The Blog Tag Experiment seems to be coming to its natural conclusion
and, whilst it has actually been a lot of fun, the format does seem to need
tweaking. In the first instance, of course, it was meant to be far more random
and involve far more people, a bit like a like a party game where you each
write a bit of a story and fold over the piece of paper to hide most of what
you’ve written and then pass it on to the next person until you’ve run out of
time, paper, people or simply the will to live. Then you would unfold the piece
of paper and read it out and much hilarity (or, more usually, rudeness and
innuendo) would ensue.
I don’t know. Perhaps I just went to some very strange parties back in
the day. Maybe that’s what eventually put me off them so vehemently...?
Back in January, the idea was for me to write a paragraph and wait for someone to write its continuation as a reply. I would then write another paragraph in reply to that, and so on until some kind of
bizarre story unfolded or everyone gave up through disinterest. It was, I
suppose, another of my sneaky tricks and schemes for getting out of my
self-imposed sense of obligation to write something new every day. Someone else
would write the opposite day and I could laugh maniacally and sip at my morning
cup of tea and contemplate which cereal to choose for my breakfast.
How very Machiavellian…
However, as is more often than not the more usual result when it comes
to me and my notions, they are never quite as exciting to everyone else as I think they are when I dream them up. In the end, only one person – Andy (fellow blogger and occasional rabble rouser - inciting villagers to rampage with burning torches a speciality...) - “bit” and decided to join in the fun (which was ultimately probably just as well as far as it goes).
Because I can’t imagine ever managing to find the time to be sifting through the
various options and having to declare a “winner” to respond to, whilst
simultaneously having to field the various disappointments of those who felt
that their response was better, or that I was “cheating” and picking the one
which most suited my own plotline, or just battling the other usual insanities which
the internet can bring along with it.
Sometimes I think that I may have been stretching myself out far too
thinly in recent times when it comes to all this wordsmithery. What, after all,
do I have to show for all the hours I choose to put in? Pages and pages of
bloggerage most of which even I struggle to remember the content of, and lots of
anxiety about not having produced something, or replied to something, or
fulfilled my end of some mythical imagined bargain of some sort.
Dickens would have written a masterpiece in that time. James Patterson
would have written several thrillers and made himself enough money to buy
himself a small country if he wanted to.
In the end, because of the persistence of Andy (the “biter” if you
remember…), the Blog Tag Experiment seemed to transform into something else. What
it turned into, of course, I can’t really tell, at least not yet (although stay tuned...!), but at some point between us we
seemed to create a vaguely flowing narrative which seemed to transform from a
short story to a novella, to a full blown novel-length something or other that
failed completely to find anything resembling a fanbase.
It is, of course, quite insane to try and write a story that long
without any editing being needed or having a pre-written storyline to follow, or without any kind of goal in mind,
especially when you have two distinct and separate minds, who have only been in
the same room once in nearly a decade and a half, coming up with different ideas
for directions in which to take the “story” or whatever else it turns out to be.
Novel writing is much, much harder work than that, and we should respect
the hours of craft that goes into doing it very well, especially when the biggest
sales at the moment are going to the kind of trash that seems to be outselling everything else at
the supermarkets lately.
And talking of rubbish brings us neatly back to the Blog Tag Experiment…
Strangely, however, having taken another look at it recently, much of what we wrote actually isn’t complete
rubbish at all, and most of it really does make a certain amount of sense if
you stick with it for the 98,000 words or so it currently takes up, and the story behind the story is another tale that is probably worth telling in itself.
Next time, though, (if there even is a next time...) I think that I’m going to tweak the format. I’ll probably let A. N. Other write the first paragraph and we’ll go from there. That bit’s fairly arbitrary
anyway, given that you can take the story where the hell you like by simply
writing what you want to do for the next paragraph anyway. I might set a daily wordcount limit to keep it shorter, snappier and perhaps make progress just
that little bit quicker, but, oh indifferent reader, be warned...
Blog Tag will return...(?)
Blog Tag will return...(?)
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