Ten-Sided: Dissecting a Disaster Part I

Ten-Sided was supposed to be a blog fiction written by 10 writers with 10 characters using a many to many format. It was commisioned by the New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. When I first found it I thought that it was just tedious. Now that I've forced myself to read all of it, I realize now that describing it as anything short of "total bloody clusterf***" would be an understatement. So, why did I force myself to read it? I wanted to see if I could figure out what went wrong. Sometimes figuring out what doesn't work can be as important as figuring out what does work.

One thing I wanted to point out. I really wanted to see if I could point to an alternative opinion on the piece. I wanted to end the whole series with:

But don't listen to me. I'm just a white collar worker with delusions of being a literary critic who thinks Moby Dick sucks. The whole thing could've been the deepest, and genius work of art since Hamlet. After all this person(s) thought it was great.(insert link here)

The reason I can't end with that is because I couldn't find anyone who wrote something favorable about the project. In fact, I couldn't find anyone who had written anything about the project after it started. I found tons of articles announcing the beginning of the project(see here, here, here, here, and here) and one announcing the related fictohedran project, but not a single article written about the project once it completed. I'm forced to conclude that either A.) Everyone learned from their mom that, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" or B.) I'm the first human being that forced myself to read all of it. Based on my experience with most internet forums, I'm leaning towards option 'B'.

Moving along now... let's get to the dissection of this thing. Let's start with the rules the writers were to abide by in creating their blog fiction:

Ten-sided explores a new form of creative practice that comments on and employs the decentralized nature of creation through blogs. Ten fiction writers collaborate with one another using a simple set of rules:

• Each author creates a fictional character for use during the project. There are no limitations as to what these characters might be.
• Each author is responsible for creating and maintaining a blog in the voice of that fictional character, and is required to employ RSS or Atom or both, so it will be easy for readers and the other authors to follow along. This blog will last for three months, from March 18, 2006, to June 18, 2006.
• All ten fictional characters are somehow connected, but the nature of those connections cannot be decided beforehand, they can only be discovered, or perhaps asserted, during the process of writing.
• Any sort of pre-planned coordination regarding the narrative is forbidden. Authors are supposed to only take their cues from the public writings of others.

The website also tried to predict the end result.

The resulting improvisation resembles a jazz performance or a session of exquisite corpse, but in a new form of creative practice that comments on and employs the multivocal nature of blogging communities.

Personally, I think the jazz performance was a bad analogy. At a Jazz performance everyone agrees ahead of time that they are playing jazz. Ten-Sided was more like a punk rocker, pep-band drummer, country banjoist, and Broadway singer trying to improvise. No matter how good they are, they have very different styles and interests.

One rule was that all of the characters had to somehow relate to the other characters. The problem is, how do you get the following characters all to relate to one another?
A member of Mi6,
A Homeless New York Musician,
A Depressed Gambling Addict,
A Cat Killer under house arrest,
A doll maker,
A nerdy scifi author,
A guy who lives with his mother that can't tell the difference between dreams and reality,
A bi-polar pack rat,
A father who's daughter is missing, and
A psychotic under house arrest.

I don't care if you're Henry David Thoreau, you're going to be hard pressed to force all of these characters into a relationship. So did the writers of Ten-Sided. Many of the relationships were very light and just barely mentioning each other. One of the characters pretended to be a singer. Poof, everyone's character "connected" by listening to his music. Problem was, that wasn't really interacting with that character - and not that interesting. No one even used going to an Ezra Kire concert as a method of meeting someone.

So let that be the first goal of a multi-character blog fiction. Find someway for the characters to quickly establish a relationship.

The problem with Ten-Sided was the rules were the perfect blend off being, at the same time, too harsh and not harsh enough. The rule saying they couldn't collaborate outside of the narrative meant that they couldn't plan any meetings between their characters. Therefore, no one knew how to get their characters to meet one another. Nobody could say, "hey, my character plays online video games. If your character does the same, they could meet online". Or "My character is going to an Ezra Kire concert, if your character goes they can meet and... who knows!". One way to fix it is that they could've eliminated the no outside interaction rule.

Another way they could've fixed the problem was they could've been more restrictive and added a rule. A rule could've been that each character must already know at least 1 or 2 of the other characters. That way 10 writers don't have to worry about how they're going to connect with all of these different people.

That's enough for now. In my next post, I'm going to try and tackle the "plot", of Ten-Sided. I think you'll be amused. If you're a fan of the TV show Lost, you might even like it.