Elementary Writing

Literature is always collaborative! Whole human Literature is process of serial collaboration defined by borrowing, synthesis and appropriation that flows from the manipulation of existing knowledge and can be widely asynchronous.

Very little of us know that most of the greatest works of literature, across time, across culture, and across language, are explicitly attributed to groups and have been revealed to be the product of collaborations.

Collaborative Writing Models and Definitions

By Wikippedia, the term collaborative writing refers to projects where written works are created by multiple people together (collaboratively) rather than individually. Some projects are overseen by an editor or editorial team, but many grow without any of this top-down oversight.

Collaborative writing is a slippery concept. It is clear that collaborative writing refers to writing in groups but there are as many ways to write in groups as there are possible combinations of individuals. Where does “a little help” and editorial assistance end and collaboration begin? There are no definitive answers.

In discussing collaborative writing in today’s literary world where the dominant paradigm is a single author theory, many models describe collaborations in several different conceptualizations:

• Group of individual authors working in an micro-economy model.
• Group of writers occupying the role and space of a single corporate or collective individuality.
• Complex organizational entities and aggregations of individuals.

For a limited but piratical working definition of collaboration, one can turn to technologists who define collaboration in more mechanical terms. In an article on the technology and processes of collaborative writing, David Farkas offers four possible definitions useful in approaching collaboration through an analysis of processes. For his purposes, collaboration is:

• Two or more people jointly composing the complete text of a document;
• Two or more people contributing components to a document;
• One or more person modifying, by editing and/or reviewing, the document of one or more persons;
• One person working interactively with one or more person and drafting a document based on the ideas of the person or persons.

Collaborative Literature - the broad concept

Collaborative writing tends only to imply synchronous and fully consensual group work. The concept of Collaborative Literature, on the other hand, is more than just the act of putting pen to paper.

While almost synonymous with writing collaborative literature implies connections between, and unity among, different written works over time and between authors in a way that “writing” does not. While not always defensible, these connective acts are always literary. Literature is always collaborative!

Main Benefits and Advantages of Collaborative Writing

• Interchange of ideas - collaborative writing could, in ways that can be tested empirically, produce better work and teach people quantitatively more than in situations where the same individuals write alone. Each aspect of the writing process—including invention, writing, and editing—are inherently social acts that benefit from and thrive in a collaborative environment ([Lefevre1987]).
• Flexibility and freedom - As computer technology appears poised to redefine literary production again, the technology itself is no longer “hardware” like printing presses and movable type but computer source code. As such, our ability to manipulate the terms on which we can communicate and collaborate, as long as we have access to source code, is instantaneously and almost infinitely flexible. We can add a line here, subtract a line here, change a line here and we create a different system and a different environment to shape and control the creation, distribution, or manipulation of literature.
• Fostering of discussion and debate - open collaborator’ eyes to how their work compares to that of their peers, giving them a better sense of their own strengths and weaknesses as writers and thinkers.
• Encourage authors to consider their audience - an important aspect of learning to write effectively and yet a component missing in many traditional approaches.
• By having students write essays and fiction in groups, students produced better work than when they worked alone. Collaborative writings’ effectiveness in the classroom has been repeatedly confirmed in what has become a large collaborative writing and collaborative learning discourse ([Gebhardt1980] [Bruffee1981] [Gebhardt1981]).

Skepticism about Literature Collaboration

In an article written for science-fiction authors on How to Collaborate without Getting Your Head Shaved, Keith Laumer, an author and collaborator, ends his short piece with the advice, “if you possibly can, write it yourself. Collaborations, like marriages, should only be undertaken if any alternative is unthinkable”.

In an article for Writer, Leonard Felder points out that not only should potential collaborators first agree to a division of royalties and payments, but that they must have “a written agreement on . . . the way your names will be listed on the book’s cover”.

It can be difficult to assess each collaborators contribution to the final product, making assigning attributes problematic.

Planning the assignment and meeting with collaborators to discuss their progress or settle problems can be time-consuming. Likewise incorporating interim deadlines into the project, such as requiring writers to submit drafts or outlines, is essential to warding off potential problems.

