▲ ▼ App for collaborative fiction
When I was in school we used to collaboratively write stories by each individual in the class continuing upon the story on a paper. It was lot of fun and I think it made us better at writing and reading.
Lately I've been searching for an app which does collaborative fiction i.e. where one person kicks of a story by writing few sentences, the next person continues it and so on. The best I could find was wattpad, but that is more of a crowd validated writing where the author regularly connects with their readers.
But, what I want is a crowd written story for fun say like wikipedia for fiction. If anyone knows such an app let me know or please build one!
I'm interested in building this. How do you imagine it looking/working (user flow for the app)?
I could surely contribute. I imagine this to be a type of game- 4 random people are dropped into a chat room, there's a theme and a timer starts. Each person takes a turn to forward the story. When the story ends, the chat is just published as a story. We might want to add guides to navigate the story a little and bring it to an end.
Great, I'd be willing to add this feature into WikiTale after core features are done, unless you plan to build something entirely new with this idea.
We could have a feed for the game that gets updated with completed rounds. Users could click on each story from the feed and read.
no such plans, would love to work with you though. the feed of stories would be great for non-participating users as well.
Yes, I agree. We want the whole site to be viewable by non participants. We have a developer as of now building out the scope of the MVP. I will share with you all here soon.
Are you a developer?
unfortunately, no. I'm a design/operations guy. I previously ran a business that revolved around promoting poetry, but it needed a digital side to it to be big. i couldn't really crack that so moved on to another project. But we made a tonne of videos and a lil bit of cash doing it so was a fun experience.
Oh well, that could work after all. We don't have much of a budget past the development of MVP. We'd need to get traction and then start looking at monetization strategies. Then, we could talk about bringing you on to help but would definitely like to have someone help with operations at some point and also design (improving upon what we have).
If you haven't seen:
https://imgur.com/a/jGcDRdH
sounds like a plan :)
let me know if you need any help at all. I could def work on building traction for this.
Hey you can start playing around with WikiTale here for testing purposes. Sign up for an account and then login:
https://www.wikitale.com/
We're still not launched yet as we have some more testing to complete and bugs to solve but we should be ready to launch soon.
Please let me know your feedback.
Thanks
Hey, that's awesome!
What I'm basically looking at is an app, where say if I start a story with some fixed number of characters, others using the app can continue the story by writing within that limited characters.
Some sort of consensus mechanism needs to be put in for connecting the story bits of each user in order and to reject the bits which doesn't suit well to the story.
This is the basic gist of what I want from the consumer perspective, I will let you the make the creative decisions on how this is built.
What do you think about sorta versioning/branching each addition to the story? For instance, you start the story and maybe two other right a direct addition to yours instead of limiting it to 1 addition after the other?
That would be nice, also it can help in selecting the best branch and showing it as default depending upon the votes?
Awesome, I was just thinking of this. I will keep you posted
Super, It would be awesome. Looking forward to help with it.
Hey you can start playing around with WikiTale here for testing purposes. Sign up for an account and then login:
https://www.wikitale.com/
We're still not launched yet as we have some more testing to complete and bugs to solve but we should be ready to launch soon.
Please let me know your feedback.
Thanks
Do you think allowing others to modify, edit, others entries is a good idea? Or should they just be able to add to the story?
Not OP, but IMO voting on the individual snippets with just Upvote/Downvote/Flag would suffice as editing other's content would cause unnecessary friction and in-fact goes against the ethos of Internet forums e.g. here, reddit etc.
Great thanks, I thought about it some more myself and determined it wouldnt be a good idea. For the MVP, so I have planned:
User creates a story/snippet
Users can add a snippet to other snippets(branches)
Users can upvote/downvote/flag on each snippet
Used can comment on each snippet
Let me know if you all think of anything else you might want to see in the MVP
What would be an ideal character limit for a story snippet?
