How's this for an interesting idea?

by Rick Blechta

How’s this for an interesting idea?

I just had an intriguing thought based on recent posts by Aline and Thomas.

But first a bit of preamble about what I’m thinking about.

There have been many example of the pastiche in crime fiction. Publishers don’t want a financially successful series die when the author does (or quits). Many contracts of beginning authors now include a clause that the series characters belong to the publisher once the contract is signed.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some excellent pastiches. The stories of Nero Wolfe have been added to by other authors, not to mention Sherlock Holmes, and those examples are just two examples off the top of my head.

What I’m saying is that it’s nothing new for a different writer to use established characters of another writer to create new works, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so.

Now to my little idea: what if a group of characters were created by two writers working together, sort of assembling a cast for a drama that’s not yet written?

This, too, has been done before. The two writers take on creating alternating chapters and the story is told that way. Or the two writers just work together to create the story, “writing by committee”, as it were.

My idea is to assemble this cast and then the two authors go off and craft whatever story they desire. At the end of the process, the results are then compared. I’m sure they would be intriguingly different.

What do you think?