Collaborative Writing in Practice

In a true collaborative environment, each contributor has an almost equal ability to add, edit, and remove text. It is easier to do if the group has a specific end goal in mind, and harder if a goal is absent or vague.

Collaborative Writing Approach and Strategy

Successful collaboration occurs when each participant is able to make a unique contribution toward achieving a common vision or goal statement. Supporting this common goal are objectives that have been generated by each of the participants.

• Understanding the assignment.
• Defining the major components of the project.
• Agreement on the writing objectives, matters of style, including documentation.
• Delegating the tasks among group members. Each member, however, shares responsibility for the whole product.
• Setting up schedules for updates and revising drafts.
• Double checking all information from sources to be sure all source material is cited and cited correctly.
• Integrating the components of the project so that it reads like a coherent whole.
• Anticipating Troubles.
• Useing Technology.
• Crediting to all members of the group who participate.

Possible Collaborative Roles

It is important for each participant to “feel” as though he or she has a significant contribution to make to the achievement of goals. It is also important that each participant be held accountable for contributing to the writing project.

• Leader - comfortable with assuming responsibility, members of the group respect her/his opinions
• Encourager - responds positively to contributions of group members and encourages less dominant members to express their views.
• Harmonizer - tries to keep conflicts in check and focuses disagreements on the subject of the task at hand. Moves conflict away from the personality perspective and toward the objectives.
• Compromiser - willingly adapts or removes his or her suggestions in order to resolve a stalemate.
• Facilitator - adept at helping keep meetings focused and work-in-process produced in a timely fashion.
• Listener - carefully listens to each member’s opinions and values their opinions.

Collaborative Writing – the present state

Collaborative Writing: An Annotated Bibliography list hundreds of articles establishing the prevalence of collaborative writing in corporate, industrial and academic reviewing, storyboarding, translation, usability testing and the production conference papers, documentation, policies and procedures, proposals, and technical reports as well as more traditional forms of literature like novels, plays and poems ([Speck1999]).

This bibliography reflects an explosion of academic literature around collaborative writing over the past three decades; it covers nearly 1,000 sources written during the seventies, eighties, and nineties. In turn, this discourse reflects the growing popularization of explicitly collaborative writing. It reflects a shift in attention toward collaboration rather than a change in the prevalence of collaborative writing itself.

Collaborative Writing Tools and Technology

Collaborative writing tools are those technologies that facilitate the editing and reviewing of a text document by multiple individuals either in real-time or asynchronously.

Collaborative writing tools can vary a great deal and can range from the simplicity of wiki system to more advanced systems. Basic features include the typical formatting and editing facilities of a standard word processor with the addition of live chat, live markup and annotation, co-editing, version tracking and more.

Google itself has recently entered this field with its Google Docs, a fully-web based collaborative writing tool formerly known as Writely. Documents generated with such tools are always accessible to all the editors and can be easily downloaded and exported in standard word processing file formats.

Make Literature Online website and projects are the brightest example of Collaborative Literature and Collaborative Writing practice and great indicator of the direction in which the whole concept of online collaboration is heading to.

Many, perhaps most, of the greatest works of literature, across time, across culture, and across language, are explicitly attributed to groups. As collaborative writing has gained scholarly attention in the last thirty years, many texts long-considered to be the product of single authorship have been revealed to be the product of collaborations.

Literature from the millennium before the Renaissance tells us that early texts were the projects of communities, not individuals. We know that these ideas and texts were the property of God or mankind; they formed a sort of intellectual commons in which all new knowledge was based and into which all knowledge flowed.

Early Models of Collaboration Before the Eighteenth Century

To one degree or another, almost every major novel, play, or large-scale poem written before the end of the Renaissance is the product of multiple hands.

Before the rise and eventual dominance of the Romantic notion of authorship, the authorial role was often compared to that of a commentator, compiler, or transcriber. Contextualized in such a way, it is unsurprising that authors’ actions in this period were intensely collaborative.

