Community editing for the fiction dictator.
Fiction fan fiction
Fiction written by a community effort doesn't work. It fails it's mission. There is no way to resolve conflicts. No czar to proclaim, this is funny, and this is not. No central planner to determine the importance of a seemlyfluffy scene at a later time. There can can be no consensus on unconventional ideas. Those ideas are untested,raw, and are what makes fiction both entertaining and deeply vital to human progress. Expressing new ideasis all about risk, something a crowd can not excel at.This proclamation of mine may irk your sense of community. I understand. I am as disappointed as you arewith this reality. I have learned much from the supercharged rhetoric among like minded friends followingthe rapid absorption of a script or story that took a lifetime to write and a few short hours to consume. Thedivergence of your groupthink from the authors vision may feel right, but is doomed by the very self reinforcing shield from the harsh realities I mentioned before. The coffee clutch will ground whatever crazyvision you saw through the authors eyes, but can not save your ideas from a sad death by committee.
Book by committee
As an author they are your ideas for better and worse. You may choose your ideas like you would choose aspouse, but no matter what you choose you are married to them. Like a marriage it will take you places younever expected, if you see it through. In a fit of haste you might retort with examples of polygamy, butremember even the strangest households still have a head. Someone has to make the tough decisions.This of course does not mean a group of ideas all wrapped up in a story belong only to the author. The storyis the presentation of ideas as a gift, wrapped up nicely in a plot that makes them easier to understand.Feedback is more than just regifting. I have changed course a few times based on dire warnings of pitfallridden flaws in my logic, and I'm sure I will again.Feedback could be considered community writing, but just like musical feedback, it can quickly degrade aflawed but interesting story into deafening pointless noise. The artist must quickly adjust to compensate for it's desire to consume the work. There may be artists who can make the most of it, but they still need to strikethe cords. I think there were some who thought the speed of the Internet would improve the process, but it just emphasized the weakness and hastened it's demise.Vast stretches of historical fiction have more than a few pens claiming credit for their greatness. I think thatyou would find if you examined them more closely you would recognize one or two strategies in use. Theyare serial or segmented works. The Odyssey has many authors, but to travel from a particular original oralstory transcribed in text today to it's origin, requires a view of authors in series. There are many creators, butthey are successive.Some great works are written by several authors working in tandem, but I doubt there will ever be enough of them behind a compelling work that they could be called a community. Community is by definition a group.Groups and communities excel at normalization, convergence and compromise. They strive for predictionand compliance which oppose that which is new and compelling.
Wise old merchant
An editor may act like an author at times. If they share the authors vision they can modify the core ideas of
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