TLDR
We’d be taking turns writing a long-term collaborative story. I’ll have everything organized in a thread and a google-doc. Each person would have their own personal character and write a section from the perspective of their character.
These are the purposes of this thread:
1. To discuss this idea I have and see people’s thoughts
2. To gauge people’s interest/opposition
3. To iron out some specifics of how it will work if people are interested
4. To advertise this idea so if I start it there's already some people interested
Also sorry for the messy wall of text, this’ll all be more organized and readable if I were to actually do the idea.
My idea:
We’d be taking turns writing a long-term collaborative story. I’ll have everything organized in a thread and a google-doc. Each person would have their own personal character and write a section from the perspective of their character. To determine the order of how people write, people that want to participate would queue up by writing “/queue” in the thread.
I think it would be fun to not only write the story but see how it grows and evolves over time. Outside of it being SFW and following the continuity/established rules of the world, people would be able to basically write whatever they want and take the story/characters in whatever way they want. The people after that would have to just roll with whatever the people before wrote.
For the sections, you could get creative with how you write them. Maybe it’d be a direct continuation of what the person before you wrote, or maybe you’d go over the events in the previous section from the perspective of your character, or you could start something entirely new. I think it would be cool to have all these different storylines which interweave with each other. You wouldn’t be limited to just prose though, if you wanted to get creative you could write a poem or draw pictures or make some music for your section or whatever, as long as it’s adding to the story. There’d be no length restrictions as well, you could write as little or as much as you’d like.
For the characters, you’d create a character yourself. It could be whatever you want, it could be a self-insert, or a completely made up character. Your character doesn’t have to be just a normal character though, maybe you want your character to start a new storyline, or you want to take the role of some minor character someone randomly invented, or you could be an alien watching from space, eating popcorn and commenting on everything, until someone eventually drags you into the story.
The characters would also be just as fluid as the story. In your section, you could do whatever you wanted with any of the characters, even other people’s characters, and everyone would just have to roll with it. For example, maybe someone makes your character out to be a villain, or have some special ability, or be romantically interested in someone, and you’d continue with that in mind. This way the characters would evolve in interesting ways, instead of just becoming stagnant because people try and keep all the characters the same way out of respect. It’s for this reason I think it would be bad for people to be already established characters, like if someone really wanted to be Sasuke for some reason, because they’d be less malleable. Maybe this could be the one restriction on the characters you could be.
Some specifics:
As I said before, all of this would be organized within a thread. People would queue up in the thread by typing “/queue”, new entries would be posted in the thread, and people would discuss stuff in the thread.
With the queue, you would be able to queue up as many times as you want, but there’d need to be at least 2 people queuing before you can queue again.
You would be able to leave the queue at anytime if you don’t want to do it, and if you are too busy to do it you could be placed further back in the queue.
New entries would be posted with a [notice] tag to distinguish from the queuing and discussion.
There’d also be a time limit for you to submit your entry. This would be so that this project is not held up by one person forgetting to submit something or whatever. I’m not sure what the best time limit would be, I was thinking maybe 4-5 days. If the time limit was long, it be more relaxed and accessible, but the pace this project moves might be slow. Short timeframes would be more stressful and limiting, but the story would move along faster. It would also be encouraged for people to submit their stuff before the time limit if they could, to speed up the progress of the story.
There would also be a google doc (or maybe there is somewhere better) attached to the thread chronicling every entry, like a book that you can read to experience the whole story.
My role would be as an administrator, by managing the thread and google doc as well as reminding people to submit their entry.
Another thing I would be doing would be to act as an editor. People would send their submission to me, and I’d fix up any grammar/spelling so it’s easy to read. I would also fix up any continuity errors and make sure that the entry follows the rules of the established world, to ensure everything makes sense, and things don’t become convoluted. It would be nice to have some volunteers for this role as well, to share a bit of the workload, and to be able to run this when I am unable to.
