Since I was first introduced to these lovely writing "exercises" back in high school I've come to know them as something really special. It all started in Mr. Lang's creative writing class. The basic gist is, you write furiously for a short amount of time then, when time is up you have to stop wherever you are, even if you're mid-sentence. Then, you pass it on to the next person and they continue in the same fashion. It goes on like this until the story comes back to the original author. What you're left with is a fantastical piece of collaborative fiction.
Circle stories are also called round-robin stories, or just round robins. These kinds of novels came around in the 19th century, so in the world of fiction they're still adolescents I guess.
It didn't occur to me until almost a year after I graduated high school that this kind of thing could be done with just two people. I could never have anticipated what amazing things would come of that singular thought. So, who else would I approach with this but Caroline? And of course, she thought it was definitely an idea worth trying. We made our own rules...well, rule: write a paragraph and send it via e-mail. We didn't have to write for an allotted time or stop in the middle of a sentence, but we had to keep the story going for ten paragraphs.
It was a success! We both loved doing it, and the story, strange as it was, was totally amazing. Since then, we've completed six stories, and we're on number seven right now. And, after the first one we stopped limiting ourselves to ten paragraphs. Instead, we ended where the story felt right to end. Our first story was 5,500 words. Our last one, number 6, was 12,111 words. Collectively, we've written enough words to win NaNoWriMo. And all of these stories are basically about the same group of people. We plan on illustrating them and getting them published one day. No autographs, please.
And during all of this, I told another friend about what Caroline and I were doing, and he wanted to do it too! He had been in the same creative writing class, so he knew about the awesomeness. So then I started writing circle stories with him. Although they have a completely different tone than my stories with Caroline I still love writing them just as much. We're currently on our second story, but our first one was 19,035 words, so you can understand why it took so long (plus, there may have been some procrastination lurking about in there).
And then Caroline started writing a circle story with one of her friends. She didn't like writing with that person so she stopped, but for a few months we felt like it would be really awesome if we started a circle-story-writing trend. It never did catch on, but I'm glad it didn't, and, looking back, I wouldn't want it to. I like it being something that makes me different from other people. It's something that I have that I hide like treasure and take it out to smile at it like I see silly people smile at their phones on the bus.
If you want to try it go ahead. It will make your life so much better (but only if there are goats and llamas in there somewhere).
Here's a moderately relevant picture of a llama:
Also, if you were wondering why my background is a wheat field, well, it's just a reference to a circle story.
No comments:
Post a Comment