I'm so conflicted on this idea. On one end of the rainbow there's google docs which would allow you to do all of this among a bunch of people you already know perfectly well, as long as people agree to follow the rules.
on the other end there's a great way to make this like a brilliant game of sorts- 4 random people get put into a chat room of sorts, the room has a theme/prompt and turn by turn they get to respond to the chat with fiction. idk who wins but at the end of the game you can publish the entire chat as a story.
I think there are still things that google docs wouldnt be able to do as well as something like WikiTale. It can open up the floor to collaboration with people around the world.
I like the game idea. It's something I would like to look into developing as apart of WikiTale, after we have the core features done. Maybe instead of selecting a winner, we set a time for each game and see where the story ends?
Maybe this chatroom can save logs to user profiles to be viewed or downloaded after each game
Good observation, a minor addition - What OP has posted is a Problem, what you have suggested or user KeMonte Jones is working on are the solutions which can potentially become a Startup Idea.
Not to bring up a dead thread, but I launched this same type of site also. https://addtothestory.com.
I'd love to hear feedback. It's great to see a lot of people share the idea.
There aren't any dead threads here in needgap, as long as the need gap exists, the problem is valid and the thread is alive!
Hey y'all! Found this thread via reddit today- so cool to see work done in this space!
Interestingly enough, we've built a collaborative fiction platform called Storylocks - https://storylocks.com and launched a few weeks ago.
It's a bit different than the original comment (contributions operate on a chapter basis and not a 280 char text basis), and stories are open to whomever wants to dive in. But if you're interested in crowdsourced storytelling, I think you'll enjoy Storylocks 😊
Let me know what you think!
Hi Sam, Storylocks is a nice take on the collaborative fiction.
Thanks, Abishek!
> wouldn't this limit Storylocks to just professional/amateur writers and not just anyone who wishes to write?
Just so I have a better handle on your question, I'm wondering if you could help me understand this a bit more fully: to you, what is the difference between an "amateur writer" and "anyone who wishes to write"?
Sure. In the current context I meant,
Is anyone willing to help with any rules that should be included for writing on WikiTale?
When I was thinking about this, I thought perhaps we should OP tag the story e.g. sci-fi, historical-fiction, space etc. then I remembered that the story can take unexpected turn to become totally different based on the new story snippets from the comments like 'sci-fi' could become 'romance', 'space' could become 'horror'.
So should each comment further include their own tag, which gets added to the main list of tags based on votes?
Also do you all think, I should be clear that this app is for fun? Ie. "Collaborative fiction writing for fun" or is "Collaborative fiction writing" enough?
In regards to tags, what do you think about the option for OP to lock the "tag"? This might be good for those who want a more serious or consistent story collaboration.
I think "Collaborative fiction writing" is good, be cause this needn't be just for fun. The 'Wattapad' platform mentioned by OP has made some of its users best selling authors, so if WikiTale is done right it can become a lucrative platform for many.
Reg, locking the "tag"; I agree with Shweta that the tag needs to be dynamic according to the comments and locking it should be purgative of moderators only.
Yes, users will be able to select a tag for each snippet. I will check with developer today to make sure the tags are being grouped based on upvotes
KeMonte Jones, I will research on this and get back.
As for general forum rules as such you can take inspiration from here - https://needgap.com/problems/2-contributor-guidelines-for-needgap. As for literary rules, I'll have to think about it; I'll come back with a few in a couple of days.
Ok thanks for your help. I'll look over this link. I will post further comments as a continuation of this one.
How about sticking with Twitter's character limitation of 280 characters, I don't have an independent reasoning for that; I just assume that Twitter has conducted enough research to justify that and that many literary enthusiasts hang out on Twitter so an association could be useful.
Ok great, we'll keep to 280 character limit then. We're also implementing HAT Technologies into WikiTale. So long story short, WikiTale wont store any user data. Each user will be assigned a HAT Personal Data Account, which they own and stores all of their data.
