and Watershed Arts Trust.
There were 8 collaborations within the project around the theme of books and print.
Two of the projects highlighted at the conference were:
Writer on the train
This app offers short stories or a piece of writing relevant to the train's location: http://www.react-hub.org.uk/books-and...
These pages fall like ash
http://pagesfall.com/
http://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/41...
The idea behind this project was to give the reader a collaborative reading experience.
2. The Writing Platform
Author Kate Pullinger spoke about The Writing Platform, "a website and program of live events dedicated to arming writers with digital knowledge". The Writing Platform is a free online resource for all writers and poets emerging, established, not yet published, traditionally published and self-published who are looking for neutral and best practice information about writing in a digital age in order to inform their practice and career choices.
3. A Million Penguins
Kate Pullinger also spoke about a project she was involved in called, 'A Million Penguins', which was a collaboration between Penguin and De Montfort University. It ran for 5 weeks in 2007, and the experiment was to find out the answer to 'can a community write a novel?'. It was on a wiki, and there were no rules. Anyone could write and edit it.
15,000 people worked on it, and a total of 80,000 people registered and read it.
The project was subject to vandalism, however, lots of it was deleted. One person logged in and changed all the nouns to 'banana'.
The conclusion was reached that, 'no' a community cannot write a novel.
Two years later, Kate Pullinger was involved in, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel. There were 100 participants.
Following on from that, she wrote a novel which was another stage of this project. That novel will be released next year.
4. Memory Makes Us
Kate Pullinger mentioned this new project that is a collaboration with if:book Australia. Here's a bit more about that project: http://www.futureofthebook.org.au/cat...
This project explores the role of memory in writing and reading. Submissions are still being accepted (until early July).
5. Brandon Generator
Nico MacDonald of Media Futures mentioned Brandon Generator, and stated that the boundaries of publishing are blurring.
Brandon Generator is an interactive story experience, created by Edgar Wright and Tommy Lee Edwards.
Here's a bit more about that project: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/0...
6. World War II Timeline App
Another interactive online story experience. More details can be found here: http://agant.com/app.php?appID=ww2
7. Creating Worlds: Black Crown
Random House's interactive adventure story involving choices by the reader that open up the narrative: http://blackcrownproject.com/s
8. Call of the Cthulhu
Based on the sci-fi novel, taking the existing narrative and finding a new way of developing it. http://redwaspdesign.wordpress.com/
9. The Harper Collins BookSmash Challenge
This competition has $25,000 in prizes and there are 3 months left to submit: http://booksmash.challengepost.com/
The challenge: Use imagination and technology to build software that goes beyond the traditional ways we read and discover books.
10. Zombies, Run!
https://www.zombiesrungame.com/
A digital narrative/game where you run away from zombies. This project was funded through Kickstarter. There were donations of $73,000 in the US.
This shows how popular these types of apps are.
11. Writing Research and Development: Lisa Gee and Contentment
Software to enhance storytelling:
http://getcontentment.com/
www.lisagee.net/
*********************************************************************************************
It was interesting to learn about all these collaborative projects. I hadn't heard of any of them before. As Nico MacDonald said at the conference, this is an exciting time in publishing. Collaboration is taking place in different ways. There is a lot of innovation. It will be interesting to see how much further these types of things develop.
Projects that were mentioned were:
1. Watershed, a cultural cinema and digital creativity centre in Bristol UK.
Watershed is a cross-artform venue and producer, sharing, developing and showcasing exemplary cultural ideas and talent. They produce work that cuts across film, music, theatre, design, visual art, and the creative and technology sectors.
The media studio is involved in development and research into new digital technologies.
Sandbox is a programme the studio has developed. Slingshot's 2.8 Hours Later game came out of the Sandbox programme: http://slingshoteffect.co.uk/ourgames...
Last year Sandbox worked on a project called REACT: a collaboration between the Universities of the West of England, Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter and Watershed Arts Trust.
There were 8 collaborations within the project around the theme of books and print.
Two of the projects highlighted at the conference were:
Writer on the train
This app offers short stories or a piece of writing relevant to the train's location: http://www.react-hub.org.uk/books-and...
These pages fall like ash
http://pagesfall.com/
http://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/41...
The idea behind this project was to give the reader a collaborative reading experience.