Before Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, books were written, by hand, by individuals or in scriptorium. Books, which were extremely valuable, were made of high quality materials like velum, and were passed between owners over generations. Often, each owner or reader of a book would make marginal annotations. As books were copied by hand, changes and corrections were made; histories were extended to include more recent events. Books were designed, written, caligraphed, rubricated, illustrated, illuminated, bound, and decorated by large groups of individuals. Every book was a collaboration and no two books were alike.

Imperial Chinese Literature

China had no laws resembling Western intellectual property or copyright until the twentieth century. Chinese refused to adopt intellectual property policies because they were fundamentally incompatible with Chinese literature’s basis in a creative process that elevated and necessitated borrowing, synthesis, and quotation—in a word: collaboration.

Imperial Chinese literature was rooted in a conception of authorship that identified the author as a craftsman and a historian. Authors assembled and connected existing pieces of literature in the creation of new works; no good author, even one secluded in the woods, works alone. Consequently, originality was defined not in the context of a lack of influence but from a context of a rich meaningful interaction with existing knowledge.

In the absence of a meaningful collaborative literary process—with authors both living and dead—Chinese authors were doomed to inefficacy and unoriginality. This attitude toward literature is summed up with Isaac Newton’s famous phrase, “If I see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants.”

To paint without taking the Sung and Yuan masters as one’s basis is like playing chess on an empty chessboard, without pieces.
Wu Li (1631-1718)

This famous thinker plainly decry the idea of solitary artistic creation.

The Talmud

In its simplest form, the Talmud is a compilation of ancient Jewish law and lore created by large groups of Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis between the late first and seventh centuries A.D. As such, the text’s relevance in the context of a discussion of collaborative creation and control needs no further justification.

Detailing the nature of the collaborative process that produced the Talmud is a tedious and confusing process attempted over centuries by historians and Talmudic scholars. Recently, these have included Hermann L. Strack, who published an English-language Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash. His books explain that it is clear that the creation of the Talmud spanned centuries, perhaps millennia, and in its current form represents the intellectual work of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rabbis, thinkers, and jurists.

With its conversational quality and with no beginning and (one must assume) no end, the Talmud exists as a text that is designed to be the product and material for a continuing collaborative process that ensures its continued organic growth.

The King James Version of the English Bible

Given this rich collaborative foundation, it should come as little surprise that collaborative efforts have been employed in the most revered translations as well. This is evident in the paradigmatic case of the King James Version of the English Bible: the most popular Bible translation and, by many estimates, the single most influential text in the English literary canon.

The committee assembled was catholic and intelligent on the whole, including most of the ablest men available, whether High Church or Puritan. This ideologically diverse group was divided into six sub-groups which met at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge.

Each location housed a group translating the Old and New Testaments. The scholar translated the text individually and in small groups. Groups came to consensus on a rendering that was then forwarded to a final committee of revisers. This final committee referred to works in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian and other languages making use of ancient and modern translations . . . and consulting the old manuscripts that were available to arrive the most informed decision possible.

KJV succeeded where singularly (or simply less collaboratively) authored translations failed because it was the product and process of intense collaboration. The freedom to collaborate not only ensured the persistent popularity of KJV over almost four centuries, but provided the foundation for several derivative translations including the popular Revised Version and the American Standard Version.

Post Copyright Authorship and Collaboration

Especially prompted by the rise of copyright in Britain in 1709, the eighteenth century introduced a new concept of individualized authorship based on the idea of a creative genius working alone. This idea—one at odds with collaborative, collective, or corporate creation—has remained widely influential despite powerful arguments made by theorists like Foucault and Woodmansee and a growing body of evidence that collaborative and collective creation is more effective than individual work.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this community-based concept of authorship and the mechanisms for literary ownership, production, and control were overhauled. At that transitional point, legal changes saw literature become the property of individuals. It is at that moment, and others like it, that the following history is centered. Through major transitions in the nature of the mechanisms of control, collaborative writing has evolved and persisted.

Peter Jaszi and a growing numbers of legal and literary theorists argue that it is copyright, a system designed to allow economic and political control of literary knowledge and expression, that has enshrined Romantic creativity in ways that have been difficult to challenge.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the mechanisms for collaborative writing took explicit form in the creation of coterie groups of authors that acted as forums for idea interchange, discussion, manuscript circulation, critique and small-scale publishing.

