Actually, in a way, all my EQ stories were collaborative to a degree, because they were all written in shared-world writing groups. Everyone in the group would create a character, and the founder of the group would usually create a background and history for the tribe, to which other members would contribute. Everything your character did could affect the other characters (so there were some rules, like you can't kill off other people's characters, and if you're going to do something major like drop a meteor on the tribe, you have to get the founder's OK first.) I would constantly get story ideas from things other people did, and we'd work out all kinds of interactions between the characters which became background for stories.

And then there's Three Deep, which is like no other collaboration I've ever seen. We had a months-long brainstorming session about all the things we'd like to see in a virtual season. Then I took all those ideas and tried to put them into one coherent story outline. I broke the outline into episodes, and the episodes into acts, and the acts into scenes. Scenes were assigned to all the writers in the project. When all the scenes for an episode are completed, all of us go over it and make editorial comments, and then the writers turn in a second draft. At some point, the entire manuscript is handed over to me, and I revise with an eye to making it read like it wasn't written by seventeen different people. (At least, that's the theory. In practice, assorted horrible calamities have resulted in significant deviations from that plan.) We're still making changes in the way we do this, and by ep 7, we're hoping to be working on a more round-robin first draft model-a lot of the problems we've had in past epiosdes are due to writers working in a vaccuum, without a good feel for where their scene fits in the larger story. Hoepfully the new method will remedy that.