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Novels written by groups are generally unreadable. This is because they have no focus, and because the immediate cheap laugh always wins. It's a shame, because with a little more forethought, such shortcomings could be fixed. Ie: start by communally developing an outline, main characters, etc. It would also be interesting to use Mechanical Turk in a systemic way to have "the crowd" determine which of several proposed plot-points is most consistent with the whole, etc.



As someone who tried to run such a service years ago, I mostly agree. Even the very best stories written through this method were troublingly self-inconsistent. On the other hand, they were often hilarious a well. We published a few anthologies of short stories written with this method here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...

The experience for writers was surprisingly rewarding, but the end result was not for mass consumption. Still, as a writing tool, it showed great value.


Experiments like this either fundamentally don't understand what it is about a novel that makes it wonderful or do it for the (excuse me) novelty of it.

A novel that works on any sort of level does so by means of compelling, empathetic characters, relatable tones, great storytelling, and rich language. Crowdsourcing fails to be more effective than a single author at all of these elements.


You do realize this is in nowhere pretending to be near as effective as a novel written even by the most okayish of writers right?




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