2. The Writing Platform
Author Kate Pullinger spoke about The Writing Platform, "a website and program of live events dedicated to arming writers with digital knowledge". The Writing Platform is a free online resource for all writers and poets emerging, established, not yet published, traditionally published and self-published who are looking for neutral and best practice information about writing in a digital age in order to inform their practice and career choices.
3. A Million Penguins
Kate Pullinger also spoke about a project she was involved in called, 'A Million Penguins', which was a collaboration between Penguin and De Montfort University. It ran for 5 weeks in 2007, and the experiment was to find out the answer to 'can a community write a novel?'. It was on a wiki, and there were no rules. Anyone could write and edit it.
15,000 people worked on it, and a total of 80,000 people registered and read it.
The project was subject to vandalism, however, lots of it was deleted. One person logged in and changed all the nouns to 'banana'.
The conclusion was reached that, 'no' a community cannot write a novel.
Two years later, Kate Pullinger was involved in, Flight Paths: A Networked Novel. There were 100 participants.
Following on from that, she wrote a novel which was another stage of this project. That novel will be released next year.
4. Memory Makes Us
Kate Pullinger mentioned this new project that is a collaboration with if:book Australia. Here's a bit more about that project: http://www.futureofthebook.org.au/cat...
This project explores the role of memory in writing and reading. Submissions are still being accepted (until early July).
5. Brandon Generator
Nico MacDonald of Media Futures mentioned Brandon Generator, and stated that the boundaries of publishing are blurring.
Brandon Generator is an interactive story experience, created by Edgar Wright and Tommy Lee Edwards.
Here's a bit more about that project: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/0...
6. World War II Timeline App
Another interactive online story experience. More details can be found here: http://agant.com/app.php?appID=ww2
7. Creating Worlds: Black Crown
Random House's interactive adventure story involving choices by the reader that open up the narrative: http://blackcrownproject.com/s
8. Call of the Cthulhu
Based on the sci-fi novel, taking the existing narrative and finding a new way of developing it. http://redwaspdesign.wordpress.com/
9. The Harper Collins BookSmash Challenge
This competition has $25,000 in prizes and there are 3 months left to submit: http://booksmash.challengepost.com/
The challenge: Use imagination and technology to build software that goes beyond the traditional ways we read and discover books.
10. Zombies, Run!
https://www.zombiesrungame.com/
A digital narrative/game where you run away from zombies. This project was funded through Kickstarter. There were donations of $73,000 in the US.
This shows how popular these types of apps are.
11. Writing Research and Development: Lisa Gee and Contentment
Software to enhance storytelling:
http://getcontentment.com/
www.lisagee.net/
*********************************************************************************************
It was interesting to learn about all these collaborative projects. I hadn't heard of any of them before. As Nico MacDonald said at the conference, this is an exciting time in publishing. Collaboration is taking place in different ways. There is a lot of innovation. It will be interesting to see how much further these types of things develop.
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Darcia
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Jun 16, 2013 08:18AM
Interesting! Sounds like you had a lot of information to take in at this conference.
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Yes, definitely! It was full of interesting stuff :)
I would find it difficult to write a portion of a story unless I knew where it was going.I am currently involved in two collaborations but my stories remain intact, one in collection, the other dovetailing the main theme.
I write a collaborative novella a couple of years ago with Jason McIntyre, Cutting The Fat. It started off as a bit of fun on a writers' forum (Bestsellerbound.com) where someone (I think it was Darcia, actually) came up with the idea for the novel, and a group of us were all going to write it jointly. Jason wrote the first chapter, I wrote the second, then no one else wrote anything... so Jason wrote the next chapter and I followed with another and it continued like that for about 25K words over about a 2 week period. It was a lot of fun, and neither of us knew each other at the time, but we somehow tuned into each other's writing styles and wrote a good story (I may be biased LOL). People on the forum liked it, so we decided to publish it on Kindle as a novella.
Now, that is a excellent way to write a book and yes, I can see that technique being fun.I have written a couple of one ‘sentence at a time’ stories, which made it difficult to keep the character going in the way I wanted, and I'm sure the others felt the same. I dropped out when I started writing children's stories, into being published and dropping out to be an Indie.
Yes, we tried doing those 'sentence at a time' stories on the forum but they didn't take off...
