Portrayl and Ficlet: Two Ways to Write that Novel you Always Wanted
Nick Gonzalez
26 comments »
Co-authored writing online has been around for a while and picked up considerably with the introduction of wikis. Notably, Lawrence Lessig used a wiki to help update his book “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace“. Collaboration is catching on, especially in journalism (iReport, Wired Assignment Zero). Here are two sites that take a lighter look at collaboration, letting you anonymously co-author short stories and books.
Portrayl
Potrayl is a small project we discovered in TechCrunch Forums that launched this month. The site lets members write their own stories a chapter at a time or more importantly collaborate on them.
Anyone can start a story. All you need is to describe the what the story will be about and kick start it with a first chapter. From there, the crowd takes over. Other users can edit unlocked chapters, end the story, or add new chapters to the previous ones. Chapters can be closed to collaborative editing or left open in draft mode. Stories can also fork into alternate storylines as users add new versions of existing chapters that take the tale into a new direction.
As a story is developing, you can subscribe to it via RSS and follow the developments for any of the storylines. Once a story is finished, you can view the whole storyline in PDF. Unfortunately stories don’t support graphics within their pages, so it’s text only.
Ficlet
Ficlets is an AOL site that lets users collaborate on short stories. Ficlets are a little different from Portrayl stories. Ficlets are unstructured short stories to which other users can contribute prequels and sequels instead of co-editing and adding chapters. Instead of maintaining distinct storyline threads, Ficlets shows users all the prequels and sequels that inspired or were inspired by the current story, which can also be followed via RSS. Each short story also supports reader ratings and comments so authors can get feedback about their stories.
Very cool new service, now if they could get some kind of publishing arrangement — maybe through lulu, then that would be really interesting.
Steve,
Howtosplitanatom.com
It’s really cool knowing that these developments are used in artistic collaboration, not only technical stuff.
I wonder if there are drawing wikis out there?? Maybe we can someday develop a wiki for music also. I’d really like to see this.
Sounds like glorified Mad Libs…
That said, Mad Libs were pretty cool.
just a couple of things about the article concerning Portrayl - Only the author can edit their chapter. So a chapter only belongs to one author (preserving his/her creative vision). If someone else wants the story to go another way they start an alternate
Also a chapter can’t be added to if it’s a draft (i.e. the person has not finished editing it), and it can be edited if it’s finalized (no longer a draft).
oops - I meant: it can be added to if it’s finalized (no longer a draft)
So Nick - could you finalize “A Night in the Valley” - because it really deserves to be followed up
hmmm I have been doing this on my site for about 3 years now. I fail to see the “news” in this.
What’s your connection with Portrayl or Ficlet?
@Steve - we’ve been considering a revenue sharing/publishing arrangement, but are holding back on it till after alpha, and developing a couple more features. We agree it would be really good.
I thought about using Portrayl (having a community of readers and fellow authors commenting upon, following, and helping me edit my work sounds cool), but after reading the Terms of Service, I decided that the publisher of my first book (St. Martin’s) would probably not be interested in my second book if I used this platform to write it. So I’ll stick with WordPress! Specifically, the part that gave me pause is where, by signing up for the site, I give Portrayl this licence:
to use, market, license, sublicense, distribute and sell the User Submissions or derivatives and adaptations thereof, as a single or as part of a collection, including Aspects of the Users Submissions, in any format and through any platform.
It’s the word “sell” that I find problematic. I’m not saying it’s Evil. I’m saying that it doesn’t work for me, and probably won’t work for many other authors. If Portrayl were only asking for the right to “give” my work away, I’d be cool with that.
Just FYI, a little unsolicited one-person market research for you Portrayl guys commenting here.
re. Portrayl: Art by committee. How dumb is that. How is the book supposed to have any cohesion?
You should also check out StorySquared.com, which enables users to create public or private stories and share them with their friends and family.
Portrayal is really good. Love the simple interface and the stories are really funny.
Just need a bit more content.
Hey guys,
Well done on your work on portrayl! I am gonna try it out.
Ficlet looks boring
thanks all you guys/gals for the feedback
@Joey - Thanks for the feedback about the terms. Neither of us are legal types, and we very much welcome any thoughts on the terms. We mainly thought out the terms when multiple people were writing, and the non-exclusive license would have made things easy to share revenues if anyone was ever interested in the stories.
The hope is people will write their own full stories on the site too (we aim to improve features for lone writers on the site soon) - but you have a very good point, this could be a potential snag for lone authors. We have no intention of tying down people from publishing. We’ll take a more detailed look at our terms
Thanks for drawing my attention to these two sites — and thanks also to the commentators who have shed additional light on these sites, I’m passing on word about these sites to writers who follow my own blog.
Tom
http://www.becoming-a-writer-seriously.com
Good service…another Wiki type encyclopedia site.
OMG! what I have done. Apologized guys for posting my comment to the wrong topic. it supposed to be for thr Portrayal topic.
Tejas — that sounds reasonable. When/if you guys get a chance to revisit the terms of service, please let me know (I’m joeymanley on linkedin, or you can add a comment on the TalkAboutComics.com blog post where I blogged this today). I run a similar site, for about 4000 webcartoonists, many of whom are also prose writers. They may be interested in your service, if using it became clearly consistent with their long-term publication goals.
Ummm …. I’m “Joey Manley” on linkedin, that is. My apologies. I really do look forward to hearing from you guys when you’ve modified your TOS.
how do writers protect their work from others stealing it? not just those who collaborate on their stories, but also anybody who has access to view them?
i think it’s a cool idea. i’m going to start writing my first book later this year.
it’d be great if there was a way to work via this, privately, with an editor (like if you have a book deal, etc.), where others wouldn’t have access. that’d be cool.
@Joey - I’ve added you my linkedin - I’ll make sure to let you know when we have terms and conditions or a publishing situation like you mentioned. txs for blogging about us btw
@patricia - Hi, the site allows for other Portrayl users to build on your work for non-commercial puposes only (using a Creative Commons license). However if you feel someone has stolen your idea on and is using it for nefarious purposes on the site you can alert us using the chapter alert mechanism and we will take it down. As for people stealing it on the web generally - technically it would not be legal, although as we know this stuff is really hard to crack down on. The ability to write private stories will definitely be something we do - it is one of the lone writing features I mentioned in my reply to Joey. Currently there’s only a couple of us working on the site, but we hope to make a big development push to fill out those features very soon.
@Nick G - txs for finalizing, a very promising first chapter, headed for some serious shenanigans in the valley
@ Tejas, thank you!! That’s really cool!
With a group of Friends back in Spain we started a small project of collaborative book writing not based on wiki technology, but on digg technology. We picked meneame’s code (digg spanish opensource equivalent) and modified it to fit our necessities.
We founded a NGO, tied up the issue on copyrights with a user contract and creative commons licences, and wrote the first chapter of the book. We collected the criticism of our first 100 users and now we are still developing a second improved version.
You may want to check it out: http://www.escribeme.org
There is a German Literature Website, Litrum (www.litrum.de), with some new ideas about doing Literature in the Web as well. It’s not available in english at the moment, but this will come soon. Writers can publish their works, discuss with readers and other writers and do some projects together, like to write a novel (one chapter each writer).
Hmm, these are interesting sites. My thoughts: http://wordlily.wordpress.com/.....n-writing/