I'm going to get started fairly soon on a website idea I've had for a while now, and would appreciate any input from anybody who would be interested in using it. The purpose of the website will be to allow people to compose, share, and critique works of fiction. The writing will be done one page at a time (this is all electronic, so there will probably just be a word or letter limit), but you will be free to use as many pages as you like. I know, this idea is groundbreaking... I'm getting there.
It will be possible to take a partial story (say, pages 1-3 of a 5 page story) and pick up on page 4, following whatever plot line you like. The original story doesn't need to be yours, and anybody can pick up on any page of your new plot line and proceed as they like. The original 5-page story will remain, but at the bottom of page 3, rather than a single link like "go to next page" there will be the option to go to any of the tangential plot lines. You may think of this as just a web-based choose-your-own-adventure authoring tool, but that's not entirely accurate. For starters, there won't be options like "Does Jim open the box? Click here for yes, click here for no." Since this site is meant partially to provide feedback to the authors, pages will be critiqued with both written comments from other authors (assuming people actually do this) as well as numeric scores in a variety of fields (like plot consistency, writing style, etc.) and the links at the bottom of any page will have this information. All the critiques and scores will be provided by the community of writers using the page and the readers. Think of it as peer review. So, to use the above example, someone reading the story, upon finishing page 3, will be given two links, one for page 4a (the first written), and another for page 4b (the new plot line). The links will have the numeric scores displayed, to facilitate the decision of which page to move on to.
Did any of this make sense? If I wrote this would anybody be interested in using it? Any ideas that you think would make it better? Please comment; I'm going to try to get started early next week.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
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17 comments:
Where's the porn database I was promised! That's way more important than this creative writing thing.
I may get to it at some point, but I'm going to focus on more legitimate projects for the time being... besides, aren't you engaged to a guy with a degree in computer science?
sure, i'd prolly try it out, although I have no writing whatsoever.
You may want to think about how you will limit page length. It would be unfortunate for someone to be in the middle of some great writing and then have it cut off mid word or mid sentence... perhaps there should be some flexibility, like the limiit is 1000 words but you are allowed 250 extra before being cut off.
Um, wouldn't that make the limit 1250?
yeah, but it would like start yelling at them to stop at 1000. or you tell them the limit is 1000 when its not... basically just a way to avoid people having to shorten their work because its like 100 words over.
I'm not really that worried about this since there's nothing stopping you from just starting a new page. As long as you don't have to stop mid-paragraph it should be allright, and I'll try to make the limit long enough that there should never be the problem of not being to fit a paragraph on a single page.
Part of the point of this is to allow other people to jump in mid-story and take it in whatever direction they like. If you let people write exceedingly long pages nobody would be able to come along and modify it anywhere but at the end, or before the long page started. Keeping a moderate word limit per page is only there to ensure that other people have a reasonable number of places to go on tangents; it's not meant to limit the amount of total writing you do in a story.
Yeah, but the guy I'm engaged to has a legitiment job with like actual work and responsiblity.
so would one only be able to begin a new story path at the end of a page? or would it be possible to start one in the middle of some line halfway down a page? the latter would be preferrably, i believe, or anyone using this. just because the page ends, doesn't mean it'll be a good starting point for someone else to continue the story...
That's a good point, I just can't think of any reasonably simple way to handle starting anywhere in a story. The major problem I have with that is that being able to start anywhere within a story may cause a portion of a story to be broken up too much. Say I start a new path right before sentence X, and you begin a new path right after sentence X: readers would have to pick "Path A/B" before sentence X, then possibly read sentence X and then pick again, betweeh "Path C/D". If this happens too much it would disrupt the reading experience.
It could be that that won't be the case that often, and there may be ways to make those choices more streamlined, and if I can find a decent way to program that capability in I may try, but I don't think it's going to be that easy to introduce some mechanism to let you start anywhere.
I'll think about this more.
i don't know how a mechanism for inserting new text would work exactly, but to show inserted sections, i might make sense to have a super or subscript link, like a footnote, that would take to you the new section and then a link at the end of the section that would take you back, if that's what the author of the new section intended... i would imagine there would be pieces that would take a story in a completely different direction that wouldn't ever lead back to the original story.
The superscript idea is good; now I just need to figure out a way to let authors pick any spot in a story and continue writing from there. The only real problem is the web interface. I want the user to be able to just click in the story where he wants to start editing, and have it go from there. I'm going to have to play around with some javascript to see how to do this.
I'm even thinking about having the superscript link just erase all the following text and replace it with whatever tangent you selected, so that the page doesn't need to be reloaded and paragraphs are maintained. If the new tangent is meant to end the paragraph differently, not start a new one, I don't think that the reader should be sent to another page.
I think that being able to start editing after any sentence is good enough since if you like the beginning of the sentence you can always start your first sentence the same way, and just end it differently. It would require much more typing for paragraph or page granularity, and I see no need to provide letter-granularity.
I threw together a page to see how this could be done, and got this: (it works in firefox, I haven't played with other browsers)
http://aducore.googlepages.com/edit.html. Yeah, it looks like shit, but that's the kind of behavior I'm thinking about.
I think breaking on every sentence-ending punctuation {".", "?", "!"} will be enough, and I'm not going to worry about periods inside sentences (i.e. "i.e."), since the user can still just highlight past it.
Why not just do the same thing but after every space? Then you can have word granularity, which I think is probably as specific as anyone would really want to get. I have no idea what this means in terms of coding, but I imagine it might actually require fewer lines (only one thing to look for, rather than three or four).
Breaking it up by word shouldn't be any harder than doing so by sentence.
Ok, this is easy. Go to http://aducore.googlepages.com/edit2.html and see if that is to your liking.
Is the edit2 page supposed to allow for inputting new text? Or is it just to show how you can break text anywhere? If it's the former, I couldn't get it to work (in Firefox at least). I clicked the "edit" button, but nothing happened. I think this is a pretty cool idea and probably has more applications than just storywriting. It has all kinds of collaborative document composition applications, just like wikis. Only, it seems like this could be a slightly more complex way to do things, which could lead to further applications.
It's only to demonstrate selection capabilities that will be present (the edit button is from an earlier version that didn't do that live-updating thing.) I thought about wiki-like projects and decided that they weren't what I wanted. I'm looking into javascript WYSIWYG editors (possibly hand-made) to handle the composition side, so that there won't be the need to understand HTML formatting to do things like bold and italics.
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