An idea I had (probably needs workshopping)

[js_thrill]

In one of the anthologies we read for the book club, there was a story that came from a shared fantasy world (if I understood correctly, multiple writers wrote stories in the same setting).

I find lots of different versions of collaborative creative projects interesting, and having a shared setting that lots of people are free to write in is no exception. The idea I've been turning over in my head is a sort of two-stage process where stage one is for a small group of folks to collaboratively do some structured world-building on a discord server.  

For example, if it is a sci fi world, with multiple alien races, each person is figuring out some stuff about one species of alien and how things went for them at some major interstellar summit in the setting's history, etc.  Something less rule-driven than an RPG but with a bit of structure to it.  And then after some history and major figures and what not of this setting are set down, we write up some stuff that reflects the "core" of the world/setting and lay that out, and then stage two is for people (the same people or new people) to write stories set in this world (probably later than the events that were established, but who knows).

This is the current state of development of this idea, and I basically am wondering if anyone has suggestions/advice/desire to participate in something this.

Comments

[landingtree]

I really like this kind of thing - at the same time, I'm afraid it's a fair representation of my current creative energy that I've taken two weeks to reply to this post. I am already neglecting at least one shared creative writing project more than I should be, and my general pattern is that I will get very enthusiastic briefly and then sheepishly half-forget about the project for six months. Maybe this translates to 'I am interested in the worldbuilding part but would probably not get as far as the stories part.' But have your thoughts moved on about this? Microscope sounds cool!

I've collaborated with my grandfather on fiction. I think the most interesting format we did was, one of us would invent a place by writing a description of it in a season, and another of us would write a contrasting description of that place in another season and also a description of a new place you could get to from the first place, and then the other one would describe the second place in a new season and then again a third place... I think we ended up with twelve places, and then we started writing a story set in them. My granddad and I tend to disagree on everything about plot and character though, so the results were fun but rather tug-of-war-like. Partly because we did not have similar assumptions about how world-building worked. It could be an interesting exercise to do at the scale of countries or planets instead of beaches and gas stations.

Years and years ago I also did an exercise where every participant made up one fact about a city and then we talked for an hour about how they could all be true and what the consequences were. It wasn't an s.f. group, it was a chaplaincy-based arts tutorial, so I was surprised that almost everyone wrote something science fictional! The statement I wrote in, 'Engineers and architects are highly respected and have a significant say in politics,' became a bit different when combined with someone else's 'All the buildings and structures are made of living plants.' I guess what I take from this is, one of the fun things about collaborative worldbuilding is having to look at semi-contradictory facts which different people have put in and reconcile them, because the reconciliation often has to be weird and interesting. (We also had 'The city is built on an unfathomably deep river' and 'The city is built on an anti-gravity foundation and floats' so the city ended up quite literally on top of the river.)

[js_thrill]

This all sounds fascinating. Maybe what I want is two things:

1) a place/discord to experiment with various cool collaborative writing formats with folks, and see what comes out of doing those

And then 2) to workshop this specific idea a bit more into a particular format to try out

LMK if you want to partake in 1, even if just to the extent of sharing more details like what you’ve mentioned above (but hopefully also doing some things like you just mentioned)

[landingtree]

Yeah, sure, that sounds like fun - count me in!