Editors would also be helpful to look over things I am unable to proofread myself, for example if someone wants to write an entry in a non-English language (I am a dumb poo poo head monolingual). Maybe give me a heads up if you want to do something like this so I can organise an editor or reject it because there is no suitable editor.
(I can also imagine people not wanting their prose to be cleaned up because it fits their character better)
I would also have the power to reject problematic entries that can’t be fixed with editing, or maybe it would be better to have a council or a public vote or whatever.
One potential issue with the queue would be too many people queuing at once. If people cue faster than people submit their entries then the queue will just keep growing. Perhaps we could have some sort of cap, with priority given to people who are new or haven’t submitted anything in a while.
Other things to consider:
An important thing to consider would be how this would interact with OT lore. I feel like this would fill a similar niche, and especially if people use self-insert characters this could start really diving into OT lore territory. We might have a situation where this becomes popular at the cost of OT lore, or vice versa. Perhaps one way to avoid this would be to ban self-insert characters from this story, so it would be kept entirely separate from OT lore. Or maybe you like that this could be a different way to explore OT lore. I think it would be good to discuss this before it potentially becomes a big problem in the future.
Another thing is that seemingly many people have grown tired of these “daily” threads that never end. This thread might be similar, except stuff happens every few days. There might be a point in the future where everyone gets tired of this too, so we’d need a way to end the story when that happens, so we don’t just have to randomly cut it off when no-one is interested anymore. I guess this probably can't go on forever anyway, so it'd be nice to have a proper ending at some point.
As for how to get this started, we’d probably need to agree on a vague premise or starting point, and a few people would have to share their characters so we’d at least have some characters to work with. And who’d write the first entry?
Also, do you think this would be better in mostly 1st person or 3rd person perspective? I think it would be weird if entries were constantly switching between the two, so it’d be better to pick one. I’d personally pick 1st person.
And last thing, is this whole thing too complicated and/or too ambitious and/or require too much effort for an OT thread?
We’d be taking turns writing a long-term collaborative story. I’ll have everything organized in a thread and a google-doc. Each person would have their own personal character and write a section from the perspective of their character.
These are the purposes of this thread:
1. To discuss this idea I have and see people’s thoughts
2. To gauge people’s interest/opposition
3. To iron out some specifics of how it will work if people are interested
4. To advertise this idea so if I start it there's already some people interested
Also sorry for the messy wall of text, this’ll all be more organized and readable if I were to actually do the idea.
My idea:
We’d be taking turns writing a long-term collaborative story. I’ll have everything organized in a thread and a google-doc. Each person would have their own personal character and write a section from the perspective of their character. To determine the order of how people write, people that want to participate would queue up by writing “/queue” in the thread.
I think it would be fun to not only write the story but see how it grows and evolves over time. Outside of it being SFW and following the continuity/established rules of the world, people would be able to basically write whatever they want and take the story/characters in whatever way they want. The people after that would have to just roll with whatever the people before wrote.
For the sections, you could get creative with how you write them. Maybe it’d be a direct continuation of what the person before you wrote, or maybe you’d go over the events in the previous section from the perspective of your character, or you could start something entirely new. I think it would be cool to have all these different storylines which interweave with each other. You wouldn’t be limited to just prose though, if you wanted to get creative you could write a poem or draw pictures or make some music for your section or whatever, as long as it’s adding to the story. There’d be no length restrictions as well, you could write as little or as much as you’d like.
For the characters, you’d create a character yourself. It could be whatever you want, it could be a self-insert, or a completely made up character. Your character doesn’t have to be just a normal character though, maybe you want your character to start a new storyline, or you want to take the role of some minor character someone randomly invented, or you could be an alien watching from space, eating popcorn and commenting on everything, until someone eventually drags you into the story.
