Developing Story Ideas, 3rd Edition

Part V

Creating Collaboratively

This part offers two experiments in collaborative authorship, a road less traveled than writing solo. In the latter, the characters and their world often suffer because they all emerge from the sensibility of a single individual. Much durable art has in fact come about by other means. For thousands of years people created stories, plays, and epic poetry collectively, without designated writers or directors. Greek mythology, Norse sagas, and Arthurian legends were all the work of many hands, and the results retain their power today, exercising a powerful influence in all aspects of our culture. Today’s equivalent of collaborative writing can be seen in “devised theatre,” which is reexploring the grassroots compositional ...