The Stone Tree: Finding Balance in Collaborative Narrative Development

Online fictional narrative is still in its formative years and will be for quite some time to come, and The Stone Tree project seeks to expand current understanding of what it means to create a story in a collaborative medium. It explores the scaffolding required to create an online fictional narrative space that facilitates multiple authors with a single plotline while incorporating reader feedback and then documents and evaluates the process to benefit both my own future work as well as the work of others.

I love to read. I love getting to know new characters. New places. New times. I love watching conflicts, and their resolutions, unfold. I also love the use of technology to support creative authorship. After mastering the programming skills required to send my name streaming across the screen on an Apple II in junior high, my first personal use of computer programming was to write a choose-your-own-adventure story with my best friend. She brought the raw creative skills, and I brought the technical and editorial skills. It was a good partnership. Since then, I have nurtured a continuing interest in how technology is used to build platforms that support creative narrative development, especially as a collaborative effort.

Recently, this interest took a more active turn. While working at Shedd Aquarium, I had an idea to write a children’s book entitled The Stone Tree about two children who find a world where extinct animals go. They learn that extinction has been an issue throughout the history of the planet, but that humans have been responsible for an extinction level that is higher than average. In discussing the plot with a colleague, she suggested a talking newt to guide the children, as amphibians are generally affected most rapidly by any changes to the environment. This seemed a good improvement, and the more we discussed the character, the more I wanted her, a newt expert with an obvious talent for sounding like an engaging, talking newt, to write it. Then it occurred to me, “Why stop there?” Why not develop a website that would support the newt and the children being authored by others? In speaking to my colleague as well as two children of friends who I knew to have a desire to write — as well as the stories to prove they can do it – they thought that the project sounded fun. More importantly, those with whom I discussed the project as readers also seemed interested.

I began exploring online fictional narrative development more closely. I found characteristics of existing work that I liked (see Context below) and could use to refine my own work, but saw nothing that fully matched the thoughts and rough plan I had for scaffolding story development.

Today, I propose to finalize the refinement of this plan and put it into practice. And I have to admit that I’m very excited to do so. I want to see what the “characters” will write. I want to put my editorial and writing skills as well as my technical skills to the task to see what results. Moreover, I want to contribute to the evolution of collaborative narrative online — helping myself and others develop future projects by documenting and evaluating this pilot test.

Exquisite Corpse / Sequential Stories
Long before the existence of computer-based telecommunication technologies, collaborative narrative in the form of sequential stories existed as both a parlor game known as Consequences and, later, an expression of artistic creativity. The surrealists in particular seized upon an extension of the form, renamed Exquisite Corpse, as a way to create poetry, images, and short narratives as a collective. The additive nature of sequential stories – one author starts, the next person works from part or all of the previous section to take over for a time before handing off to the next author — lends itself well to web-based applications. And, in fact, numerous examples exist online. Exquisite Corpse at ReproHistory (http://www.repohistory.org/circulation/exquisite/ec_fr.html) and the Global Story Train for children (http://storytrain.kids-space.org/) are two examples.

I have been inspired by these online applications of fictional narrative development because they have translated successfully and popularly online. However, because there is no consistent author, the story can drift, and it is almost always evident that different people are writing the same characters. Their voices do not remain consistent over the course of time. While fun to write, and fun to read, the inconsistent authorship remains evident in a way that makes it more difficult for the reader to forget the structure through which the stories were created. Indeed, part of the fun is generally derived from noting where the breaks are in the narrative and discovering how a new author took over from the old. If handed a sequential story without an explanation of the method of authorship, the story generally isn’t as pleasurable for the reader.

MUDs and MOOs
MUDs and MOOS, rather than dividing the fictional narrative authorship along plot development lines, divide the “authorship” along character lines. Each participant takes on a character, creating a narrative in collaboration with other characters as they interact in a defined environment. While an “editor” is generally present to some degree – to help keep characters true to the style of the environment and to craft the environment and adapt it to the storyline as required or monitor character-built additions to the environment, for example – he, she, or they do not structure the plot towards enjoyment by outside readers. Rather, the focus is on building an engaging environment for the author-participants. Lurkers – readers – might be present, but do not participate in any way, unless they become involved as an author at a later time. In addition, MUDs and MOOs are generally open-ended, and archival transcripts do not make for good Sunday afternoon reading.

