What Is Cooperative Storytelling?

"Cooperative storytelling," "collaborative fiction," and "multiple-author stories" are all terms that I use to describe the same thing: descriptive narratives where at least two or more people work togther to tell and/or write the story. You will find many examples of this form of literature in the Library section of this web site. Another excellent example of this fun method of crafting a tale is the RinkWorks feature, The Duel of the Ages. Also on RinkWorks, you will find in the on-site chat rooms a summonable program known as StoryBot that allows groups of users to write collaborative fiction together. The completed stories are then saved in a buffer where any registered user can log in and rate them on a 1-5 point system.

My personal experience with cooperative storytelling goes all the way back to January of 1990, when I was a high school freshman taking a one-month long, half-day course in English Composition. Our teacher had us complete an exercise where the the student in the front of each row wrote a one-paragraph introduction to a story. It could be about whatever they liked, but only one paragraph long. Then the paper was passed to the next student in the row, who picked up where the first paragraph left off, and wrote a continuing paragraph. Then the paper was passed backward again, and the process repeated, until the last student in each row was given the job of concluding the short story with a final paragraph.

Needless to say, the results of this exercise varied widely in final outcome. Some rows of students chose to work together, and ended with nice little stories that were cohesive and made at least some sense, if perhaps lacking in excitement or a climax. Some groups' stories were full of contradictions and nonsense, as each new writer tried to change what the previous authors had put down, or in some cases totally ignored what had come before and attempted to start a new plot. Some stories seemed to go well until one maverick writer decided he didn't like the way the story was going and took off in a completely different direction.

I do not remember anything at all about the story that my group ended up with. But somehow, that fifteen-minute exercise fired up my imagination. My friend Gordon (who had also taken the same class the previous year) and I began writing our own cooperative stories, and we were quite prolific. We would write in the school hallway in the morning while we waited for classes to start. We would carry our stories around with us from class to class throughout the day, writing a bit here, a bit there, and trade them back and forth whenever we happened to meet. We'd take our stories with us at the end of the day, work on them at home, and bring them back the next morning to start the process over again.

Soon, he and I began to involve our other friends in our writing, either by working them into our tales as characters, or (in the case of our friend Ben) even by persuading them to join us in our literary endeavors. And while all of us would draw in little doodles to illustrate our narratives, on our best stories I, as an art student, became our "master scribe," recopying our ever-growing stories word for word, as neatly as possible, onto pristine college-ruled notebook paper and attempting to improve our hastily scribbled drawings, creating masterpieces of illustration-- all with a cheap BIC fine-point 4-color pen!

Although many of our collaborations have sadly been lost, you can find a number of our surviving stories in my Library here. Some of them are still ongoing! Of course, we lack the ample amounts of free time that we had back in our high school days, so the work proceeds at a much slower pace nowadays.

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