Writing, out loud
Every story has
more than one ending.
You have finished a book and thought: no, not like that. Here you can do something about it. Read work while it is still being written, hand the author your next paragraph, and if they turn it down, take the whole thing and finish it your way.
Somebody starts
First paragraph, in public, unfinished. One at a time, so it stands a chance of ending.
You write the next bit
No pitch, no permission. Write what happens next and send it. They say yes or no.
They said no
Fine. Take the whole thing from wherever you like and write your own. Theirs carries on without you.
How it holds together
Every paragraph remembers
the one before it.
That chain is the whole trick. It means there is no special place to branch from, because every point is one. Leave from chapter three and you keep chapters one and two. Not copies of them. The same ones, still with their writers' names on.
Nobody has to be wrong for you to be right. Two endings can just both exist, which is more than publishing has ever managed.
The rules
Six rules. There is no seventh.
Written down and kept short, because the alternative is deciding each case as it turns up, and that always ends with the loudest complaint winning.
- One
One story at a time
Finish what you started before beginning again. Three open drafts means nothing finished, and a library of chapter ones is nobody's idea of a library.
- Two
Anyone may suggest
Read it, write the next bit, send it. No application, no follower count, nothing to be let into first.
- Three
The author decides
What you send is an offer, not an edit. It sits unpublished until they say yes. Nothing gets into somebody's work over their objection.
- Four
The author can share that
Drowning in suggestions? Hand somebody the yes-or-no, and take it back whenever you like. That is all they get. They cannot end it, undo it, or pass the keys on. Nobody wakes up co-owning your book.
- Five
Told no? Take it anyway
A refusal is not the end of your paragraph. Branch from it, keep everything up to that point, and carry on. Some of the best versions here started as somebody's rejected idea.
- Six
Nothing is ever deleted
Turned down, rolled back, replaced: all of it stays. You can always put a work back how it was, and the paragraph that did not make the cut is still there for somebody else to build on.
Write a chapter of somebody else's book and your name stays on it. You still do not own their book. Both of those are allowed to be true, and keeping them apart is why this never turns into a committee.
If you read
You already argue
with endings.
Everyone does, usually at a friend who has not read it yet. Here the argument goes in the book. Write the next paragraph of something you are already following, and if they pass on it, the work is still yours to take somewhere else.
- Follow stories while they are still being written
- Suggest a passage without asking permission first
- Read the versions other people made of the same story
If you write
Nothing dies
in chapter one.
They die in the middle, quietly, in a folder. The middle is exactly where readers turn up here, and some mornings the next paragraph is already sitting there waiting for you to say yes to it.
- Keep one story open, so you finish it
- Take suggestions, or take none, entirely your call
- Roll back to any passage and go a different way
Things people ask
Straight answers.
- Who owns a story?
- Whoever started it. Contributors keep their names on their own paragraphs and that is where it stops. No joint ownership, no committee, no argument about it later.
- What if someone branches my story?
- Nothing happens to yours. It carries on untouched. Their version turns up on your page, which sounds worse than it is: somebody who finished yours usually wants to see where else it went.
- Can I take a suggestion back after accepting it?
- Yes. Roll back to any earlier paragraph. What you dropped stays in the history, and somebody else can pick it up and run with it.
- Why only one story at a time?
- Because the limit is the point. Give most of us three open drafts and we finish none. A library of abandoned first chapters is not worth browsing, so we made it impossible.
Somewhere in here is a paragraph
only you would have written.
Go and find the story it belongs to. Reading one costs a minute. Changing it costs about the same.
Go and find it