Collaborative Poetry and the Storytelling Techniques of Neil Gaiman

Yesterday at noon, Neil Gaiman, celebrated author of The Sandman series, American Gods, Coraline, and more, sent out a single message from his Twitter account, @neilhimself. As io9 reported, what followed would be thousands of messages in reply to Gaiman's prompt. The first thousand are currently being compiled and edited into a massive collaborative short story.

Collaboration is a social media buzzword, and here at Paradise Tossed we've reported on a number of interesting collaborative writing projects. Gaiman is probably the biggest name writer to get in on the act, and on the occasion of this tech-savvy author's high profile project we thought it would be a good time to reflect on the whole idea of collaborative storytelling.



All poetry, all writing, is by its very nature collaborative. If you subscribe to the notion that we are the sum of all our interactions, then writing is not so much an act of individual imagination as it is a record of the collective effects on a single psyche. Put more simply, your poems are really written by you and anyone who has ever had any effect on you.

And beyond that, as scholar and critic Stanley Fish would argue, any act of reading is an act of interpretation, which can change the whole meaning of a piece of writing. And this individual interpretation is the result of an interpretive community.

I don't want to get too deep into theory here, especially since I'm splicing together a bunch of different critical perspectives. But the upshot is this: every act of writing is the result of a near infinite number of interactions, and so is every act of reading.

What does this mean for Gaiman's collaborative project? Well, since all writing is collaboration, what makes Twitter projects like this one so interesting is that they become a sort of meta-collaboration. Social media technologies, which allow thousands of people to collaborate directly, expose the underlying interactions that exist in all writing. This story will be a great illustration of the way that all stories are taken from bits and pieces of everyone.

I want to leave you today with a poem by the English Romantic John Keats. It's called "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." As you go through it, think a little about just a few of the interactions that are taking place in the work. There's Keats' reaction to the epic poet Homer, who himself is most likely a legend collected from a number of ancient storytellers. There's the English translator, George Chapman, himself an Elizabethan under the effect of that unique interpretive community. There's Keats' Romantic counterparts, who themselves formed a robust community of writers and thinkers, including Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron. And most recently, there's you: the reader. You are formed of a vastly different tradition than Keats or Chapman or Homer, and you bring to the table an entirely new set of interactions and interpretations to this centuries old poem. Mind-blowing, isn't it?

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

 Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; 

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific — and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise —

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.