So, I've recently come across individuals and even groups of writer friends (and seen people on the forums) who are extraordinarily creative but don't have any plans to say, write a novel themselves.

Some build worlds.

Some develop characters.

Some outline plots.

We have threads and posts in here like "here's this character, if you want him" or "I've got a world with no plot" or "I've a plot and no characters" and any combination in-between.

First off, I love this aspect of HW. That we can all sit and go, "Look, I have this character that I love and appreciate but doubt I'll ever write his story, would you care to do it for me?" It's an interesting concept and unique among a lot of people who don't want to share anything for fear of plagiarism.

So I'm curious:
What do you as individuals, as HWers, see as your strong point in writing?
Does world-building terrify you?
Are plots thick or elusive?
Do you have wonderful starting ideas but hate trying to figure them out in a novel?

And, have you ever considered of going into the business of, say, world-building and selling your worlds to other authors? Or character-development and selling (or fixing an adoption fee) for your characters? I've often thought that it's a shame the writer's market doesn't actually have this all thought out. That there's no market for creative people who are much better at one aspect than the other (Because, honestly, haven't we all read books that had wonderful ideas and we wished somebody else had actually written the story? )

Me myself, I would happily write strings of dialogue and sell it to people. But I also enjoy most aspects of writing--plots not being my strong point, I'd buy those if the market existed!

Anyway, I'm just curious to know more about you, my fellow writers and what ya'll think of this.

This is a darling idea. I love it.

I have an excess of ideas, mostly. There's no way I'm ever going to write them all, and some of them aren't even ones I'd really be able to write well. I wouldn't mind selling them.

'The Three Musketeers' was actually a collaboration, I believe.

I remember hearing that about The Three Musketeers, and also Count of Monte Cristo, which Dumas co-wrote with Auguste Maquet, "with Maquet outlining the plot and characters in draft form and Dumas adding colorful dialogue and details. At the insistence of the publisher, Maquet's name was left off the title page, and in return he received generous fees"~Wiki article.

This is exactly what I'm thinking of--although, I think the publishers of today would be more willing to include someone else's name on such a collaboration. XD

I'm not a typical writer, so the "what are your strong points?" questions are somewhat non-sequitur for me: I write because there's a particular (but egregiously large, and growing) story "in my head" that I feel needs to be written, and I can't pass the idea to anyone else because that would result in a different but similar story being written. I'd be open to collaborating with someone(s) (that I knew I could trust---so far, my mental list stands at one) on it, because the scope it has grown to is such that it may be more than one life's work, but ...

For the more common cases, based on books about writing and authors' blogs that I have read, there are two main issues that have forestalled any sort of formal economic exchange of ideas/worldbuilding/characters/etc. (beyond ghostwriting):

First, ideas are cheap---if anyone were to pay "a dime a dozen," that'd be hundreds if not thousands of times a fair market value. Good ideas, well-developed ideas, are rarer and dearer, but once you get to the point where an idea is really worth something you've done the bulk of the work already and there's really hardly any point in not writing the story yourself (Similarly, in the free/open-source software world, unsolicited ideas are often ignored, but contributions of code are not.) Further, HW is hardly the only site where ideas are bounced around with money never being mentioned, so why would someone pay for them?

Second, what we might call "idea mutation," and fear of lawsuits: Back in the '80s (I think) a fan made a suggestion to an author, the author used it in a way the fan didn't like, and the fan sued---and whatever the outcome of the lawsuit was, lawsuits are more expensive than any but the richest authors can afford. Since then, savvy authors have generally made a point of either not reading fan ideas of what they might write in the future (what a sequel might contain, for example) or scrupulously avoiding using any such ideas. (Where "idea" is fairly but not necessarily very specific---"A book from so-and-so's POV" would be fine, but anything more specific might not be, depending on the author's risk tolerance. And savvy fans sometimes deliberately speculated in public about possible plots that they didn't want the author to subject their favorite characters to.) But at its root, the problem is that in passing from one person's brain to another, and then from the recipient's brain into final form (a completed story, a draft, or whatever), ideas change, and the person who "thought of the idea" is (particularly if not an accomplished author himself or herself) likely to object "But that's not what I meant!"

