I like the idea of a work written completely anonymously with no copyright and completely open for future authors to...

I like the idea of a work written completely anonymously with no copyright and completely open for future authors to play with. A collective conscious crafting an epic piece of fiction, similar to Diderot's encyclopedia with the identities of the writers secret, only the editors can be named but very little editing be done. Editors cannot stifle freedom of thought but only contribute guidance and direction as the work cannot be a jumbled schizophrenic mess of racial slurs and memes but contain an actual plotline(s).

then why don't you do it? make a website or so

did any1 else think pic related was Hitchens

Would Veeky Forums be down for that? I could try to get crowdfunding through Kickstarter

It doesn't need funding, all the platforms you could possibly need are available free.

I'll try to get a website up and running. What could the project be called? Maybe start with brainstorming on at least the skeleton of this thing.

Like Wikipedia, or an exclusive, extremely vetted forum with good Troll Protection

I'm so down for this. If there will be enough contributors, this thing could really take off. Should this be solely online or an end date set for each volume with a final form in print? I enjoy print and that's where funding could come in. Self published as well

wait with the funding till you have a book in peto

you don't really want to do this, right? why do you make stuff so complicated?

I want to do this but, in all honesty, I have no earthly idea how to begin. Getting caught up in the grand idea of it all is something I always make a mistake of. So maybe, you are right I shouldn't make it complicated to deter any possible help.

you don't need to have anything besides a site that can be freely edited. start with that. it can be blank white. nobody needs to select fonts or shit like that. then you add whatever is necessary as it grows.

I've thought of doing this specifically crafting some sort of non-ironic epic poem or saga complete with calligraphy and gilding/illustration, sourced from a select number of anons collaborating via email rather than the clusterfuck that occured with google docs on hypersphere

the end result is a hybrid e-book/physical book hand produced and sold on-order with the proceeds divided appropriately between the authors and artists

We did it recently with that YA parody on Google docs. It was mostly unfunny and poorly written under the guise of being ironic.

It's auteur theory, not autist theory

Like a google doc, butt that always turns out with someones filling it with copy pastings of the equivalent and equal of/to n-words and dicks

You have a throw away email?

bumping for interest

[email protected]

This sounds like it would inevitably become a setting rather than a cohesive work.

Any single narrative that contained thousands of words from hundreds or thousands of authors would become so unwieldy and meandering and vast that it would eclipse all the most absurd epics that currently exist. And how does a new authour contribute if all the chronological gaps from beginning to end have been filled?

Here's what happens, people just start to write side stories for increasingly obscure characters, and over time the side stories become more and more distant from the main plot. Spin-off threads start being made for characters not in the main storyline, but other spinoffs, and to maintain any semblance of order there'd have to be a division drawn between an archived main work and the sprawling clusterfuck of off-shoots. And just you fucking wait for it to go full Fate/Stay Night and have entire off-shoot universes imagining what would happen if so and so major plot point from the central canon had gone differently, entire epics in their own right being written on this works equivalent of 'what if the nazis won the war'.

Sounds promising.

OK so there would have to be heavy editing to keep it on track. Obscure side characters and contributions would have to be reviewed for relevancy. The problem is editors review hundreds of submissions in their free time

IT'S CALLED THE LEGACY OF TOTALITARIANISM IN A TUNDRA

AND IT WAS A COMPLETE MESS

IT'S BEEN DONE user

None of this makes any fucking sense

Dice thrown

How does it not make sense?

The main issue to this is what to do about an ending. There's either no definitive ending or it just goes on forever and looses all semblence of structure, or there is an ending and there's a chronologically limited amount of content you can have without sprawling, so it can't be the eternal sandbox this person is envisioning

It sounds and seems like it would be like how some movies and tv shows are created, with a round table or writers, "ok we want to write a novel together: Story ideas? Character ideas? What are we trying to achieve? Genres?

Are you working on a novel or something, ever written one? How intelligent, creative, and talented are you?