Tennis and product placement.
Tuesday September 4, 2001
Actually, product placement first. Why not? Anyone want their product featured prominently in the next chapter of James Sisters?
Then tennis. It’s an utterly brilliant idea—trust me, flip through a match to see what happens. It’s like a demented cross between Exquisite Corpse and 5-Card Nancy, though with a much bigger palette. And no narrative constraint.
Which makes me wonder why these sorts of collaborative/competitive games don’t seem to work so well with writing. There’s round-robin serials, say, but those take too long. Instant-esque gratification is what’s wanted, here. There’s 24-hour comics, but those are comics (writing is very much involved, but in a different way), and besides, those aren’t collaborative, so forget I said anything. (24-hour plays—but the writing’s pretty much out of the way right off the bat. And they aren’t competitive. Much.) There’s things like Write Club, but you’re still off working on your own piece—any clever writer can work any given word in without derailing her intended story too terribly much, and some writers just can’t do a whole story in three hours, or not so much.
And anyway—the object isn’t to produce a finished work of art; it’s to play with the process, have fun, make it up as you go along and get surprised by what results. It’s to produce a toy, an arabesque, a fillip or a filigree, an exquisitely timed joke at your friend’s expense at a raucous party. Surely something like that could be structured for us wordsmiths..? —But I’m lousy at games, and game theory. Still, a whack: writer one serves a ten-word phrase. Writer two can then add or subtract any combination of five words total. And back to writer one, for five more words, added or taken away. And so forth, and so on, until something more or less happens… Perhaps? Maybe I’ll give it a go.