Fractal Fiction

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  Immutable Realms, the EOS arts and culture zine will feature the first story written via the Fractal Fiction process.

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  Twelve participants and a moderator from around the world, writing a fictional story through fractal governance.

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  Artwork by Adam Sward to accompany, "Moonlight", the first Fractal Fiction short story.

Inspired by EdenOnEOS

Fractal Fiction originated as a concept buried deep within the early threads of an Eden Members Telegram discussion. "This process could be used for anything, even creative projects!", someone said. It was only a matter of time. As far as we're aware, Fractal Fiction is the first.

What it does

Fractal Fiction represents a real-world, tested implementation of the Eden election process to write short stories through fractal democracy. Fractal Fiction was purpose modified for creative writing. Roles are randomly assigned to participants within small groups tasked with developing the foundational pillars of a story; theme, characters, setting, plot, conflict, point of view, style and the unknown [unknown was added to this process to cover nuanced aspects of a story and elements that may shape the other seven categories, such as a magic, a curse or natural disaster].

Once consensus is reached in the initial round of ideation and articulation, a representative is selected amongst each group. This delegate will advocate for the group's voice and principles to be honored in the outlining round that follows. During the outlining round, the delegates will attempt to artfully incorporate their respective story elements in to a rough draft. Of these delegates, a consensus vote will assign roles of writer, editor and advisor.

Challenges we ran into

As something of an alpha for this process, one challenge that emerged was the inevitable contradiction potential of story elements [i.e. characters finding a humanoid-being entombed in a glacier, but the setting taking place in Death Valley, CA]. To avoid these conflicts, the first round groups were assigned with two story elements each [...this included the unknown element so that round one elements could be assigned in an equally divisible manner, rather than one group having a single story element in the traditional 7 elements model]. Groups were designed with story elements that related to one another such as characters and plot, setting and point of view and finally, conflict and theme.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Undoubtedly, the results of this initial Fractal Fiction pilot are the biggest achievement. The final story, Moonlight, written by Sophia Keller, edited by Oscar and advised by Farah, is attached for your reading pleasure. This story will be included in the upcoming release of Immutable Realms.

In a more abstract sense, we were impressed by the ability of so many world views and individual experiences of the participants to uniquely [...and surprisingly seamlessly] shape a story. This was especially noteable considering that until the second round of outlining, no one knew what the other groups were discussing.

Lastly, this process paired participants without creative writing experience with those having previously completed short fiction and published novels. The diversity represented within groups was wide-ranging and in our pilot, two of the three final roles elected to the writing, editing and advising round, were women.

What we learned

We learned that this process is not only possible, but highly adaptable. Upon completion of the initial pilot, Fractal Fiction participants met for a post-mortem with suggestions to improve the process, shorten or expand rounds for ideation and outline guidelines for determining how settings, characters, plot and conflicts are decided. Navigating geographic and historical accuracy was addressed and efforts that could be made to consider social and cultural sensitives when developing a story. One final point of discussion was the use of research and tools, like maps, internet searches, name generating software and artificial intelligence.

What's next for Fractal Fiction

This proposal is for a formal development and implementation of Fractal Fiction as a web-based or application-based DApp built on EOS. With much of the existing Eden election process having been architected with the website [...and iterations there of] and the many public goods either available or soon to be available [i.e. Hypha DAO] these frameworks could be leveraged to built a Fractal Fiction DApp and/or DAO community that would attract untold creatives to the EOS community.

Sustainable Fractal Fiction

Fractal Fiction has the potential to self sustain when paired with the EOS token economy and a cyclical value model. Dividing the DApp or website experience to both creators and readers, a fee, either monthly or per story paid by the consumer, could fund a pool that would then be distributed amongst writing/creator accounts. This concept could be further supported with reputation-based acknowledgments or, "best seller", NFT badges similar to those associated with the Pomelo platform or the Kindle Store.

Built With

• blockchain
• eos