Today Robison Wells, Marion Jensen (of USU OCW fame), and I are launching a new project called Massive Fiction. Massive Fiction is an effort to create and define a fictional world in three novellas, providing a good understanding of the new world, its characters, and its setting, after which several additional authors – including two NYT Bestsellers – will write story stubs that anyone can use as a place to start their own stories set in the new world.
Essentially, this is an effort to create an open narrative infrastructure for legal fan fiction. All of the story content, characters, settings, etc. will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license so that everyone who writes in the world will be able to share, publish, or sell their writing (unlike other fan fiction, which is forced to live underground). Like all fan fiction, our project is especially useful for beginning writers who struggle to juggle the dozens of tasks involved in writing fiction. Rather than starting from a blank page and the need to invent characters, setting, and conflict from whole cloth, beginning writers will be able to start with characters, setting, and conflict already in pocket.
While supporting formal instruction is not the primary aim of the project, once the novellas and stubs are complete Lumen Learning will create CC BY licensed instructional supports to helps teachers bring the Massive Fiction world into their writing courses if they’re interested in doing so.
Check out the Massive Fiction site on Kickstarter and consider supporting the project.
It’s interesting its whole idea is borrowed from fan fiction, but based on a basis of teacher-led learning. Why do we all think learning needs to be led by teachers? Kids can’t decide what they want to write. I guess fan fictions will be more attractive and authentic to kids. Passion is the best catalyst of learning.