Zorac (zorac) wrote,
Zorac
zorac
  • Music: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Once More, With Feeling"

I've got a theory...

OK, my second thought after having this idea was "I bet somebody's done this already", so feel free to point out prior art. It was already inspired by much poking around on LiveJournal, thegraybook's hilarious Very Secret Diaries (which I finally got around to reading the other day) and jiggery_pokery's suggestions re: the release of my own fic-in-progress.

Fiction by way of diaries - it's been done before, eg Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones. My idea was to have a collaborative project with the story evolving in real time via the diaries of a few main characters (published in LiveJournals) - each one written by a different author. You'd need a fair amount of coordination between the writers and plenty of advanced planning of the plot, but if done well it could be really cool. You could have the story emerging over weeks or months, multiple viewpoints, updates appearing conceivably several times a day.

There you have it - well, the structure, at least.. Just need a plot & some characters... Other thoughts - You could do it one of two ways:
  1. The LJs really are LJs, the "characters" read and post in each others journals - could be fun, but scuppers the idea of reading the characters' private thoughts
  2. The LJs are the contents of the characters' private diaries, characters are not aware of what the others write - I reckon this would be the way to go, plus readers can post comments on the diary entries, etc.
Oh, and you probably want a central LJ for out-of-character postings, which could then friend all the characters so that the friends page would be an easy way to keep up with the whole fic in one place.
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  • 4 comments

jiggery_pokery

October 3 2002, 17:32:07 UTC 18 years ago

Excellent idea - but, as you suspected, not original. See nocturne_alley and Friends thereof for a highly-regarded example.

Not quite sure what cardboards is, but I suspect it could well be related to what you're suggesting.

zorac

October 4 2002, 00:38:41 UTC 18 years ago

Excellent. While nocturne_alley is an RPG rather than a fic (rather more freeform than the more tightly-plotted fic I envisage), it's close enough that I don't need to worry about adding this to my @Home TODO list. This is a good thing, or it could end up looking like the 10-mile monstrosity of my @Work one...

Do what?

addedentry

October 4 2002, 03:36:18 UTC 18 years ago

Go on, share your todo list with the rest of LiveJournal. I'm not entirely sure why there's a facility todo so, but since it exists...

Re: Do what?

zorac

October 4 2002, 06:00:26 UTC 18 years ago

I've already got the todo list on my PalmPilot, so I really don't feel like sticking it on LJ as well. The @work one is long and tedious, ranging from the small annoying things to the big "take all these systems and neatly integrate them into one even bigger one" sort of things. The @home one includes finishing my fic (only another ~60,000 words to go in the first draft), writing a Java mail server (POP3 done, HTTP mostly done, IMAP half-done, LMTP not started, MySQL back-end half done), ripping all my CDs to oggs, reading all the books I've bought but haven't read yet (and similarly for DVDs), getting a life, etc.