Round Robins on My Mind

I’ve been thinking about round robins for a while now… not really so much how to start one as who might be interested in participating and what kind of market might exist for it.

It strikes me as an excellent idea for an anthology – start up a world, invite people to contribute stories about that world, edit meticulously, then publish. Continuity is a must, and constant collaboration is a given.

But what are the odds that an idea like this could take off?

This rant was brought to you by a stray advertisement in a certain Filipino message board about a forum-based roleplay. The roleplay is based on a popular MMORPG, the name of which i forget right now (it’s not Ragnarok, I’m sure of that), and to all intents and purposes it’s just a fun thing to do.

It resembles a round robin at least in that it follows a moderator-imposed storyline, but the installments are done from different points of view. There’s no final output to be compiled, no “project” to be accomplished – people with similar interests just get together and have fun.

But what if you could put it together into something. What if you could create a round robin that could be patched together into something publishable, much like Robert Lynn Asprin’s Thieves’ World, and the Myth and Phule series? Say you could assign authors to specific delivery dates, and they could come up with stories based on a world you all could build together? Wouldn’t it be both fun and challenging for all concerned?

Well, more challenging than fun, I suppose, but I still think it’s worth looking into. A couple of questions go with this…

Who should moderate it? Here are some initial criteria that I feel are safe to propose, when looking for a round robin moderator:

1. Someone disciplined, who has enough TIME.Maintaining a round robin seems to me like keeping a corporation. You have to be around 24/7 to consolidate all major ideas into something that works. I imagine that there will be times when annoyingly revolutionary ideas strike the designated author five hours before this author’s story installment’s deadline. They are good, but they would need you to coordinate with all the other available authors in a hurry. “Hey, Mike just said he wants to kill Zartan to make way for an Age of Beryl in the Hyperion Continent. Everyone in for that?” And you need to do this and come to a decision ASAP, otherwise you’ll have to move Mike’s deadline.The moderator ought to be able to invest considerable amounts of time and money on the project.
2. Someone democratic.It may seem like a good idea for you – as a moderator – to kill Zartan to make way for an Age of Beryl, but you need to consider all input before reaching a decision. In the end it’s not YOUR story, but the GROUP’s story, which is a mindset that admittedly, not many creative folks are wired for.In order to achieve this sort of tolerance, I figure experience in managing writers’ groups would not be necessary, but it WOULD be a plus.
3. Someone who can set and implement very specific ground rules. For example: no killing off of major characters created by other people. No altering the continuity in any major way without the consent of all the other members of the round robin, such as suddenly writing in a trans-dimensional rift that plunges everyone into an alternate reality. This would just plain launch your round robin into a whole new saga – which may be a good thing if everyone in the round robin is delightfully crazy enough to go for it…. but in general would just be pretty annoying for all the other writers.

Who should participate? I’ve always been under the impression that round robins meant for publication are “invite-only” in nature. This imposes a modicum of control on the project, although I do acknowledge that “control” is a very variable concept. Even people you’d thought you could trust to not bully all the other writers may ferociously turn on you, for reasons all their own.

While you could restrict your writing circle to a tight “invite-only” gang, you may still find that some writers could get too attached to certain characters, and subsequently have a hard time relinquishing them to others. Actually, I believe any writer worth his or her salt possesses the ability to become excessively attached to a personal creation, but I digress.

What correspondence tools could exist for it? This is, I believe, more of an enterprising idea than a creative one. I wouldn’t be able to say for sure since I’ve never had a real head for business, and this is why I prefer to share my (ridiculous) business ideas than implement them myself…

MUDs and MUSHes appear to be extremely creative outlets. A lot of them appear to be free for use, but the setup itself takes a lot of time and money on the part of the implementors. MMORPGs are there for a broader audience to become interested in, although an MMORPG as a fiction platform may take an impractical amount of time to put together.

Once you’ve set something like this up for your writers, and accomplished the necessary marketing via the fiction your writers turn up, you can even put your MUD/MUSH up for paid use! After that, the question is really: can you set up a world that will be interesting enough for paying customers, and can you find creative minds who can develop this world into something people would want to pay to stay in?

New, good writers may even be attracted to your correspondence tools. A good interactive marketing platform could pave the way for the perpetuation of your series!

What is the market? So here’s the big question: who’ll want to read your round robins? Given that we have extremely high standards for publication here in the Philippines, I think it’s a given that unless you have the money to self-publish, no self-respecting publisher would want to turn out a title that readers will have trouble identifying with.

A title that is all in English, for example, would leave out an audience who may be familiar with fantasy as a game or teleserye setting, but who won’t be able to relate to the story at all. A story that is set in Victorian England, with complicated scientific theories mixed in (steampunk for the win!), might do better with an international audience, and therefore would be more workable as a Web-only publication – but you’ll still need to pitch in for print copies, which many international readers would prefer even with the slightly higher retail cost, compared to ebooks.

It would be great if anyone could start up something like this. I’m not much of a writer, and given the “invite-only” nature of such endeavors, I might not even make the cut for such a project. But if a sufficiently interesting idea pops up, I might want to try and jump in :3