8
Apr
Update #2 (July 1st 2011): This proposal is alive and well as SplinteredLands.com
Edit: There has been a lot of discussion of this idea in the comments, so please read them as well as the main post.
So, I’ve been mulling the idea of doing a ‘shared world’ anthology of short fiction, of fantasy or science fiction. This is an idea that has been used before, most notably by Robert Lynn Asprin for Thieves’ World, and I’m wondering how many people out there would be interested in something of this sort. It’s an idea that has caught my attention recently, and I’m throwing it out there to see if it catches anyone else’s.
The first step, if there are enough interested authors, is pick the story type, setting and the language style (Gaelic-style names would be an example), and spend some time world building, creating an encyclopedia that can be handed around to the interested parties. I’m leaving this deliberately open-ended because I want to see what comes back in the way of ideas, and I don’t want to restrict them.
On the idea of the first short stories, I would recommend nothing more than 5-10,000 words, as a rough test of the system, and not too stressful to write either. Of course, there’s some work to do before writing the stories happen.
Thoughts on the proposal?
Comments
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T.S. Bazelli on 04.08.2010
It would be interesting to build a world – and see what kind of stories emerge from it, but I’m not sure if you’d need to go further and define a story type as well. Would the world building be a collaborative process?
I’m interested! Let me know what happens with this.
The Four Part Land on 04.08.2010
It would be collaborative world building, as I want to make sure it’s interesting not only for me, but for all of the other authors who are intrigued by this idea. I don’t want to limit the story types too much, just the length at first, I think.
I’ll keep plugging away and seeing what sort of interest I can generate for this.
Louise Broadbent on 04.08.2010
I think stories of different genres set in one world would be cool – I guess they’d all be speculative by default but you could have dark speculative, speculative romance, literary speculative (if that’s pos.), speculative fantasy etc. I’ve often thought about writing the story of someone dissatisfied with a genuine utopia – just tossing that out there (I noticed you like the word ‘tossing’…)
The Four Part Land on 04.08.2010
Is that supposed to be a ‘tosser’ wink? đŸ˜›
A distopian setting of some sort would interest me quite a bit, and has done in the past, although I’ve never really explored it much. The one time I did was something called ‘City in the Desert’, where the basic idea of the setting was that there was a single city built around an oasis, and surrounded entirely by badlands and desert. Each year, they would hold a ceremony exiling people from the city in order to ration the water supply. It was a sort of walled garden, that wasn’t particularly perfect inside the walls.
Louise Broadbent on 04.08.2010
OK, stop me if I’ve just crossed the border into Crazyland but we could do a zombie dystopia world – bear with me – using your exiling for water rations idea – they could be like organized zombies who exile fellow zombies for brain rations. Or we could just do the water-in-the-desert thing – maybe there’s a utopia somewhere in the desert and an exiled character stumbles across it – and then it was all a mirage – no that’s almost as bad as ‘it was all a dream’ – it’s a real utopia city in the dystopia world. There’s even potential for religious speculative fiction in there, if we could find someone willing to write in such a genre.
The Four Part Land on 04.08.2010
I have to say I rather like the real utopia hidden in the middle of a dystopian world. Of course, being me, I’d probably have a Sword of Damocles hanging over the small utopia, that eventually it too will be consumed by the dystopian world.
Not sure I’d go for the organized zombie idea, but I can certainly be out-voted. Of course, we could combine the two -> zombies live out in the dystopian world, this sort of horrendous ruin of what was once society, and the city starving for water in the middle of the desert is the last utopia, but the water is slowly running low.
Very uplifting idea that.
Louise Broadbent on 04.08.2010
The zombies could find it and destroy it…and then it turns out the zombies aren’t zombies but humans – we’d been fooling the reader all along to have a dig.
Hmm maybe that should be a solo project and we should ditch the zombies for this. I doubt we could get many people on board with it.
The Four Part Land on 04.08.2010
Zombies are a bit of a polarizing topic for the writer. I’ve only tried them once, and it was a ‘flip the script’ short that never quite worked out.
If we don’t try zombies, where does that leave us?
Louise Broadbent on 04.08.2010
Someplace sane.
Louise Broadbent on 04.08.2010
I’ve never written a zombie story before, btw – this is a recent obsession.
The Four Part Land on 04.08.2010
Someplace sane is just not as fun though.
So, back to the city in the desert surrounded by a dystopia, perhaps without zombies?
Louise Broadbent on 04.08.2010
Yes. Now then, how do you feel about the different genres thing?
The Four Part Land on 04.08.2010
To be honest, I probably couldn’t pick the different genres out of a lineup. I just write and see if I like the result. Genre considerations don’t really ever come into it.
Louise Broadbent on 04.08.2010
OK, no genre writing – I’m more mainstream/ literary/ misfit anyway. So how will this work? Different writers pick/ add a character or what?
The Four Part Land on 04.08.2010
Each writer picks a single character to claim as theirs, and then writes a story in a combined world that has been handed around beforehand. The only big rule is one writer cannot affect another writer’s character in a major way. It’s expected that they show up in the background and as wall-dressing, but they shouldn’t play a major role that changes who they are.
Louise Broadbent on 04.08.2010
Yep, I’m feeling it. One problem, though – wouldn’t the characters have to interact with each other – have relationships with each other (in the broad sense of the word) – no man is an island and all that. I guess these could be other, unclaimed characters. The other way we could overcome this potential issue is having some ‘response’ stories – sort of ‘other side of the story’ types. Or it could be a part of the dystopia that every man is an island – the characters would talk but not connect at all.
The Four Part Land on 04.08.2010
Generally, there are about twice as many ‘name’ characters as there are authors, and some of the most common ones, like the barkeeps or the fortune teller in the market, aren’t assigned to anyone. So, a bar scene would often have a few of the main characters in the background, watching whatever the main occurrence was. So the interaction is usually fairly normal, and characters can be friends and so on, it’s just something that needs to be worked out beforehand between everyone as they build the background world. This does require a bit of thinking ahead, and probably rough outlines of all the stories in mind while the world is being built, so that it can accommodate them without breaking.
Hope that helps.