An exquisite corpse

Want to play a game?

Hello writers,

This is all sounding like the start to a 90s slasher movie. It isn’t … or is it. No, it’s not.

Photo by Jose Francisco Morales on Unsplash

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I’ve been thinking a lot about how much creative freedom there is when you start a writing project. The world feels hopeful and magical, and you write with abandon, not really caring (yet) about whether it’s good or who will read it.

And then, somewhere along the way you start to take yourself a bit too seriously and then writing feels either like work or like it is so important that you better do it perfectly.

I think what I love about writing workshops (both hosting and attending them) is that I get to play and help others play with writing. To remind people that it’s actually fun to use a pen and paper to create a whole world, to make people up, to live in your imagination for a bit.

So in that spirit, I’d like to play a game with any of you readers who might be interested.

An example of an exquisite corpse. Image from Pinterest

Have you ever played the game, an exquisite corpse? You might not know the name, but it was where you had a long strip of paper folded up and each person got to draw one bit of a body without necessarily knowing what had come before, and definitely without knowing what would come afterwards. The best thing about this game was that it created something suprising, and it was a way to do something collaborative. The idea was never to ruin someone else’s drawing, but to create something at least as good.

You may also have played this in a story format, where each person got to write one line of a story, and the only thing visible to you was the last line that someone had written. That’s what I’d like to do this April.

I’ll provide ten first lines, and we’ll write a few ten line stories together. I’ll make it a bit easier with an instruction about what each line of the story ‘should do’ so that we don’t get a jumble of nonsense (for example: Line 2: Introduce the weather, or Line 8, add a line of dialogue).

Keen?

Let me know in the comments below. Let’s play!

Happy writing until then,
Jen

x

p.s. If you’d like to write something a little longer, sign up to one of my workshops.