game girl advance: Write a Page, Pass it On

Write a Page, Pass it On

We used to play this game, my nerdy bookish friends and I, where we'd write a novel collectively, usually at a gathering that involved candles and wine and perhaps pot. Sometimes it was a story-telling format, all of us cross-legged facing the center of someone's parents' livingroom; sometimes it was in a faded notebook passed from hand to hand, paragraph by paragraph. Later, it mutated to the internet and lost that sense of gently getting drunk together off of ridiculous words.

Lately I'm staring to feel it again though, through the novelistic spam that arrives in my inbox. The short preview glimpse of the email often makes me want to read more. It tugs at my attention, distracts me from the business of the day, such as this one I got a few minutes ago: "Curse that Selmi, he has made mecatch cold! Now, with death,he would surmount them all.
He looked at his hands, his legs, and at oncefelt a thrill of horror."

It goes on:

Why, why had they been gathered up like thattogether?
Henceforward, he wasraised above everyone and everything.
Now Donna Caterina will die of a brokenheart. His hand strayed restlessly in his pocket.
And his fatherdied here, in my arms, at Milazzo.

It's practically poetry. I should start collecting these and knitting them into a great narrative of ... something. The Story of Spam?

Posted by jane at September 06, 2006 02:11 PM

I remmeber doing one of these a long time ago on a dial up BBS I used before the internet was.. well, the internet. At least before it was the form we al know today.

Anyway, it was some fantasy story. I'm pretty sure no one else was really writing on it an I added like 5 chapters.

Kind of makes me wish I could go back and read it again.

Posted by: Ramen Junkie on September 6, 2006 07:08 PM

I did one of these back in the dialup days. It turned out to be pretty fun but everyone gets upset when someone steers a story in a direction inconsistant with where they wanted to see it go. I know it happened to me.

I distinctly remember pointing out a factual/consistancy error that someone had written in and just hammering away at how the story didn't make sense after it. :P

Anyone else ever read the round-robin story between the girl and the guy that gets passed around the net every so often? The girl wanted to write a sentimental story of a woman lamenting over a lost love over tea. The guy wanted epic space battles and submarine bases. They kept killing each other's characters. It's hilarous.

Posted by: Tallest on September 7, 2006 07:38 AM

I distinctly remember pointing out a factual/consistancy error that someone had written in and just hammering away at how the story didn't make sense after it. :P

Posted by: Tallest on September 7, 2006 07:39 AM

I got curious about this, and these lines are from an actual book.

Title: The Old And the Young [I VECCHI E I GIOVANI] (1928)
Author: Luigi Pirandello [1867-1936]

Authorized Translation from the Italian by
C. K. Scott-Moncrieff [1889-1930]

I've looked these things up before, and they are usually from old books, usually foriegn, which had been translated into english.

Posted by: Mister Disco on October 15, 2006 11:46 AM