Pass-Along Story Models

Clancy, a most clever & canny friend of the Umbrella Revolution (shown above), and I have been kicking around recently the idea of putting together a pass-along story. You know, that creative writing activity where someone will write a segment of story and then someone else will write another, and so on, with no particular planning on either participants part.

In doing so, it occured to me that there's actually a number of interesting variations off of the standard "you-write-a-page-I-write-a-page" models that could theoretically lead to quite a number of interesting configurations.

That is to say, the foward progression of the pass-along story assumes that the first page is the first page of the story, though there's not necessarily any reason why that should be the case. The first page of a pass-along story could be a random page from an as-yet unwritten book, in which case the writers could be allowed to insert pages anywhere when it became their turn, which would be ridiculously dynamic and pretty cool.

Alternatively, the free-flow style that engenders might lead to incoherency, so another interesting challange would be for writers to only insert pages before the current page, leading to a "Momento" style construction where the participants would constantly have to anticipate the plot manuvers of their counterparts.

Another fun one, though I'm not sure how plausible it is, is to play the pass-along story game like you would play a game of "ghost." That is, minimize the block of text that can be written per "turn" to a single word. Presumably you'd have to do this sitting down with someone and have a laptop to record the words. Go figure.