Stories branching out

Image by Wonderlane via Flickr

Do you ever get that feeling when you read a story that the main character is going the wrong way? You read it and think, Why is she doing that? Go back, you shout, in your own head. Call the police! Club the bastard!

Or maybe you find one of the minor characters far more interesting and you’d really like to see how they’d develop but the author goes off in an completely different direction.

I have to say, this doesn’t happen to me very often. And if it does I’d probably just dump the book and pick up another. But I saw this website recently, called Protagonize, and it just might help with that kind of frustration.

Anyone can login and post a story or part of a story and invite others to add chapters and decide what happens next. Or you can add a new branch to a story, develop that minor character further.

It’s a bit like that game where you write a bit, fold over the paper and pass it on. But they prefer to describe it like this:

Protagonize is a creative writing community dedicated to writing various forms of collaborative, interactive fiction. One author writes a story, and others post branches or chapters to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where everyone can participate.

There are a few hundred stories on there and some have dozens of extra chapters added to the original story. And there’s some pretty good stuff too.

I wouldn’t go publishing your very best efforts but it can be fun.

I think it might be useful though when you’re in the early stages of developing an idea. You could post a kind of character piece and then see how other people perceive that person and how they would change him.

It could be interesting too to try out different plot directions and see what works and what doesn’t.

It’s also not bad for just mucking around on. You can even set up an RSS feed so you don’t even have to keep logging on to see how your story develops.

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