Collaborative fiction using the blog medium

My friend Bill and I have embarked on a really exciting adventure.

Bill set up a fictional blog back in 2005, and the narrative is basically set in a futuristic institution, where a number of imprisoned inhabitants use a blog to communicate with each other, moderated by the institution's staff. It is partly a satire about New Labour forms of authoritarianism. It is called Community Fair, which as you can see features on my blogroll.

Bill is an expert on 18th century culture, and has told me in the past about novelists at that time being far more collaborative than they would subsequently become in the 19th century when individualism truly took hold on society. When Richardson, for example, was writing his epistolary novel, Clarissa, in serial form, he would receive letters from readers when it was still incomplete and this would guide the denouement of the plot to a certain extent. Bill was hinting very heavily for such feedback on his blog, but was doomed to be disappointed for a long time.

It was only when I started this blog that I saw very clearly what form such collaboration should take.

On Sunday, I decided to put a comment on one of the postings of Community Fair. I have always been particularly intrigued by one of its characters, Roxanne, who is quite feisty, so I decided to pretend that I was a long lost friend of hers and sent a posting along the lines of "Roxanne, is that really you... where have you been all this time", without telling Bill that I was doing it.

An hour or so later I received a text message from a very excited Bill, and we began to talk about the possibilities and pitfalls of developing this fictional collaboration.

We briefly considered the idea of agreeing in advance a meta-narrative that would guide interactions between Sarah (it's funny being a real person AND a fictional character at the same time and it'll be interesting to see how that pans out) and Roxanne. But we dismissed that approach because it's been done before. It's basically the approach that Mike Leigh takes in his improvised plays and films. We want to do something truly experimental. For us it's not enough to do something that's more or less been done before but on a new medium.

So now that Roxanne has replied to Sarah, I have to look back at all Roxanne's previous postings as well as the reply, and compose a response that will move the narrative forward whilst remaining consistent with her past.

The novel has always been connected to a specific period in human development, and maybe it's a bit tired by now, so will it start to be superseded by more collaborative forms of story-telling? Only time will tell.