Tuesday, July 22, 2014

The Importance Of Collaboration Fiction

By Sharron Cantu


One may wonder why team writing endeavors are undertaken. It seems contrary to the benefit of being an independent author and presenting a unique book without suffering the influence of others. However, there are various benefits that can be found in collaboration fiction. Sharing creative control almost harks back to oral tradition where individuals all contributed to stories.

Academics often have to collaborate with one another in the writing of academic articles and papers. However, it is in the field of fiction where this type of writing as particular challenges. Such a collaboration may be attempted by a writing group as a way of developing the skills of participants and this can help them a great deal. Many collaborations are attempted for commercial purposes too, where experienced authors decide to work with one another.

Writing together has a number of benefits but it also creates various challenges. One of the main benefits is that each author can benefit from the talents of the others. They can also challenge one another and thus stimulate increased creativity. The synergism can be very motivating.

A major difficulty when collaborating is to integrate all the efforts in such a way as to produce a consistent style. In order to do this there must be a level of mutual respect and egos have to be put to one side. One author may have stronger skills in one area than another and it makes sense when collaborating to use the particular talents of each author. One author may be better at driving a story along whereas another may be better at working on finer details like fine tuning dialogue and settings.

In this type of project, the work is divided up in many different ways. Some efforts may involve only a limited amount of collaboration such as authors each writing sub plots and one person being designated to weave them all together. At other times, a general plot outline may be brainstormed at the beginning and specific characters or chapters assigned to each writer.

Authors can often be quite egotistical and this means that collaborations can be difficult. It definitely may require putting aside certain convictions and ideas for the sake of the project. As long as there is a mutual trust and respect, this is possible. Sometimes, however, it is the collaboration of strong, egotistical authors that may produce the best results due to the fact that they challenge one another and each person is pushed to achieve his or her best.

The world of gaming has resulted in some collaborative writing. This is probably due to the role-playing nature of many of these games where characters constantly interact with one another. Other attempts in collaborative storytelling have been done at online websites where a story is begun and then driven forward by visitors to the site.

When people co-operate with another to produce books, the efforts can be disappointing but they can also be rich and complex. This type of work definitely has a place, especially when accomplished authors succeed in working together. They can produce books that reach greater heights than they could possibly have accomplished on their own.




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