Getting onboard with building a more Ethical Internet. You can see the benefits for users section here:
https://hatdex.dataswift.io/
How do you all like these for plot types?
There are actually 2 different delineations. Story type being story and poem which we could add your list and then plot type.
Overcoming the Monster.
Rags to Riches.
The Quest.
Voyage and Return.
Rebirth.
Comedy.
Tragedy.
Or would you prefer to see options like:
Thriller
Mystery
Sci-fi
Drama
Romance
Action
Adventure
Or all?
Sorry for the late reply, I agree with the earlier discussions between you and Abishek.
As for characters, I think that by itself would be a huge discussion and so why not let's stick with Twitter character limit of 280? I'm sure they have done enough research to justify that number.
The category of story selection you've mentioned are interesting, I think the second set of common categories would do for initial version and may be expand based on user opinion?
Btw, off-topic; Did you post a new parent comment here or the thread automatically positions new reply in a thread as parent after some levels?
Rough draft of functionality: https://imgur.com/a/zEQs1og
Hey looks neat!
Does the second (pen) button show the branches or is that the edit?
Wikitale sounds appropriate and cool; would it be mobile friendly?
The second pen button is the edit button. We are setting it to lock after 4 hours for each snippet.
Yes, we'll make it mobile friendly. Would you prefer it be an ios/android app or is mobile responsive web app fine?
I would suggest responsive web app for MVP as that would be the least effort and when the traction improves you can think about a native app if it improves value significantly.
Ok great, this makes sense. Thank you. We're looking at 1 - 2 months before we have the initial version
Take your time and all the best!
Share the progress here for testing and I'm sure that there would be other like me eager to check it out.
Ok, will do. Here is more of what we have so far, although it could change:
https://imgur.com/a/jGcDRdH
That looks nice! I'm interested to try this out when available as well.
Thanks! Sure, as soon as it's live, I'll post an update here.
If you could, let anyone else you think might be interested, know about WikiTale.
Ok, great. Thanks for this, I think that's all we need for now to get started. If you have any more ideas, please let me know. We have a rough draft of the UI already. I would like to show you all. Maybe I can link to an imgur? The name of this app will be WikiTale.
I replied directly to your original post a few times. Let me know if I shouldn't have done that.
What about a view that shows the history or log of a story?
Maybe it shows "user added "hshdh" to "#&$&" at this time"
"User edited "dhdh" at this time"
Would this be needed?
Generally, forum discourse requires some form of comment freezing mechanism such as limiting editing to certain duration (e.g. it's 3 hours here) (or) as you mentioned change log as in Facebook, LinkedIn to ensure that the discourse stays meaningful i.e. someone shouldn't change their comment entirely and make the discussion meaningless.
But, in the case of collaborative story building may be we need both edit time limit and also change log? How about asking the user the 'reason for edit' and then displaying the same along with the old content when someone clicks 'edited' link on the comment.
Ok, thanks. Shweta mentioned a character limit. What would be ideal?
There's a subreddit for it https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/ , but an individual app which can aid better collaborative fiction would indeed be nice!
Hey everyone, just an update on WikiTale. It's looking really good so far, everything is functioning properly. We have about 1 - 2 weeks left of development for the initial iteration. However, our developer is having to take a little time away from it to be with his kids while they are out of school due to coronavirus quarantine. We're hoping that the first version will be ready for you all to use sometime in April. Thanks
Good to know. WiKiTale like app would have been useful to focus on something else during crisis like now. I understand the need for break from development though, no rush.
Hey Abishek, are you still running your online coaching?
Hi KeMonte Jones, I do provide startup coaching at hitstartup (https://hitstartup.com/online-startup-coaching/).
Hey everyone, you can start playing around with WikiTale here. Sign up for an account and then login:
https://www.wikitale.com/
We're still not launched yet as we have some more testing to complete and bugs to solve but we should be ready to launch soon.
Please let me know your feedback.
Thanks,
KeMonté