The joy of Google Wave

(or: writing is to masturbation as Google Waving is to sex)

The moment I gained some understanding of how Google Wave works, I saw the potential for collaboration between Shirley and me.

Some background: we always created scenes, especially dialogues, by role-play. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for her contributions of that kind to my dead-tree works, and I contributed to hers, too. We would do live role-plays and then recreate the lines, as best we could, by memory by writing.

More recently we began RPing by instant message. This made it possible for the two of us, now living in separate houses, to create dialogues full-speed without being in the same place. The other lovely thing was that it generated a written record which could then be edited and built up with narrative into a finished scene.

Google Wave just made that method obsolete.

Basically, you have two (or more) minds and sets of hands inputting into one file. We can both work in the same scene, at the same time. A little coloured label with her name on it moves around, showing where her cursor is, and vice-versa on her end.

It's kind of like having someone else in your mind. And they could be on the other side of the planet.

Our method: we stay in one box. We keep our Messenger windows open, and words that don't belong in the scene (e.g. "Hey! She would never say that!" or "Umm, what was the name of such-and-such again?" or "brb I have to p") we IM to each other so they don't clutter up the file. We each write the lines of the character we're assigned, in quotation marks, and whoever the scene belongs to writes narrative, aided by stage directions for the character played by the other (e.g. "(he takes a deep breath)"). We found that it was pretty much possible to write the narrative while waiting for the other to write her next line.

We quickly developed common-sense rules. When it was Shirley's scene, I made sure I a) didn't edit her lines or narrative, except inarguable things like typos; b) didn't write narrative for her. She did same other way around. When we do a book that is truly collaborative, it will be interesting. I suggest to others that they agree beforehand who gets final edit on each scene.

The result? Rough-draft text. No extraneous comments, no "So-and-so says" lines, no choppy dialogue from taking turns shooting back and forth. You can even format, so you don't have to add the italics in later, and when you copy and paste into Word the formatting is preserved. The only thing I'd like to see it do is properly curved apostrophes and quotation marks, not those straight up-and-down things, but you can fix those all at once with two quick search-and-replaces in Word. Oh, and I'd like it to allow two spaces in a row, but that's small potatoes.

Heck, you don't even have to save. It's saved as you go, and sits on a website. If you sign out, it's there when you sign back in. You can't delete a wave unless you are alone in it; you quit following it.

We had a BLAST. Here are some sample IMs from the accompanying stream:

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OH THIS IS SOOOOO COOL!
THIS IS REAL COLLABORATION!!!

wowowowowow
I am LOVING this.

Shirley says:
I can interrupt
Karen says:
Yes, you can!
We can do anything!
Man this is awesome!
We're doing it like this for EVERY scene from now on.
this is WAYYYYY better!!!!

Gods, it even spellchecks... gives you the right word as a choice often...

So I wonder if you can claim the title of First Weblit Created by Use of Google Wave to Be Posted?

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It was amazing. We will never go back to IM RPing. We both took scenes that we Waved today and put them in our posts on Philosopher in Arms and Eclipse Court.

If you already collaborate, you MUST TRY IT!! If you don't collaborate, you might want to start, just for the joy of using this. It is that good.