ABSTRACT
Which reader doesn’t at one point or another dream of being an author? Online writing platforms for collaborative narrative fiction such as One Million Monkeys (henceforth OMM), Protagonize, StoryPassers, Ficly, or WEBook seem to offer the perfect opportunity for nonprofessionals to write literary texts and gain recognition. 1 These platforms are conceived as “creative writing communit[ies] dedicated to writing various forms of collaborative, interactive fiction. One author writes a story, poem, or other work, and others post branches or chapters to it” (Protagonize). Anybody may sign up under a user name to contribute text segments of usually no more than a few hundred words. Thus, literary digital fiction may be considered collaborative if a literary project is actively contributed to by several users in form of textual additions and/or alterations; commonly, it is nurtured through commentary and/or evaluation by different users. As any other form of digital fiction, it is “written for and read on a computer screen . . . [it] pursues its verbal, discursive and/or conceptual complexity through the digital medium, and would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from that medium” (Bell et al. 2010, n.p.). For the collaboratively written text itself, this is particularly true if the individual platform allows for a hypertextual structure that branches the story out into multiple versions. Furthermore, the interaction between users is based in the medium, as it takes place in blog-like sections of the respective platform as well as personalized user-profile pages, which could not be reproduced on paper.