There's also the problem that nothing in the craft of creating speculative fiction can be done purely in isolation. Characters are shaped by the world in which they live, so "drop so-and-so's character into my world" (or, contrariwise, "take this character I've developed and send him into so-and-so's world") is easier said than done (well). Similarly, worldbuilding dictates the "possibility space" that a plot explores. So a well-crafted SF or fantasy novel can't have the plot, characters, or worldbuilding simply "subcontracted" to another author, handing off the requirements and receiving the completed work. Handing a plot, characters, or world concept off for another author to use and adapt as necessary can work, as can true collaboration, but I don't think a "freelance market" in worldbuilding/character development/plot concept services could work in any systematic way.

And lastly, for a worldbuilder or character developer to get paid, an author has to use part of the royalties (or revenue, if self-publishing) of the novel or story to pay this "contractor" instead of whatever else he or she would have done with the money---and authors that earn enough for that not to be a hardship both are few and far between and tend to be the authors who don't (see themselves as) having enough trouble coming up with ideas in any of these areas that they'd want to hire someone to do the development for them. (A secretary to manage fan mail, yes; someone to develop the world of the next book, usually not.)

Well, hopefully. The more I read about publishers the more I realize they really haven't changed as much as I thought they had....

There's a funny story I read about collaboration: there was a man who started off writing using a nom de plume, and got a pretty good following. But after a while he ended up deciding he wanted to use his real name instead, and started trying to make a sort of transition over by publishing 'collaborations' between his nom de plume and his real name. Kinda funny way of going about it. Anyway, he got this message from one of his fans, with the gist of: 'You know, it's nice you're trying to help out new authors and all, but this new guy you're collaborating with is ruining your writing'.

I'm thinking attribution might be a bit tricky....

If the things you used were small enough comparative to your own work, you could state that you received help or ideas from 'Person' in the same sort of place you say who did your cover art, I guess. It wouldn't be so hard there.

* is curious *

I wouldn't say so. Like I said, I don't have room for many of the ideas I have (either characters or story ideas or anything else), and with some of them I know I would not be a good person to write them, so it's not a case of 'I might as well just write it myself'.

And I wouldn't say 'figuring something out' is the bulk of the work, also. A lot of people find that actually writing the story is the hardest part for them. Others have a very hard time making characters and either spend a large amount of time working on trying to create good ones, or else just use bad ones in their stories. If someone made amazing characters and had too many to write about (or didn't even have an interest in writing about them all), I don't think it would be really 'easier' for the one to just make his own characters, and the other to just write his own stories about his own characters.

I really think it would be quite similar to collaborating, except different from what a lot of people think when they hear that. It is exactly the sort of thing I read about with Dumas and Maquet, that I am thinking it could be. Dumas (if I remember correctly from the article I read about it) either couldn't or wouldn't work out a whole story on his own. Like Caeli said, Maquet did that. But as Maquet said himself, a lot of the flavour and wit and charm of the characters and the style were only created by Dumas, and it would not have been the half the same book if Maquet had done everything himself. Similarly, the book wouldn't have even existed if Dumas had done (or more accurately, not done) everything himself.

So it was collaboration. But not the sort of collaboration I usually see when people say that word.

If you would make a considerably better book by using someone's else's work, I don't think the cost would be a something to kill the entire idea, especially if it was a success based deal (such as, if I ever earn this much on book sales, then you get this much; or just a simple percentage).

*reads and contemplates points made*

Hmm, maybe there could be less of a "market" (with all the pros and cons thereof) and just have it as an established thing. Like there's a page in the back with the acknowledgements where you can list your "contributors and collaborators". Some authors practically do this already: "thank you to so-n-so for inspiring so-n-so." and etc.

I just like thinking about it.

This all just reminded me of Katie and Jak – Jak using Katie's supervillain world for his new SHRAID series, you know.

I think my strong point is creating the characters. I lahv them.

And yes, I could see myself making and selling them to others. *nod* is fun, it is.

I love world building. It's probably one of my favourite points when it comes to writing.

Characters terrify me. Or rather the concern that my characters are all too one dimensional.

I fine it harder to start ideas off to be honest. As in, it could take me quite a while to work on an idea, but when I have it all worked out in my head, I don't find it hard to work it into my novel.

I've only ever built one fantasy world, and I'm my current novel is set in it, so I wouldn't consider giving it/selling it to anyone. However I think it's great to share story ideas with other writers, if you know you aren't going to write the idea yourself. I have ideas that I may write one day, so I keep those to myself, but I think some people are especially gifted with very easily coming up with plots, and I think it's cool to share if that's the case.