Collaborative Fiction Writing

Primus loves to do Google Hangouts with a group of her friends. I think she's the youngest in this group so I'm thankful they haven't decided yet that she's too immature. They're good kids!

I'm also thankful that one of the girls' parents is very involved on their general chat page so there's lots of adult supervision in the conversation. I also get notifications so I can see when the girls are talking. 

Their general chat page is full of memes and silliness mostly. The page that I find the most interesting is their collaborative fiction story. They just all contribute to it when they have time. You can see in the screen shot above that this morning "Friend A" added some things.  When it's regular text, then that is regular story text or point-of-view notes. The stuff in parenthesis are side notes to each other.

To my knowledge, they don't have an agreed-upon outline for the story or character development. These girls like to create characters for themselves that belong in the already established worlds they love such as Big Hero 6, Voltron, Gravity Falls, Rise of the Guardians, Teen Titans, and Young Justice. So the stories they work on together are fan-fiction. The current story is Big Hero 6. They'll work on the same one for weeks until they grow tired of it and someone suggests a new one.

Primus tells me that they have a big list of their fan-fic characters. Every time they start a new story, if it's one they had worked on in the past, they pick new characters from the list and start fresh. It sounds like these plots never really reach a conclusion. The girls are just having fun exercising their creativity. This is a natural extension of the imaginative play they did with their dolls just a few years ago. 

I think it's so cool! The girl that I would guess is the ring-leader of the group self published a full novel a while back and Primus is always working on her own fantasy stories. Like the advice I read years ago and keep telling Hubby, who's an aspiring fiction writer himself, "Writers Write." You've got to be constantly writing something. Exercise those writing muscles, even if it's not on the book that you're hoping to publish one day.

Maybe my daughter will be a published author one day. And maybe this will just be a fun way for her to connect with her friends and will never lead to anything else. Either way, it's a good thing!