Having been a Dungeons and Dragons player in my tweens, I am very respectful of this format as it has been translated online. I enjoyed, and the success of online spaces such as Everquest suggest that others also enjoy, taking ownership over a character, taking on a continuous, active role in a fictional narrative. I have been happy to see the development of educational uses, such as Amy Bruckman’s MOOse Xing for kids. However, as noted above, MUDs and MOOs are author-centric. If it is to be of interest to a non-author, it must maintain continued growth or fade away. And even so, it is a very different reading experience than enjoying a work intended to be read by an outside audience.

Multiple Threads in Traditional Narrative
One of my original inspirations for this project was a book, which I read in high school and has stayed with me ever since. Exercises in Style (Exercices de style) by Raymond Queneau takes the same small incidents and recounts them in a different style in each short chapter. The same seemingly inconsequential events are repeated over and over, and yet are fresh at each telling because the voice of the observer describing the events changes. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is an example that takes that idea and refines it to give each character a chance to illuminate the central story from his or her individual viewpoint. Same event, style and interpretation based on an individual character. The trouble with these formats in print form is that with a more complex plot, they can become rather difficult to follow. Online editions of works such as Faulkner’s have attempted to remedy this difficulty, but often they have to resort to adding newly-authored contrivances, such as a timeline, to benefit. Because these have been retrofitted to the stories, they aren’t seamless.

While I enjoy a complex read, I also believe that a multi-threaded story developed explicitly for reading on the web has the potential to keep the narrative complexity while leaving behind some of the tracking-the-plot difficulties that detract from the story.

Online Collaboration with a Single Author
Many authors find reader feedback essential to the creation and refinement of their stories. Tad Williams is one author who has embraced using online forums to gain such feedback. For his Shodowmarch series, Williams developed a website where story chapters were released in an episodic fashion, and a bulletin board was set up to encourage immediate feedback with which to shape subsequent chapters (http://www.shadowmarch.com/bin/ultimatebb.cgi).

While it is rare to see an author put him or herself up for such widespread critique, I believe that this could be quite engagingly applied to a collaborative narrative — taking advantage of the popularity of sequential narrative-style projects and using it to help guide the next turn of the story as feedback. Allow individuals to write the characters and maintain the coherence of the story, but use an editor to invite readers to suggest what might happen next, to help shape the next stage of the plot.

Online fictional narrative is still in its formative years and will be for quite some time to come. I propose to explore the scaffolding required to create an online fictional narrative space that facilitates multiple authors with a single plotline while incorporating reader feedback and then document and evaluate that process to benefit both my own future work as well as the work of others.

Each month, three authors (who have already been identified) will be given a preliminary set of guiding questions about their character and how that character — and characters around them — might react to a given situation. The authors’ responses will then be divided between what is public knowledge to all characters, private knowledge shared between two of the three characters, and private information accessible only to the individual author by the editor. Each of the authors will then be given an outline for a chapter (or, in the first month, for writing a character description) to use to write a short narrative from their character’s point of view. Once submitted, these will go through an editorial revision before being posted publicly online. Concurrent to the posting of the three first person narratives recounting the same event from different points of view, a fourth account from an omniscient point of view will be posted that links the stories together both as a narrative and literally with hyperlinks. After the chapters have been posted, readers will be invited to suggest how the story might continue. Audience suggestions will then be used to inform the next round of guiding questions and chapter outlines.

By the end of the project, The Stone Tree will consist of an online fictional narrative with the following components completed:

• Introduction
  
• Three detailed character descriptions written by different authors, available to the public in a graphic design that connects them to each other while reflecting the personality of each character
  
• Two chapters (three version each, plus one written from an omniscient viewpoint; again, each designed to match the personality of the character)
  
• Three guiding questions worksheets used by each of the authors to initially react to plot developments (one each for character development, chapter one, and chapter two; filled out by each author)
  
• Two chapter outlines (given to each author after completion of guiding worksheets, used to write their final chapter entry to keep each character’s story consistent)
  
• Story feedback by readers
  
• Evaluation surveys completed by authors and readers
  

Based on these components, an evaluation report will be written, including a proposed second round of tools development to continue beyond of the bounds of the thesis. As noted, this document will be written not only to help future development of The Stone Tree, but also to provide a background for others working on online collaborative fictional narratives.