Storytelling Through Facebook

It would be foolish to discuss storytelling in the 21st century without giving a nod to Facebook, the social media juggernaut that, with its status updates, notes, wall posts, “likes,” etc., has changed the way we communicate and turned the stuff of our daily lives into bite-sized stories. To demonstrate, I’ll share a few choice yarns from my newsfeed today:

“Can't stop moving: could be the 44 oz Diet Coke, or it could be I'm 30 minutes away from flying to Austin for ACL.”

“Every time I work out my toes go numb, it's time for some new running shoes, any good suggestions?”

“The woman who spilled water on my laptop this morning (and didn't apologize) is now sitting in front of me at a conference. Resisting the temptation to fling spitballs at her, or worse.”

“Some people just eat chocolate pie for breakfast.”

As anyone who has been on the site for five minutes can tell you, virtually nothing is off limits, which makes for sometimes-thrilling unpredictability. Combine that with the unprecedented communal power of Facebook and you’ve got the either harebrained or ingenious idea hatched by Executive Editor John McAlley for the Storytelling package in the October issue of Spirit.

McAlley blasted a message to 75 of his Facebook friends, each of whom is a professional journalist or screenwriter. The plan was simple: On August 11th at 1:00 p.m., he would post a status update containing the first line of a narrative. It would then be the work of his Facebook friends to, comment by comment, breathe life into the story by adding each successive sentence. What resulted was, as you might expect, a chaos of unfolding plot lines, tons of laughs, and a story that moved from point A to maybe point E, but definitely not to point Z. But, ultimately, that was beside the point. During the 70-minute flurry of communal creativity, writers from across North America—including Toronto, Portland, Austin, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Fort Worth, and Dallas—were simultaneously kicking in their ideas, and the experience was thrilling. Although there wasn’t room to run the resulting piece in our Storytelling package, below is a snippet of the off-the-wall experiment. If you’re up to the task, take your narrative thoughts to the comments section below and finish what we started. 
   
John McAlley: If I were to tell you how Meg and Ted met on a Tuesday, came to loathe each other by Wednesday, and were married by noon on Thursday, you wouldn’t believe me—unless you knew the peculiarities of the New York subway system.

Comment: Tuesday was hot—schools-closed, electricity-wavering, old-people-dying hot—and Meg and Ted were the only passengers left on a "hot car" on the downtown F-train.

Comment: The first thing she said to him was, "There's a funny smell in here,..”

Comment: Ted tried not to take offense. But he couldn't tell if she was kidding or not.

Comment: So he got up and changed seats. The usual nausea filled her mouth. Why was it that she was never able to pull off the kind of flirtatious banter others did seamlessly?

Comment: And why had the MTA taken away the one-day unlimited pass. It made honeymooning on the subway too expensive.

Comment: There was a long silence. Ted looked at her, and turned away when she looked back. A man in a seersucker suit—an actual, unironic seersucker suit—boarded the train, sat down, and sighed heavily.

Comment: But Meg’s churlish little smile—and his too-frequent glances at it—brought them back together, and soon they were laughing at it all.

Posted By: Austin Morton