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As someone who has written many short stories, I've always been fascinated by the idea of a collaborative story, where a bunch of people take turns working on a piece and taking it in different directions, until it gets drawn together and finished. I got to try this when I started a story and encouraged visitors to add to it. I had no idea how big a response to this I would get, with contributors from around the world adding to it bit by bit. Some entries were a little frivolous, and took the story off on tangents that wouldn't work, so I chose not to use them. But most were great additions to the story, sometimes a single line, sometimes just one line of dialogue at a time. I often I had to choose which one to use, which was fun. My original idea for the story was to make it scary, so I tended to pick additions that supported that direction. But week by week I never knew where we would end up. I was amazed at how well it ended. Here is the first collaborative story that contributors made. Our second story seemed to go in several directions in the first few paragraphs, but I let it go where people who submitted wanted it to, just to see what would happen. This story never got finished due to the unexpected demise of the school website that I'd created, but I'll post here what we produced. Here is our second collaborative story. |