Collaborative Fiction

When I was a kid scouring back issue bins I came across a few issues of a series called DC Challenge. The idea was simple, each issue would end in a cliffhanger and the next issue a new creative team would come in and continue the story. The comic was about as bad as you'd imagine it would be, but there was still something appealing about it, there was a sense of fun to this creative hand-off that was irresistible to me. This was my first exposure to the idea of collaborative fiction.

This isn't, of course, a novel idea. Collaborative fiction existed before DC Challenge and continues to exist. Do a Google search and you can find a number of these projects around the web. And there are role playing games. In high school I had a group of friends who were in to RPGs and who drew me into their gaming sessions. It was the storytelling aspect of these games that appealed to me (because, lord knows, I couldn't be bothered to learn any of the rules) and looking back I really regret that it didn't occur to me to record those games in some way and then go back and write them up as stories.

Anyway,the point of this trip down memory lane is that I've gotten the idea of collaborative fiction on my mind. It popped into my head in the shower this morning (the shower, of course, is the place where all good ideas reside, waiting to reveal themselves). So, now I've got an itch to start a project of my own (because, as it turns out, I'm far too egotistical to merely contribute to one the the existing projects I referred to earlier). It would be easy enough to set up a website and establish the rules for contributing. The obstacle is that, unlike this or my haiku blog where it doesn't really matter if anyone actually visits, the collaborative part of collaborative fiction means that some web traffic would be a necessity. How can I drive traffic? It's a bit of a puzzle for one as shy and retiring as myself, one that I'll have to give some further thought.

Updates as they are warranted.