Crowdsourcing Fiction

On Tuesday, BBC Audiobooks America sponsored a Twitter event that featured popular novelist Neil Gaiman and hundreds of short-form writers. The outcome will be a free audiobook produced from the collaboration.

At noon, Gaiman—the author of Sandman graphic novels, Coraline and The Graveyard Book—kicked things off with the first line of the story:

Neil Gaiman offered the first line of a collaborative story

From there, the story took on a life of its own.

The goal for the story is 1000 tweets. After compiling a finished script, editors will turn it into an audiobook made available as a free download (also available through iTunes or other retailers). To participate, authors had to post a Twitter reply in the form of “@BBCAA [contribution to the story] #bbcawdio.” A moderator filtered the incoming entries to build an official story thread in the @BBCAA tweet stream, blogging updates with each new scene.

Writers Love Twitter
This isn’t the first time Twitter has been used for a creative writing event. In 2007, 140 authors each claimed one line each in a short story—”Twittory”—but it stalled with 86 people contributing.

The following year, Maryland teacher George Mayo encouraged his eighth-grade English class to collaborate with students around the world, writing a story using a shared Twitter account (@manyvoices). Six weeks and 140 international authors later, the book was edited on a wiki and published through Lulu. A couple months later, Brian Clark (Copyblogger) issued a challenge to write a story in exactly 140 characters, drawing 331 submissions.

This past May, the NYC Midnight writer’s community sponsored a twitter creative writing contest. Participants were divided into groups and given a word and a couple hours in which to create a short-form story.

BBC Audiobooks America billed this week’s event as a “choose your own adventure” experience, seeded by Gaiman’s initial tweet. However, the choice belongs to the editors directing the narrative. The result has been a tale clearly influenced by Gaiman’s previous work (maybe with a little Heroes throw in). This would have been a more interesting exercise if the many threads of storytelling could have emerged organically from Gaiman’s starter.

Technical issues forced the BBCAA experiment to end during the third scene. The action will pick back up again starting at 9a Eastern.