The most famous, and consequently most well documented, is the now famous “Cockney School” that included, at different times in its life, the company of Shelly, Byron, Keats, Hunt, Reynolds, Smith and Hazlitt. Through their letters and correspondence, it is clear that each of these poets turned to associations and interactions within the group as a means of cultural production.

The group’s collective work included the production of commonplace books, collaborative projects, and “contest” poems as well as major individually attributed efforts which were executed in the context, and with the assistance, of the members of the group through a system of manuscript circulation and revision.

Over time, the popularization of Wordsworth’s concept of ideal authorship has strengthened and reinforced copyright to the detriment of collaboration. Contemporary authors cannot collaborate in the same unapologetic fashion in the context of more rigid technological, social, and legal systems of control. As the publishing industry has been reshaped by these powerful and lucrative systems of control reinforced by the discourse of Romantic authorship, it ultimately shaped the dominant systems of literary production.

Contemporary Industry Collaboration

Joint authorship is steadily increasing in popularity and influence. Empirical studies have shown that instances of joint authorship—a measurement taken by tallying books and articles with more than one person on the byline—are becoming increasingly popular and prominent While these collaborations are important in highlighting the persistent power of collaborative writing, they are hindered by the hostile climate of control and authorship created by copyright.

In an article written for science-fiction authors on How to Collaborate without Getting Your Head Shaved, Keith Laumer, an author and collaborator, ends his short piece with the advice, “if you possibly can, write it yourself. Collaborations, like marriages, should only be undertaken if any alternative is unthinkable”.

In an article for Writer, Leonard Felder points out that not only should potential collaborators first agree to a division of royalties and payments, but that they must have “a written agreement on . . . the way your names will be listed on the book’s cover”.

Unfortunately, this advice is all perfectly sensible in today literary climate. While many of these articles also mention the potential benefits of joint-authorship, they explicitly, and accurately, approach the collaboration as a business relationship; their emphasis is on avoiding the pitfalls of such joint work.

Collaborative Writing: An Annotated Bibliography list hundreds of articles establishing the prevalence of collaborative writing in corporate, industrial and academic reviewing, storyboarding, translation, usability testing and the production conference papers, documentation, policies and procedures, proposals, and technical reports as well as more traditional forms of literature like novels, plays and poems ([Speck1999]).

This bibliography reflects an explosion of academic literature around collaborative writing over the past three decades; it covers nearly 1,000 sources written during the seventies, eighties, and nineties. In turn, this discourse reflects the growing popularization of explicitly collaborative writing. It reflects a shift in attention toward collaboration rather than a change in the prevalence of collaborative writing itself.

Conclusion

History has shown that the importance and power of collaborative creation is one of the most powerful mechanisms for the creation, organization and dissemination of knowledge. The dominance of the Romantic notion of authorship has forced us to ignore both the importance and power of collaborative creation and the effect that this type of ownership has on collaborative models. We need not ignore the power that ownership and individualized control bring to the table, but we should not dismiss collaborative work because it’s incompatible with the ideology that lets us control, and amass fortunes, from our ideas and from those of others.

The fact that joint-authorship and collaboration can function, and even experience massive growths in popularity, in this hostile environment, is testament to the power of collaboration. Without a strong system of control shaping the landscape of literary creation, there is no guessing what other works we might enjoy.

Imagine how exciting Fiction Stories would be if they were devised and neatly fashioned by the avid anticipation of the readers themselves. The best way to achieve this goal is to compellingly involve readers in all stages of the creative writing process to the benefit of all.

In this article we explore the winning concept of collaborative writing of the real, solid state, ready to publish online fiction books! What was the roadblocks in the past, and why it is finally possible to achieve this right now.

Background - Collaborative Writing Concept

By Wikipedia definition, the term collaborative writing refers to projects where written works are created by multiple people together (collaboratively) rather than individually. Some projects are overseen by an editor or editorial team, but many grow without any of this top-down oversight.

