Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by a group of authors who share creative control of a story.
Collaborative fiction can occur for commercial gain, as part of education, or recreationally – many collaboratively written works have been the subject of a large degree of academic research.
Process
A collaborative author may focus on a specific protagonist or character in the narrative thread, and then pass the story to another writer for further additions or a change in focus to a different protagonist. Alternatively, authors might write the text for their own particular subplot within an overall narrative, in which case one author may have the responsibility of integrating the story as a whole. In Italy, various groups of authors have developed more advanced methods of interaction and production
The methods used by commercial collaborative writers vary tremendously. When beginning writing the short story 'the toy mill' Karl Schroeder and David Nickle began by writing alternating sentences, whereas when English authors Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman wrote Good Omens they largely wrote separate plotlines and then collaborated much more heavily when revising the manuscript.
The collaboration may be very limited indeed, when John Green and David Levithan wrote Will Grayson, Will Grayson the only plot point they decided on was that two characters would meet at some point in the novel and that their meeting would have a tremendous effect on their lives. After this decision, they separately wrote the first three chapters for their half and then shared them with each other. After sharing, they then "knew immediately it was going to work", as stated by Levithan.
Debate over value of collaborative authorship
Some academics are concerned with being able to discover who wrote what, and which ideas belong to whom. Specifically, in the humanities collaborative authorship has been frowned upon in favor of the individual author. In these instances, antiquated ideas of individual genius influence how scholars look at issues of attribution and tenure. Collaboration scholars Ede and Lunsford note, "everyday practices in the humanities continue to ignore, or even to punish, collaboration while authorizing work attributed to (autonomous) individuals". In particular, literary-critical essays often move to "settle" questions of authorship before moving on to their central interpretive purposes. Woodmansee uses studies of writing practices since the Renaissance to conclude that the modern definition of authorship, is a 'relatively recent formation' and that previously 'more corporate and collaborative' forms of writing prevailed, suggesting a long history of Collaborative Fiction. She further argues that the concept that 'genuine authorship consists in individual acts of origination' is an entirely modern myth.
For Renaissance playwrights, collaboration appears to have been the norm; Bently notes that nearly two-thirds of plays mentioned in Henslowe's papers reflect the participation of more than one writer. There is also an issue of continuous revision: it was common practice in Renaissance English theatre for professional writers attached to a company to compose new characters, scenes, prologues and epilogues for plays in which they did not originally have a hand. Scott McMillin has exported revision as a deconstruction of authorial individuality in the Sir Thomas More manuscript.
In an artistic sense, as Lorraine York notes, "Critics and readers feel a persistent need to 'de-collaborate' these works, to parse the collective text into the separate contributions of two or more authors". This is part of a tradition in criticism to view collaboration as a subset or aberrant kind of individual authorship – such that later readers could separate out by examining the collaborative text. Particular examples of this approach to criticism include Cyrus Hoy who studies authorship in the Beaumont/Fletcher plays.
There have been several university-based projects that investigated collaborative fiction, both from a writing perspective and as a testbed for scientific techniques, such as visualization of narrative structure. Collaborative writing in smaller groups is a widespread and successful educational technique.
A Million Penguins was a large scale and completely open collaborative fiction writing sponsored by Penguin Books in 2007 that did not succeed in developing community or a cohesive narrative.