ltknow posted a link to the National Write a Novel in a Month Challenge:
What is NaNoWriMo? | National Novel Writing Month
It's 18 November and that's not enough time for a single person to write a 75, 000 word novel—but maybe lots of people working collectively could do it. Baraka Guru and I were talking about this, and decided to make a collaborative writing challenge.
The idea is that between now and the end of the month we make a 200 page novel, and do it in the Literature forum.
We should make a town.
Let's make this town:
Any town is lots of different things happening simultaneously.
So pick a location and make characters and the space they're in.
You can describe the location, the building or part of the building that your character or characters occupy. You can tell situations, tell stories. You can do multiple characters and/or places by doing several posts—but each individual post should be consistent: one post, one location. You can do multiple posts about the same location—you can make an apartment building for example. But please cross-reference them (see below)
You can tell stories about the past, describe interactions, describe spaces or objects within spaces: you can daydream or nightdream or whatever you like. It's the complexity of simultaneous stories that'd make this doable and maybe cool to wander around in.
If you want to put up a piece of genre writing—fantasy, sci-fi, horror—you have to work it into the town constraint—so for example if you want to do a gothic thing, you could have your character read the story and us read along with your character reading it, or you could have your character watch a film, etc. Similarly, you can do stories about the past present or future so long as you keep building the town in "real time" as well. You can refer to other places via communications infrastructure, patterns of trade or exchange. You can talk about electricity and telephone if you like—a town is all these things, but it is also still a town, so you have to remember: everything that happens is building this town.
Characters and scenes should be self-contained in terms of action. If you want to have an interaction with a character or characters from another story, you have to collaborate before posting. The is no omniscient narrator in this town, no god. You can write things involving characters or spaces that other people have made directly by collaborating with them. This is a rule---if you make a situation in which there is interaction, you should pm the writer who made the characters you're interacting with. Think of it like this: you wouldn't just show up. You call ahead.
It'd be good if a cross-references system developed--so if in a post I were to mention, say, The Acme Penile Implant Corporation (i don't know why i thought of that), another post later could take you into an office of the APIC or walk you around the production facility. To cross reference, please start with the number of the post that you're picking up on. What we'd like to do is link them together so you could go down any number of pathways through the same town. The idea is that this town already in a sense exists, so you can talk about it as if it does. If this works, we can populate it with places, spaces and stories that hang together through the cross-referencing.
I think the movement of the reader through the town is enough of an organizing idea that way, particularly if the link possibility can happen.
To keep things interestings, we're going to move through cycles of days. So there will be DAY and NIGHT. There may also be WEATHER to consider. Baraka Guru or I will post in yellow when day becomes night and if there's weather (rain, snow, hurricane,etc). At first, maybe Day—if this goes as we'd like and lots of people are working on it to do this town-raising, we'll start to break it up (morning, afternoon, evening). Please stay consistent with the time of day. You don't have to refer to it, but if you do, be in the same timezone as the stories around you.
To complete this, we need lots of text, so write and steal freely.
The objective is to submit it as a novel to the website above at the end of the month.
Hopefully, we get a prize.
So the thread will stop at the end of the month.
So let's make a town comrades. The only way this is possible in 12 or 13 days is if all of us help with it.
Have fun. I look forward to visiting this place
-----Added 19/11/2008 at 11 : 45 : 01-----
DAY ONE
It is morning.
Without stories, there's only a map.
A town is a geographical region and a collection of states of mind, some connected, others discrete. A town is a collection of networks, of spaces where folk work, where they interact with each other, where they buy things, where they live.
A reader enters this town by reading about these states of mind, how they're connected to each other, to the wider world, to the past, to the future, to each other, to the place.
We should populate the town, make it more than a network of lines and street names.
When you decide on a street on which to put something, please note that and what it is that you're putting there—a single-family house, an apartment building, a store, a factory or warehouse, etc. Once we're underway, if you want to add something to the same space (another apartment in the same building), please cross-reference with the post number and location so that we can keep things kinda straight.
The date is more or less the present, but feel free to invoke the past or the future so long as you do it in a way that keeps your story consistent with the town---as you see in the opening, you can have a character talk about the past, or you can do it as narrator, but frame it as someone in the present talking about the past, or reading something or watching something about the past.
Characters can have relationships of various kinds with each other. If you're going to set up a character as a friend of another and want the characters to interact directly, please pm the poster who made that character and make the interaction as a collaborative story—it can be done as a sequence of posts or in the same post.
Remember that it's morning. When night falls, remember that it's dark outside. If you can see and you're outside, you have to account for why that is.
Have fun---write freely, steal liberally.