The characters would also be just as fluid as the story. In your section, you could do whatever you wanted with any of the characters, even other people’s characters, and everyone would just have to roll with it. For example, maybe someone makes your character out to be a villain, or have some special ability, or be romantically interested in someone, and you’d continue with that in mind. This way the characters would evolve in interesting ways, instead of just becoming stagnant because people try and keep all the characters the same way out of respect. It’s for this reason I think it would be bad for people to be already established characters, like if someone really wanted to be Sasuke for some reason, because they’d be less malleable. Maybe this could be the one restriction on the characters you could be.
Some specifics:
As I said before, all of this would be organized within a thread. People would queue up in the thread by typing “/queue”, new entries would be posted in the thread, and people would discuss stuff in the thread.
With the queue, you would be able to queue up as many times as you want, but there’d need to be at least 2 people queuing before you can queue again.
You would be able to leave the queue at anytime if you don’t want to do it, and if you are too busy to do it you could be placed further back in the queue.
New entries would be posted with a [notice] tag to distinguish from the queuing and discussion.
There’d also be a time limit for you to submit your entry. This would be so that this project is not held up by one person forgetting to submit something or whatever. I’m not sure what the best time limit would be, I was thinking maybe 4-5 days. If the time limit was long, it be more relaxed and accessible, but the pace this project moves might be slow. Short timeframes would be more stressful and limiting, but the story would move along faster. It would also be encouraged for people to submit their stuff before the time limit if they could, to speed up the progress of the story.
There would also be a google doc (or maybe there is somewhere better) attached to the thread chronicling every entry, like a book that you can read to experience the whole story.
My role would be as an administrator, by managing the thread and google doc as well as reminding people to submit their entry.
Another thing I would be doing would be to act as an editor. People would send their submission to me, and I’d fix up any grammar/spelling so it’s easy to read. I would also fix up any continuity errors and make sure that the entry follows the rules of the established world, to ensure everything makes sense, and things don’t become convoluted. It would be nice to have some volunteers for this role as well, to share a bit of the workload, and to be able to run this when I am unable to.
Editors would also be helpful to look over things I am unable to proofread myself, for example if someone wants to write an entry in a non-English language (I am a dumb poo poo head monolingual). Maybe give me a heads up if you want to do something like this so I can organise an editor or reject it because there is no suitable editor.
(I can also imagine people not wanting their prose to be cleaned up because it fits their character better)
I would also have the power to reject problematic entries that can’t be fixed with editing, or maybe it would be better to have a council or a public vote or whatever.
One potential issue with the queue would be too many people queuing at once. If people cue faster than people submit their entries then the queue will just keep growing. Perhaps we could have some sort of cap, with priority given to people who are new or haven’t submitted anything in a while.
Other things to consider:
An important thing to consider would be how this would interact with OT lore. I feel like this would fill a similar niche, and especially if people use self-insert characters this could start really diving into OT lore territory. We might have a situation where this becomes popular at the cost of OT lore, or vice versa. Perhaps one way to avoid this would be to ban self-insert characters from this story, so it would be kept entirely separate from OT lore. Or maybe you like that this could be a different way to explore OT lore. I think it would be good to discuss this before it potentially becomes a big problem in the future.
Another thing is that seemingly many people have grown tired of these “daily” threads that never end. This thread might be similar, except stuff happens every few days. There might be a point in the future where everyone gets tired of this too, so we’d need a way to end the story when that happens, so we don’t just have to randomly cut it off when no-one is interested anymore. I guess this probably can't go on forever anyway, so it'd be nice to have a proper ending at some point.
As for how to get this started, we’d probably need to agree on a vague premise or starting point, and a few people would have to share their characters so we’d at least have some characters to work with. And who’d write the first entry?
Also, do you think this would be better in mostly 1st person or 3rd person perspective? I think it would be weird if entries were constantly switching between the two, so it’d be better to pick one. I’d personally pick 1st person.
And last thing, is this whole thing too complicated and/or too ambitious and/or require too much effort for an OT thread?