page_title: Collaborative fiction
section_title: Community and educational uses
hierarchical_section_title: Collaborative fiction / Community and educational uses
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of some books collaboratively written at 826 Valencia.
context_page_description: Collaborative fiction is a form of writing by a group of three or more authors who share creative control of a story.
  Collaborative fiction can occur for commercial gain, as part of education, or recreationally – many collaboratively written works have been the subject of a large degree of academic research.
context_section_description: Collaborative writing has been used to increase community engagement in writing: one of the three 2008 TED Prizes was given to Dave Eggers, partially for his work with the 826 project, which uses many collaborative techniques to engage school children, and community groups in writing. 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. His TED Prize wish was for community members to personally engage with local public schools.
  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. The project attempted to show students the workflow of a novel from inception to production and to improve teamwork and feedback skills. Workshops lasted up to a week and aimed to produce a full-length novel from a plot idea provided by an established author, with younger students producing smaller sized novels. Because the workshops were very short the use of collaborative writing was required so that a novel could be produced in the timeframe.  Techniques from software engineering were used to arrange the workload amongst the students.
caption: Selection of books written collaboratively as part of the 826 Valencia Project
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