How do you co-write over email?
Okay, so my friends and I are in a roleplay and we are all very interested in it. We all talk and are close to eachother, though we've never met (we all live more that a hundred miles away from eachother). We talk through email. Anyway, these friends and I have been inspired, through the roleplay, that we created to write a book about it. Not about the roleplay, but about the characters. I am a writer and some of them are. The only thing is, I don't know how this will work without meeting up. Is it, we decide on what happens in the next chapter, we take turns writing a chapter and then post it on our website?
More Questions From This User See All
Answers & Comments
Verified answer
A couple of friends and I used to do this! We used the AIM instant messaging system though because it was more efficient than e-mail -- the only problem was when all three of us couldn't be on at the same time. Anyway, each of us had our own character and we role-played out a story where our characters were basically enemies and ended up battling each other a lot. The IMs were complete with dialogue, action, and sound effects.
After each of our chat sessions, I would go through and copy and paste all the contents of the chat and save it in a Word document, still in the chat format. Since I was the best writer in our little trio, I would then go through and start converting the chat into more of a novel format. Next time we would all get on, I could just look at where we left off and we would start from there. Granted, we were in like 7th grade at the time so my writing skills weren't quite up to par and our story plot was pretty ridiculous but we had a lot of fun and that's pretty much how I got started writing.
In YOUR situation, taking turns writing a chapter is always an option. You would have to make sure you discussed everything ahead of time so you could all get each others' characters right and stuff. I would say instant messaging is definitely a better/easier method, but if e-mail is your only option, go for it. I wrote a story a couple years back that was basically a sequel to a story one of my role-playing friends wrote, and his character was one of my secondary characters. I had to stay in almost constant contact with him, asking how his character might react in certain situations and whatnot. He ended up giving me quite a bit of liberty to do what I wanted, but that's probably not always the case -- and it will be harder with a larger group.
Good luck! :)
You could do it any way you like, but I'd suggest this:
First, have an idea where the story's going (if you want it to be a good and finite story that is - if you don't care where it goes and if it goes on forever, that's fine since it's just for fun). Plan the story out so everyone knows from the very beginning what happens in each chapter. Maybe one person should make a rough plan, and then let everyone else add to it until it's fully fleshed out. You all need to be prepared to compromise, because you WILL disagree on things along the way. Then, let one person write one chapter, and offer it to the others for comments and editing. When everyone's happy with it, the next person writes the next chapter, and so on.
I think if everyone writes different chapters on their own with no group input, it will end up very disjointed, and everyone's style and the way they write the characters will be different. Every part needs to be a group effort to keep things flowing.
How do you want to do it? There isn't a correct way. Your method is one possibility. Another is that you use something a bit more real-time than email (such as Messenger) and do it that way.