[10] For Renaissance playwrights, collaboration appears to have been the norm; Bently notes that nearly two-thirds of plays mentioned in Henslowe's papers reflect the participation of more than one writer.
[11] There is also an issue of continuous revision: it was common practice in Renaissance English theatre for professional writers attached to a company to compose new characters, scenes, prologues and epilogues for plays in which they did not originally have a hand.
[13] In an artistic sense, as Lorraine York notes, "Critics and readers feel a persistent need to 'de-collaborate' these works, to parse the collective text into the separate contributions of two or more authors".
[9] There have been several university-based projects that investigated collaborative fiction, both from a writing perspective and as a testbed for scientific techniques, such as visualization of narrative structure.
[17][18][19] Italy has a strong tradition[20] in collaborative fiction: the most remarkable texts being Lo zar non è morto [it], a 1929 collective novel[21] by the futurist team "Gruppo dei Dieci", Don Milani's Scuola di Barbiana experiment, Lettera a una professoressa (1967), the various historical best-sellers produced by the Wu Ming collective between 1999 and 2011, and In territorio nemico, the 115-author[22] novel realized within the SIC – Scrittura Industriale Collettiva [it] project founded by Gregorio Magini and Vanni Santoni [it],[23] which established a codified methodology[24] for the collective production of literary texts.
In 1944 James McAuley and Harold Stewart collaborating as Ern Malley wrote seventeen poems in one day as a hoax against Max Harris and his magazine Angry Penguins.
In 2020, novelist Craig Cormick collaborated with Indigenous Australian writer Harold Ludwick to write an alternative history novel, On a Barbarous Coast, about Captain Cook's 1768-1771 voyage to Australia.
The 826 Valencia chapter consists of a writing lab, a street-front pirate supply store that partially funds the programs, and two satellite classrooms in nearby middle schools.
Over 1,400 volunteers—including published authors, magazine founders, SAT-course instructors, and documentary filmmakers—have donated time to work with thousands of students since the chapter was founded.
[28][29] Other educationally motivated work has been developed by the University of London and used both to improve the writing skills of the participants and as a testing ground for scientific techniques, such as visualization of narrative structure.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Bob Sipchen noted, "Caverns is an amusing lark, full of weird characters and goofy plot twists.
For example, the Baen's bar forum, known as 1632 Tech, has been a prime force behind the many works in the popular alternate history 1632 series under the aegis of Eric Flint — especially The Grantville Gazettes.
Author and scholar Scott Rettberg's paper "Collective Narrative" discusses connections between avant garde literary groups and online collaborative fiction.
[37] Eventually, these tabletop behaviors merged with hypertext fiction to create text-based interactive role-playing environments, like roleplaying MUSHes.
Nevertheless, they have also been used to collectively write works of fiction, such as Hypersphere[40] or The Legacy of Totalitarianism in a Tundra[41][42][43] anonymous users of the Literature (/lit/) board of 4chan from over 71 countries using Google Docs.
[44] Traditional fiction writers and writing circles have experimented in creating group stories, such as Robert Asprin's Thieves World and MythAdventures – such approaches date back at least as far as The Floating Admiral in 1931.
The disadvantages of the collaborative writing process can include problems with series or sequels to successful books, if one partner has other commitments or is bored with the project, then losses, delays and pressure on the relationship may occur.