From Hedley to hippie, more on the Whistler haps
More on the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival that’s running from the 14th until the 23rd up the Sea to Ski from us. Earlier I blogged about the free concert that was going to be happening there [mbv] but from the jock rock of Hedley they’re offering up a collective novel writing experiance.
From the website [w]:
The Collective Novel Experiment, which debuted at the 2005 Festival, is an innovative approach to promoting local scribblers and exposing the creative process. The theme for the 2006 Experiment: A Whistler Love Story. Over the course of 36 hours, writers will collaborate on a major work of fiction, by taking turns sitting in a four-poster bed installed in the heart of Whistler village, writing chapters of a romance novel set in Whistler. The bed will be a kind of visual greenhouse - enabling the writer to work, while providing insight to the public as to the way a major literary work incubates. Up to 18 writers will sign on to participate in the 2006 Collective Novel Experiment. Each will undertake to serve a 2hour stint in the bed and to complete a consecutive chapter of the novel.
Sounds like a potential mess of a novel, but who knows. Might be worth checking out.
Yeeees…oookay….
There’s just a handful of MMOCWNs (Massively Multiauthor Organized Collaboratively-Written Novels, acronym based on MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) that I know of, and all of them have been jokes.
Naked Came the Stranger was the 1969 sex potboiler written as a test of how low were the literary standards of the American reading public. Naked Came the Manatee, a crime/action novel is one of the several parodies (and probably the best-known one) of Naked Came the Stranger, originally started by Dave Barry in 1997. And Atlanta Nights is the science fiction novel written to reveal a vanity-press publisher for what it was, in revenge for disparaging science fiction and science fiction writers on its website.
What’s common to all these books are that they are massively multiauthor, with many more contributing authors than the usual two or at most three who work on typical collaborations. Twenty-four for Naked Came the Stranger, thirteen for Naked Came the Manatee, and (by my count), thirty-nine for Atlanta Nights, with one of them being a story-generating computer program. There is little, if any, attempt to coordinate the story and characters, to maintain continuity and consistency, neither in plot nor style.
All of this is fine, because all of these novels were meant to be total trainwrecks. I trust that this Collective Novel Experiment (up to 18 authors) is just a big ol’ publicity stunt or a lighthearted, having-fun, play activity, and not based on some serious belief about quality work emerging from the powwah!, the gestalt!, the proactive leveraging of synergies! of massively multiauthor collaborative writing, or anything like that.
Doesn’t necessarily mean that the result won’t be worth checking out, though.
Actually none of those examples sound worth checking out. Even the one with Dave Barry.