We know the author as a solitary figure. We’re used to the vision of the solo artisan struggling against norms both textual and social. Blogs and novels might be collaborative but they are of limited collaboration, with designated members, true names, known identities and verifiable credentials and backgrounds.
But what if the solo artist was more like a distributed collective of artists? A scattered, decentralized la Boheme. Say we’re working on a single novel, maybe even an epic fantasy, like Lord of the Rings. Such a task might be too much for a single writer, and maybe we want a distributed textuality to give it flavor or life. Or maybe we just want the social experiment. Either way, in this scenario, we’ve concluded that the writer is solitary no more.
The concept freeing us from authorial solitude is the chain novel.
Everyone involved writes a section, which is appended to the novel and becomes the next chain of events in the narrative. This has an old pedigree, with writers and theorists like Ronald Dworkin weighing in with practical or scholarly uses for the concept. Dworkin used the concept for legal theory; others might use it for a novel of 18 chapters having 18 different writers, one for each chapter.
It makes sense in legal theory: Someone publishes a paper, another writer publishes a paper linking to it or referencing it, and more and more append to the paper and its ideas until there is an entire chain of concepts linked by their referencing of the first paper.
A novel might have a similar structure. The first chapter, the genesis chapter, is written by a human or software, creative intelligence. From here, the next author writes a chapter, using the elements from the first to continue the novel like the familiar and then in improv—but hopefully more cogent. If we’re writing a novel anyone would like to read, it’ll be important to make sense. Might even be worth it to be engaging and good, too.
After 18 successive rounds of this, we have an 18-chapter novel, each one sequentially and narratively linked to the one that came before. We have, thus, a chain novel. We can read it chronologically like any other story, lose our place in it, spoil it for others online, reread it for analysis or criticism.
You might’ve noticed from my loaded wordplay that this chain novel has many structural similarities to the blockchain. Each chapter is a completed block, each conceptual linking (chapter titles or numbers) links back to the previous block all the way to the genesis chapterblock, the novel is append-only (i.e. previous blocks cannot be changed by ones that follow), distributed users or writers add their material to the book and complete transactions, etc.
Let’s dig deeper into this blockchain novel. First, part of why cryptocurrencies work and double-spending is prevented in blockchain is because of proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS): Those involved in validation and acceptance have to demonstrate their validity by showing computing power or coin investment in the various outcomes available. Similarly, computational mining is needed in PoW to ensure a truly decentralized acceptance of block additions. There is also Proof-of-Contribution protocols as well, which might be germane to a blockchain novel and even its IP protections.
For a blockchain novel, each chapter will need to be accepted by the community of readers and literature miners. These lit miners need to overcome a possible 51% attack: What’s to stop the majority of nodes from accepting trashy or wrong chapters simply because they have the necessary voting power to continue the dominant chain? What’s to stop good chapters, or chapters of acceptable literary quality, from being abandoned as orphan blockchains?
We have two avenues. One is to require some kind of coin staking for validators, i.e. skin in the game to prove the commitment to the chain. Another choice is to not require this at all, and to let the narrative become a branching tree, like a choose your own adventure novel where orphan blocks are appended to storychains of choice and later readers can follow whatever path they choose.
For the dominant chain, PoS might work like this: lit miners all mine the chapters, or in this case, write them. These chapters are broadcast across the distributed nodes for voting and acceptance. Each writer stakes a certain amount of tokens or coins for the right to contribute a chapter and have it read across the node spectrum. Writers can also add transaction fees (like gas in Ethereum, for example, or fees in Bitcoin) to speed up the process of reading the chapter for possible acceptance into the chain. Whoever reads the winning chapter the fastest gets to claim the block reward.
Writers have their chapters added to the narrative if more than 51% of reading nodes accept it as the best chapter for the chain. This might confer artistic or bragging rights, or it might be that access to the blockchain novel, for outsiders, is fee-based, like selling a book through a conventional publisher. The sales revenue from novel access are distributed equally among winning chapter contributors. If the novel is optioned into a movie, the possible monetary rewards are even higher.
At first blush, this might all seem ghastly, a capitalistic nightmare of democratized voting for artistic pieces. Did anyone stake tokens for each brushstroke of the Mona Lisa? Did Flaubert claim a block reward?
While there is plenty of merit to these criticisms (and let’s be clear, a system like this will never, not in a million years, become a dominant writing form over the conventional authorial narrative), there is also some precedent for such a thing, albeit limited.
Atlanta Nights is a 2004 novel that was written by several authors, one for each chapter. The only rules were to follow with basic characters and situations—and to write as poorly as possible. This is, first and foremost, a parody novel. It’s also hilarious, like every wrong choice taken on purpose for anti-literary merit.
