‘The Collabowriters‘ is an online experiment in creating a crowdsourced novel, conceived by Chicago-based storyteller Willy Chyr. Each sentence is selected from users’ submissions, which are then voted upon by the community as a whole. This means that the story is “written and edited by anyone and everyone together, one sentence at a time.” Each sentence can be up to 140 characters and once you have submitted it, the other users vote by giving it a score of either +1 or -1. The submission with the highest score appears in the novel, at least until another one beats its score. One of the submissions needs to receive a score of at least 5 in order to proceed to the next sentence.

The project is an exploration of storytelling and the dynamics of group interaction. Will the story follow a narrative structure? Will there be character development and subplots? That’s up to you to decide.

You can sign up to join the writers or read the novel so far online and mouse over the text to highlight a sentence and find out who wrote it.

The Collabowriters