[NSP] The Format & Story Prompt 1

[NSP] vs. [Story Name]
For sorting/tagging purposes and reader clarity, each post will receive a prefix tag stating clearly whether it is a Non-Story Post, [NSP], or part of a story we have in progress, [Story Name]. The reason I will make the story name a tag and not the post title with an appended number is so that I may title different sections of the story if I so choose.

Note: I may use abbreviations for a story with a particularly long name. (e.g.: “The Terrific Tale of Sully the Porpoise and His Magical Sword of Fire, Which is Quite Useless Underwater, Sadly” – a story I hope not to write – is most certainly going to become [TTTSPHMSFWQUUS], which is itself still quite long, but it’s a bit more palatable in a blogging sense.)

Story Posts
I will try to give credit at the beginning of story updates to those comments that gave me the most inspiration. After that short aside, I will recap (if necessary) and continue on with the suggested narrative path. At the end of posts, I will try to keep my prompts very clear. The reason I say this is that sometimes I will be looking for a very general direction, while other times I might want to know exactly which box our intrepid hero is going to pry open and why.

Possibilities
I’m not sure at this point what I’m capable of in terms of production quantity. Part of me wants to allow the option of the story branching off like a regular CYOA, but that would immediately slow the pace of all branches of the plot should I keep to my regular update schedule. For now, I’m going to stick to one plotline that is determined largely by my readers, but I will let everyone know if I want to split things up. I might only branch at the very end to allow different conclusions while minimizing the extra workload. We shall see!

Story Prompt 1
WHAT: an event (a birthday, a car accident, the unveiling of a new space station, a space station accident, the birth of a new car, the unveiling of a new day…)
WHO: a character/entity (main or otherwise)
WHEN: this can be a number of things (i.e., is it the dark of night, the day after a king’s assassination, or 12:34 PM on a rainy Friday? Remember to be creative. If you think the time is as significant as the event, be clear.)
…THING: I want you to give me something to focus on at the very beginning of the story, like in the first sentence or paragraph. This can be a sound, a character noticing some minor detail of some furniture, or the description of a foreboding calm that has settled over a large group of people despite recent belligerent actions against them that would have set any other collective mindset on fire.

I will do what I can to find something intriguing in all of your suggestions that fits with my other choices. Feel free to suggest a WHAT and a WHO or a THING and a WHAT without bothering to come up with an idea for the other two parts. If four readers can come up with one brilliant suggestion for each scene criterion, we have a good story on our hands. And on that note, please don’t feel like you are limited by the listed criteria. If you want to suggest something that seems beyond the scope of the prompt, you can be sure that I’ll take it into consideration if it comes in before I’m knee-deep in causality.

Now have at it, and be clever!

Cranks (they’re turning),
M. Charles

[NSP] The Big Idea

Most everyone is familiar with the Choose Your Own Adventure story format. It’s an interesting type of interactive narrative, and one that’s introduced to children fairly early on in their reading careers as a way to make reading seem more playful to those kids who are choked by the rigidity of an immobile plot. CYOA books do not have a much greater audience, though, because they’re typically frowned upon after a reader hits a certain age. Whether this is due to writing quality or subject matter is beyond me.

Maybe there’s some hidden detractor in this type of writing that I’m missing. Does one lose a sense of attachment to the story if they know it could have gone a different way? Perhaps. And this is actually one reason why I’m going to eschew the typical CYOA format – short scenes with a limited number of choices – and crowdsource all of the narrative choices.

Here’s how we’ll do it:
We may create more than one story in the long run, but for now we will focus on one opening scene. An event, a thought, a character, a sound…there are many compelling ways to start a story, and that’s what I want you to do. Give me a list of elements, and I will craft the beginning to our tale. From then on, it’s up to you to lob possibilities my way. Then I will return to you with the next scene, hopefully giving credit to the comments that inspired my direction.

I will be trying to update this blog on a bit of a strange schedule: Saturday nights at midnight, Monday nights at nine or so, and Wednesday nights, also at nine (or so). This will give me a break at the beginning of the weekend and allow your ideas to develop and accumulate for a bit before the story picks up again. You can post ideas any time you’d like until the actual update is posted, but I probably won’t give as much weight to ideas that crop up once I’m three-quarters of the way through writing that post. Keep in mind that updates are subject to delays, and I may post updates early so that I might focus my energy on other matters in my life. A delay, though? That’s so depressing. Let’s focus on the fun…

Be creative! I have plenty of ideas as a storyteller, lots of which will be tested with this little project of ours, but combined, you all have FAR more ideas than I could ever come up with. I welcome the silly, the short, the lengthy, the arrogant, the unintelligible, and the corrosive, just as long as YOU think there is some merit to what you are suggesting.

So…[drumroll] without further ado…[more drumroll] please take a look at the next post!

Thanks,
M. Charles