There’s nothing to stop blockchain novels from being similarly done, for novelty and community engagement rather than an earnest attempt at writing the Great American Novel. There are numerous examples of parody coins over the years, so the marriage of silliness and sarcasm seems perfectly able to use this method without much concern for high-minded criticisms about the death of the writer or the art or whatever else.
The real challenge, of course, is producing a blockchain novel of genuine artistic merit that reaches a wide audience. What can a community say that can’t be said by an individual? What is the best practice for democratizing the writing of a solo project? Is it ever truly needed?
Even with an earnest attempt at quality production, there is a genuine risk of a limited append-only blockchain novel giving readers whiplash. Different authorial voices are able to hijack the narrative even if they can’t retcon the previous mined chapter. The Last Jedi retconned The Force Awakens; The Last Jedi was then retconned by The Rise of Skywalker. This left viewers worse off, as the plot soon made little sense and seemed to be guided entirely by subversion and trolling of the previous installment.
Part of what makes literature so much different from pure computer science and cryptography is the subjective nature of quality. We often don’t let individuals vote on parts of novels or where a story is going because there is too much of a diversity of opinion, too strongly held, by too many. We wouldn’t have a coherent narrative, only ideas shoved together.
A chain novel would need strong, limited validators to be successful at all in true artistic achievement.
Possibly, agents or software (AI), without human intervention or input, might compete with one another to produce the next chapter. With set parameters, we get a diversity of bots adding their voices to the ongoing tale. Maybe it’s a mingling of bots and humans…and maybe all validators are bots, dispassionately weighing the narrative choices of emergent, distributed novel writing to mine the very best, objective, story.
There have been many attempts in the past to mathematically define and create literature or films. One of my favorites is Plotto, by William Wallace Cook. Cook, more or less, listed every possible permutation of a story at successive steps and codified it into a guidebook that a writer could choose. If followed, it’s the very definition of a paint-by-numbers writing style.
Vladamir Propp, in Morphology of the Folktale, applied a mathematical formulae notation to analysis of the Russian folktale. The result is a set of equations for what happens in stories. This is highly unusual from a conventional Western criticism point of view, which eschews numbers and formulae in favor of schools of thought or ordered critiques like structuralism, Marxism, Freudian analysis, so on.
Franco Moretti has written numerous books about the quantitative analysis of literature, in contrast to these same qualitative valuations. Quantitative analysis might look at the use of certain words or phrases in a novel or novels in a given region or time period. It might weight the use of titles or styles to make points about how novels have changed in word counts or styles over many years. I’d be lying if I said these weren’t an influence on my own thinking.
Perhaps, rather than chapters as blocks, we instead have distributed microtransactions for a chain novel. Female critics have often noted that male writers seem to have a limited toolbox of expressions for writing women characters, or that the male characters are much stronger due to a dominant viewpoint contrary to an equality of experience. Perhaps a community of female critics accepts a character profile, down to the sentence level or even word choice, if it passes such strictures.
Male characters are written by men and accepted by male validators. Female characters are written by women and accepted by women validators. So on with non-binary, different races, different neurodivergent traits, you name it. The democratization of the blockchain novel might end up being countless small pieces pulled together by distributed, hidden validators into a cohesive whole that, frankly, might capture the messiness of the human experience better than a solitary writer lacking the awareness of other viewpoints to an artistically acceptable degree, a content-centric networking rather than a centralized creator.
Even more fascinating is the idea of empowering online critics and being able to actually capture viewpoints and ideas and feed them directly into a novel. Voices on Twitter might be invited to participate in a permissioned blockchain novel by raising substantial issues with ongoing literary choices. An inclusive artistic society, in this manner, might find a way to incorporate criticism directly into an active, ongoing tale.
I mentioned earlier the idea of dominant chains and orphan blocks. With so many potential chapters and additions to a chain novel, it might be artistically rewarding to allow soft and hard forks of the chain. Branching novels have been a massive mode of experimentation for years. You only have look at works like Victory Garden or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to see the possibilities of branching narratives or the Borges-esque Garden of Forking Paths concept.
Hard forks from the main blockchain novel might provide interesting artistic expression on their own merits, without needing validation from a community. If a novel’s events are unsatisfying, escape to another chain. If you want to get lost in the story world itself and read nearly endless permutations of possibilities, read as many chains as you like, in different directions.
The same could work for film, radio, television, internet series, any other form of entertainment medium. Anthologies have existed across the spectrum for generations. It isn’t necessarily different to think of them here and imagine their possibilities when created in an append-only chain ecosystem. Part of the beauty of artistic expression is the experimental nature of creation, and blockchain novels might well create expression beyond anything possible before, with emergent quality or defined value.