When I was 15 I took a drama class in which we would do a number of exercises to stretch our imagination and get our creative juices going for improv. One such exercise was to create a story whereby one student would start with one or two creative sentences and then pass it over to the next person to add to the story and on it would go from student to student creating a collaborative story. It was a lot of fun and it got a little crazy at times.
More than 20 years later enter the wiki novel. The well -known publisher Penguin Books has introduced the first ever wiki novel as a social experiment to see if collaborative creative writing can produce a novel worthy of the book loving masses. The novel is called “A Million Penguins” which was launched from millionpenguins.com . This experiment will be online for approximately for six weeks and it will be interesting to see the finished product. There is an interesting article at scotsman.com http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=171722007 on this venture.
One of the interesting aspects in collaborative pieces of this sort is the personal perception of ownership. In one sense a writer would have to give away the idea of the ownership of words in the traditional publishing sense. You may or may not get visible creditation of the work published as one would with print materials. It can be likened to giving your ideas away to others to develop and explore. However, the sense of ownship may instead be found in the creative process of the collaboration where each participating member pushes creativity, imagination and boundaries hopefully towards a unique finished piece. The results may be quite surprising and original.
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