Man, here we are at 200 members, 322 stories. It's always been my goal to have so many dedicated bronies and pegasisters here at the Writing Process.

But I have to ask. Are we ready for a bigger goal, one where we truly show everypony the art of The Writing Process?

I have located a place known as The Creator's Guild, a group whom have the same goal as us, yet with multiple groups inside.

I feel that it would be an amazing accomplishment if our little family could lend their services to this group, but I can't do it alone.

So, the question is, how do we show these groups with thousands of members that we, The Writing Process, are just as effective and just as successful as them?

Let me know your thoughts.

6848595
Two words. Collaborative story.

It will show that the members of the group can work well together, it'd be a nice and simple thing to show them, and, well, it's a collaborative story, something horrific amazing is bound to come out of it. If nothing else, it'd be fun to write and a laugh riot to put on FimFiction.

6848600
A collaborative story, huh? That's an interesting idea.

I'm just not sure...

The best service i offer is a sounding board and i do not know how effective that is most of the time.

This is why i am not sure

1.5% of the people here said anything... another 1.5% (with some overlap) bothered themselves to read this thread and upvote or down vote. What kind of goals can we have when we can only drum up 4-6 people? 99% of the threads here die after 24 hours. Heck i only come here when new threads are made and maybe a day after; confident that nothing is posted otherwise.

I would have loved to hear about the collaborative story; i even would have helped. It would be a good inter group project to build friendship

6848624
In my personal experience, collabs tend to either fizzle out into obscurity or flat-out catastrophically collapse within at most a couple months. Unless there's a driving motivation factor behind the entire project, people will tend to lose interest and leave one-by-one.

Trust me, I've hosted collaborations multiple times in the past, and not one of them has even reached a reasonable stage in the story before being called off. There's just nothing to motivate people to put their time into something that likely wouldn't get much attention in the first place without a major marketing push.

6855927
I remember the collaboration in the Pinkie Pie group, which died multiple times...

6848600
With collaborations, the more people involved, the more likely it is that one or more will drop out or never finish their section.

My personal suggestion with collaborations would be to have a small number of people, with plans for what to do if any of the people involved get busy, and one person coordinating the whole thing and putting it together. That person should probably be ready to do the whole thing by themselves.

Otherwise, have it be loose enough and silly enough that it doesn't matter if people drop out. Drop a public link to a google document and let people write it and edit it to their hearts delight, with at least one or two people trying to stitch things together a bit. (Something like horizons drunk writing events). Or, for a little more structure, each person writes a chapter, and passes it to the next person. If that person isn't done in a certain length of time, it goes to someone else instead.

Collaborations are likely to fail, though. It's hard enough to get a whole story out when only one person is involved...

--Sweetie Belle

6855935
Yeah. Serious collabs, without proper preparation, are pretty much guaranteed to fail. If any sort of collaboration is considered, then as SweetAI Belle noted, it'd be best to leave things as more of a loose collection of ideas that people can add onto over time, or something where continuity may be ignored.

6855940
For example, the story here, which still has amusing comments in the google document and even got read out loud.

I wrote most of chapter ∞, and did edits in various places (though not actually drunk, or, indeed, drinking anything alcoholic.)

--Sweetie Belle

6855935
A collaborative effort is a lot like a Dungeon and Dragon game in the play-by-post format. All the participants would bring something to the metaphorical table and run a game on a forum. Typically this was the DM, who brought the world and story, with a number of players bringing characters. These games tended to have a high mortality rate called 'player attrition' which was often the result of indecisive DMs, bored/impatient players, problem players and lack of 'player buy in'.

I recommend that one author of a collaborative is picked for the job of admin. See DMs had one tool they used to keep the game going and a philosophy when losing players; "posts per week" and "keep going". Some games had 1 post per day where, in perfect conditions, every player and the DM manage one post in a twenty four hour period. So the next author in line could be given a month to bring something to the table and if he fails he moves to the back of the line and anyone else can carry on. Miss too many times and your removed from rotation.

Of course we have to have 'player buy in' in order to get this too work. Too many times i see a group where a DM brings a world and the players each bring one character and hope they all fit. Doesn't really work too well. If we do this we need to decide on what to make.

So how will we go about this, if we theoretically went with the collab idea?

6856233
Central Google doc, open for anyone to join or leave as they want. No established plot or lore and permissive to full creative freedom, where people just need to make things work with what was added immediately prior, instead of having to read the entire work to figure out how to make their portion of the story fit in with the rest.

Basically, and open, chained, semi-related story anthology.

6856811
Okay, so if we have an idea, how will we get everyone/everypony to want to do this?

6857024
Group thread, and a group Discord server to coordinate. Post a link to a publicly-accessible Google doc with editing permissions (make sure to make backups regularly!).

Well, Techie, you have my support on this.

6856233
Another alternative method;

Have each author pick (then discuss) three tags that they would like the book to have. Might work better than utter chaos and will keep a steady theme when more of the authors agree. This would probably keep the number of authors down though, which isn't necessarily a bad thing if they start collaboratives of their own. The authors could also work out a beginning, middle and end. At the most it will be little more than bullet points, here is an example;

1. Twilight discovers the elements of harmony and nightmare moon.
2. Twilight gathers five other ponies
3. Nightmare Moon defeats the Elements and darkness reigns. Thee end.

6857103
How do you use Google Documents and what are some of the pitfalls of the program?

6858602
Google docs is just Google's online word processor. You share a special link with others to allow them access to view, comment or edit your document ay the same time as yourself.

As far as pitfalls go, there are rumors that Google nerfed the responsiveness of Google Docs for anyone not using Google Chrome. Based on personal experience using other browsers, I'm somewhat suspicious of this as well.