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News: What's up with writers and writing

     In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet H. Murray anticipates that cyberbards will "reshape the spectrum of narrative expression" by using the unique capabilities of the computer to construct the "multiform plot."  Yet at this historical moment, in the infancy of computer-mediated narratives, a different kind of interactive genre is flourishing on the internet.  People who frequent websites devoted to celebrities are engaged in collaborative storytelling – writing screenplays, short stories, and even novels together – in which their hero figures as a main character.  What makes these works interactive is that they include two or more individuals in an authoring process that benefits the larger community of fans who frequent their websites.
     One example of collaborative storytelling is Zorro Returns, an interactive narrative written by fans at the Antonio Banderas Web Mall (www.banderas-mall.com).  This site was created in 1995 by Kathleen Grant, a fan who is also a professional web developer.  People from all over the world track reports of Antonio Banderas in the press and report back to the Mall.   Like any threaded discussion board, visitors introduce subjects by posting messages or responding to earlier topics.  There is also a chat group which meets at negotiated times and a Bio Board that permits frequent visitors to tell about themselves, how they first discovered the films of Antonio Banderas, and why they are his fans.   It was through this comment board that fans were invited to participate in a group sequel to the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro.
     The result was Zorro Returns, which has 24 scenes written by a total of 16 people, with as many as three collaborators for a single scene.  It tells the story of Alejandro Murietta, a bandit who was transformed into El Zorro in the film The Mask of Zorro and who, in the fan sequel, fights an array of variously motivated villains while having lots of sex.
     Although the moderator attempted to limit the number of new characters and plot twists, and to encourage writers to advance existing story lines, Zorro Returns enjoys the kind of wild plot swings, narrative cul-de-sacs, improbable characters, and unmotivated sex scenes that one would expect from a group of enthusiastic amateurs whose relish in telling their fantasies supercedes their interest in shaping them into the confines of the novelistic form. 
     In a sense, Zorro Returns is related to folk legend – episodic scenes in which a community describes the adventures of a folk hero. As I watched this storytelling phenomenon unfold over the course of about three months in the winter of 1998 – and even wrote a chapter myself – it was as though there was a crowd of people sitting around an electronic campfire listening as some members of the community took turns building a sort of picaresque legend around their shared hero.