Tag: dropbox

  • Communication Tools

    It is probably worth considering how much of a debt collaborative writing of the type we’ve been discussing owes to modern communications technology. Heide and I live twenty-three miles apart. Without word processing, e-mail, video conferencing and web-based file sharing, we would not be able to collaborate on fiction in the way we have. That…

  • Writing methods compared and contrasted

    Are our writing methods like chalk and cheese? Iain and I decided to compare our writing methods, so we devised a list of questions, and then each answered them WITHOUT peeking, just for once. The results are interesting. When we looked through our answers we realised that we could not have written Clovenhoof sitting side by…

  • Clovenhoof v Draculas

    Heide and I have been working on our collaborative novel since last autumn and we’re mere weeks away from finishing a healthy-looking draft of the entire thing. We’ve tackled the collaborative aspect of writing in our own way, simply doing what we felt was right and it’s been interesting to see how other people have…

  • Chicken!

    Actual chicken. Owned by Iain. I was hunting through old emails recently, looking for some detail that I knew we’d talked about, before we’d set up our Dropbox structure. Ancient History! I started to realise just how far we’d come, and how quickly. From the very first tentative shall we collaborate? email to having a…

  • Sewing the pieces together

    Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, 1931 Charles Dickens died in 1870, leaving his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, unfinished. His readers, who had followed the story of Drood, his Uncle Jasper and the Landless siblings, were left with an unfinished story abounding with unanswered questions. Who killed Edwin Drood? Who was the Dick Datchery…

  • How did we avoid these collaborative writing pitfalls?

    Empirical Study on Collaborative Writing: What do co-authors do, use, and like? Sylvie Noël & Jean-Marc Robert I came across this interesting paper about the co-authoring of documents. Most of the research is about collaborative writing in the workplace or in academia, but it’s full of interesting things. I’m not going to reproduce what it says, you…

  • Collaboration: Can two people write with one voice?

    A writing collaboration can take many forms. One partner might be the ideas person and the other the writer. Or one might be the writer and the other the editor. Or each author might write separate story strands which are then woven together once complete. These are perfectly fine methods of collaboration but, in them,…

  • Doing it in Public

      How much privacy do we need or want?   When we started using Dropbox our productivity soared. Instead of emailing ideas back and forth, we could easily create and share them in documents. Once we started writing in earnest, it raised a question. Writers are nosey people, it’s a given. To be a creator…