01-31-2017, 01:26 PM
So, various thoughts here...
In terms of making OA comparable to Star Wars or Star Trek in terms of size of the fanbase and genre - that would require resources we don't currently have. Not only money, but essentially people whose 'day job' would be creating such things. Or who at least had the resources and know-how to produce stuff such as some of the fan created extensions of the Star Trek universe that can be found on YouTube or such.
What would be potentially more doable would be to have a wider range of longer stories set in OA that could make it more accessible to a greater number of people.
The challenge with that is getting people to produce the stories. In terms of doing that, the big challenges we've historically faced seem to be:
a) People trying to drink from a firehose - OA is huge and, from our perspective of being able to see the 'big picture' of the whole setting - we often seem to have authors struggling to narrow things down to a place/time/set of elements to make a coherent story. People often try to fit every element of the setting into a single story, which is probably not doable unless you're prepared to produce a novel length work.
b) People trying to write OA fiction as if it were Star Wars or Star Trek type fiction - Both of these other franchises include elements that essentially allow them to practically commute across the galaxy - something OA doesn't really allow. Which mainly means we need to find a way to tell exciting/engaging stories that aren't predicated on being able to cross light-years in a matter of hours or in the course of a commercial break. I can think of various ways to do that, but it's a matter of coming up with a story to do it in. Which leads us to...
c) What to write about. A lot of our stories are currently 'daily life vignettes' rather than full on stories. Coming up with coherent stories that are interesting and also showcase OA can be challenging. From speaking with an author acquaintance of mine, not just in OA btw. A lot of writing groups do more talking about writing than actual writing it turns out.
That all said, I've been playing with some ideas that I'm hoping might help in this regard:
1) What if we were to set up one or several 'sandboxes' within the setting with the idea of people being able to write stories in them? These could be tiny subsets of the setting that are nevertheless big enough to fit one or several stories into. But their limiting parameters might (hopefully) avoid the 'firehose' issue.
2) Writing a story in series in which each of some number of people commit to do a chapter, continuing the story within an agreed upon framework, but also adding their own twists. This could take a fair bit of coordination, but might be fun to try. Or maybe write a story as a group - mapping out the plot, events, etc. together and one or more of us doing the conversion to a story.
3) Picking a single SF plot or theme (or some more general plot/theme) and then a bunch of us each writing a story within that plot/theme. So maybe something like 'exploring the unknown' or 'a detective story' or 'a love story' or 'an ancient evil awakes'. We could even get more explicit and say 'write an OA story with the plot/theme of The Lord of the Rings (half of all fantasy seems to do this already) or a Sherlock Holmes story or some such. Not a literal copy of the story of course, but the basic plot mapped into OA.
I'm also planning to add a number of author resources to the website this year to hopefully encourage more writing.
Anyway, my 2c worth,
Thoughts?
Todd
In terms of making OA comparable to Star Wars or Star Trek in terms of size of the fanbase and genre - that would require resources we don't currently have. Not only money, but essentially people whose 'day job' would be creating such things. Or who at least had the resources and know-how to produce stuff such as some of the fan created extensions of the Star Trek universe that can be found on YouTube or such.
What would be potentially more doable would be to have a wider range of longer stories set in OA that could make it more accessible to a greater number of people.
The challenge with that is getting people to produce the stories. In terms of doing that, the big challenges we've historically faced seem to be:
a) People trying to drink from a firehose - OA is huge and, from our perspective of being able to see the 'big picture' of the whole setting - we often seem to have authors struggling to narrow things down to a place/time/set of elements to make a coherent story. People often try to fit every element of the setting into a single story, which is probably not doable unless you're prepared to produce a novel length work.
b) People trying to write OA fiction as if it were Star Wars or Star Trek type fiction - Both of these other franchises include elements that essentially allow them to practically commute across the galaxy - something OA doesn't really allow. Which mainly means we need to find a way to tell exciting/engaging stories that aren't predicated on being able to cross light-years in a matter of hours or in the course of a commercial break. I can think of various ways to do that, but it's a matter of coming up with a story to do it in. Which leads us to...
c) What to write about. A lot of our stories are currently 'daily life vignettes' rather than full on stories. Coming up with coherent stories that are interesting and also showcase OA can be challenging. From speaking with an author acquaintance of mine, not just in OA btw. A lot of writing groups do more talking about writing than actual writing it turns out.
That all said, I've been playing with some ideas that I'm hoping might help in this regard:
1) What if we were to set up one or several 'sandboxes' within the setting with the idea of people being able to write stories in them? These could be tiny subsets of the setting that are nevertheless big enough to fit one or several stories into. But their limiting parameters might (hopefully) avoid the 'firehose' issue.
2) Writing a story in series in which each of some number of people commit to do a chapter, continuing the story within an agreed upon framework, but also adding their own twists. This could take a fair bit of coordination, but might be fun to try. Or maybe write a story as a group - mapping out the plot, events, etc. together and one or more of us doing the conversion to a story.
3) Picking a single SF plot or theme (or some more general plot/theme) and then a bunch of us each writing a story within that plot/theme. So maybe something like 'exploring the unknown' or 'a detective story' or 'a love story' or 'an ancient evil awakes'. We could even get more explicit and say 'write an OA story with the plot/theme of The Lord of the Rings (half of all fantasy seems to do this already) or a Sherlock Holmes story or some such. Not a literal copy of the story of course, but the basic plot mapped into OA.
I'm also planning to add a number of author resources to the website this year to hopefully encourage more writing.
Anyway, my 2c worth,
Thoughts?
Todd