In story writing, the diverse perspectives of the crowd could
support an author’s search for the perfect character, setting,
or plot. However, structuring crowd collaboration is
challenging. Too little structure leads to unfocused,
sprawling narratives, and too much structure stifles
creativity. Motivated by the idea that individual creative
leaders and the crowd have complementary creative
strengths, we present an approach where a leader directs the
high-level vision for a story and articulates creative
constraints for the crowd. This approach is embodied in
Ensemble, a novel collaborative story-writing platform. In a
month-long short story competition, over one hundred
volunteer users on the web started over fifty short stories
using Ensemble. Leaders used the platform to direct
collaborator work by establishing creative goals, and
collaborators contributed meaningful, high-level ideas to
stories through specific suggestions. This work suggests
that asymmetric creative contributions may support a broad
new class of creative collaborations.
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