There were few attempts of carrying out collaborative writing methods in an online environment. They can be roughly sorted in two major disciplines:

• Interactive fiction - process in which everyone can add a chapter or a section to an ongoing storyline making a set of possible alternatives. By submitting follow ups to their favorite scenario, contributors branch out storyline towards many possible outcomes. Main benefit is in allowing almost Darwinistic selection principles to determine the natural flow of the narration in favor of the most resistant variety. Downside of this form of collaboration is that it suffers from the lack of other regulatory principles. As a rule, the result is a cloud of incoherent visions and interpretations of initial plot or idea. Usually, such projects do not have clear mechanism to accomplish the story by navigating it to the closing chapter.
• Wiki stories - are fully accessible writings which content may be freely edited and modified by contributors. Usually, this kind of collaboration is suitable for scientific and encyclopedia-like publications, where the “collective wisdom” and community knowledge integration has a priority over esthetic and creative expression.

Make Literature Online - Fresh Approach

Unlike traditional Literature, where creative writing is secluded (”from the attic/basement”) process, fully subjected to the isolated author’s experience and imagination, we wish to use all advantages of Internet communication channels to provide intelligent collaborative writing environment in which readers and writers meat together, share their ideas, reviews, experiences and knowledge, and listen to one another all way through the new literature creation process. This new concept is named The New Age Elementary Writing phenomenon.

To avoid mistakes of previous similar attempts, we had to make a structural environment by adopting some rules of engagement:

• Project framework - The main unit in new Collaborative Writing conception is not the chapter (which is usually the case in interactive fiction schemes), but the New Fiction Book Project. To make a structural foundation for solid project management, we defined a framework in which all literature genres are sorted in six general categories:
  1. Science Fiction and Fantasy
  2. Mystery and Horror
  3. Crime and Thriller
  4. Romance and Comedy
  5. History and Adventure
  6. Children’s and Social

At one time, there may be only one active project in each genre. That makes six active projects simultaneously overall. In other words, all community efforts are focused on writing one particular fiction book in each genre.

• Project management - Each project comprises of stages that are organized like separate writing contests:
  1. Storyline - Ideas for writing a book submissions
  2. Opening chapter
  3. Middle chapter 1, 2, 3…
  4. Closing chapter
  5. Book cover design
  6. Book finalization tasks

Selection cycles are organized around the forum topics attached to each stage, with review submissions, user rankings and discussion. Writers in this stage may receive a valuable feedback for their writings. The goal is to select the best option for new chapter, one that reflects general desire of the community.

• Advanced rating algorithm - To be sure that only most quality content will be making the official draft, a complex rating algorithm has to be developed. It takes in consideration many different factors, some of which are:
  1. Submission time
  2. Popularity - how many unique views the item received
  3. Ranking - how members vote
  4. Number and quality of reviews
  5. Compliance to the main idea and storyline

It is important to stress that despite its complexity, this rating system has its transparent interpretation which can be easily reviewed at any time for each particular item.

• Project Micromanagement - One major problem related to dealing with collaborative writing projects is the fact that you cannot actually impose some firm timetable in the environment in which so many things depend on other people’s behavior and so many other limitations involved. The only way around is to establish the Project Micromanagement, the set of additional rules and criteria, that automatically handles each of these particular situations. Some of these criteria are:
  1. Minimal submissions per stage to start voting process
  2. Minimal number of ranking received before an item is considered
  3. Maximal number of submissions per same member
  4. Maximal number of votes per member per stage
  5. Minimal rank limit for selected item
  6. …
• Project Timeline - It defines each project dynamic by marking out significant check points and time frame in which each of them should be reached.
  1. Stage launching time
  2. Submission period
  3. Voting period
  4. Results consolidation period
  5. Project idle period - time between two consequent projects

In conjunction with Project management, Project Timeline determines transitional procedures between consequent stages and makes the spine of the project development.

We strongly believe that Fiction Collaborative Writing has a bright future. Loose coordination mechanisms and luck of editorial monitoring that was missing links in the past, with principles, rules and criteria presented here, no longer play a role in an on line collaboration. Writing the real, solid state books of fiction on Internet, with Make Literature Online innovative concept for the first time becomes present reality, not the future fiction.

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