Novel Twists, collective fictions of days gone by

In my search for online images and backgrounds for my final project, I came across a site that reminded me a lot of Shelley Jackson's Skin. The site is called Novel Twists, and it basically is a piece of collaborative fiction comprised of a total of 150 pages, and people bid for the right to contribute a page. I tried to find the ebay aunction site where this was going on, but I failed. It's probably privatized or something.

Anyway, this project is very similar to Jackson's Skin. It also relies on the premise that this is a collaborative project with a limited number of participants who don't know each other. Here, though, the participants aren't as thoroughly screened as those in Jackson's project. Rather, the winner/writer of each page goes to the highest bidder, and then all the proceeds go to charity. Quite an interesting way to raise money, don't you think?

I'm not interested in participating, but another reason why this project resonated with me was because it reminded me of a game I used to play with my friends when I was little. I'm sure everyone else has played it too. It was basically a collective story-telling game in which we all sat around in a circle, and there were no rules at all. The first person started the story, and then we'd all take turns adding one sentence to the story. I loved that we weren't bound by any rules at all. Usually things like dinosaurs and flying squirrels and all sorts of nonsensical things appeared. It was great.

Novel Twists isn't exactly the same thing, since there are actually rules (like, for example, you can't kill the main character, which is a bummer), so in that sense it's more limiting. Still, though, this collaborative project reminds me of my childhood collaborative story-telling days more than other collaborative projects I've come across this semester--like, our class wiki, for example--because this "book" is actually linear, with clear starting and ending points.

Another reason why I bring this up is because I've just recently realized that most of us have probably been participating in creating collaborative fiction since before we could remember, but we just couldn't put a name to it. I'm just realizing now that collaborative writing mimics kids' collective story-telling, but with little kids and their short attention spans, they create their stories together and then it's forgotten a day later, never to be remembered again until some object or event later in life triggers that long-lost memory of a story once told. With the internet in full swing, people have started writing these things down, but it's definitely not anything novel at all, it's merely a written version of an old form of oral storytelling familiar to the kid in all of us.